DOGE: Department of Gawdawful Errors
[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]
This seems very inefficient:
Oh, I’m not referring to the second consecutive failure of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship this year. He can blow up all his capital and burn down his future space freight contracts.
I’m referring to this:
Why have are our FAA resources, reduced as they are after Elon Musk took a DOGE-ian chainsaw to them recently, been forced to scramble to protect civilian and commercial aircraft from yet another “rapid, unscheduled disassembly“?
Why wasn’t the FAA given enough advance notice of the possible (and likely) threat from debris so that flights could be re-routed or delayed BEFORE the launch attempt?
The reach of this fuckery is breathtaking:
Photographs and videos posted on the social media site X by users saying they were along the Florida coast showed the spacecraft breaking up. The falling debris disrupted flights at airports in Miami, Orlando, Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, and as far away as Philadelphia International Airport.
In other words, most of the eastern U.S. affected — no big deal. But that’s likely an understatement; you know the cascade of effects must have been wider given how tightly planes are scheduled.
Why are any other persons outside of SpaceX forced to change their activities without advance notice because Musk is such a selfish fuck-up of a business manager?
This is particularly galling:
In a Department of Transportation all-hands meeting late last week, Duffy responded to a question about DOGE’s role in national airspace matters, and without explicitly mentioning the new employees, suggested help was needed on reforming Notice to Air Mission (NOTAM) alerts, a critical system that distributes real-time data and warnings to pilots but which has had significant outages, one as recently as this month. “If I can get ideas from really smart engineers on how we can fix it, I’m going to take those ideas,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by WIRED. “Great engineers” might also work on airspace issues, he said.
As if NOTAM wasn’t already a concern, Musk’s SpaceX blows up a rocket without ensuring adequate notice. It’s not as if the launch was scheduled in advance or anything, as if a flight path for the rocket — and its debris — wasn’t predicted well before launch.
You know what really worries me — more so than I already was?
Engineers who work for Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been brought on as senior advisers to the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), sources tell WIRED.
On Sunday, Sean Duffy, secretary of the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA, announced in a post on X that SpaceX engineers would be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia to take what he positioned as a tour. “The safety of air travel is a nonpartisan matter,” Musk replied. “SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer.”
Count the errors in the last two sentences of that excerpt. One party doesn’t give a shit about Musk’s manifold conflicts of interest or his unelected status as shadow president, the same party also doesn’t see the problem with giving Musk free rein to trash the regulatory agency which kept his space freight company from making even more explosive mistakes.
Imagine letting Elon’s SpaceX management habits reengineer infect the U.S. air traffic control systems, especially with his clueless if not utterly indifferent attitude about his mistakes.
“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody can bat 1,000,” he said, adding that he would act quickly to correct errors.
He acknowledged DOGE could be making errors as well.
“We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we’ll also fix the mistakes very quickly,” Musk said.
A plane crash isn’t a mistake one can fix, quickly or otherwise. US air travel demands zero defects; it’s not a series of test launches which can inconvenience people with few repercussions to the individuals responsible for failures.
What will it take before the spineless GOP congressional caucus, in thrall to the current administration, snaps out of its sleepwalking submission to Musk’s Department of Gawdawful Errors?
Will it take the crash of a plane carrying some of its members before it realizes oversight by a separate but equal branch of government is absolutely necessary to their own fucking safety?
Somehow I don’t think it will be enough to wake them up, because they haven’t batted an eye at Musk’s other business failure, the “Deadliest Car Brand in America.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell’s sister-in-law couldn’t be rescued from her swamped Tesla in no small part because of its design, and yet this wasn’t enough to give the GOP congressional caucus pause about Musk in any way. They continue to share the road with these vehicles on a daily basis.
And yet the news media (at least print news media) treats the SpaceX explosion and resulting disruption in air traffic as an amusing side note. Sleepwalking towards disaster.
As mentioned yesterday
Source https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/america-is-trapped-in-a-burning-tesla
It’s worth the whole read.
As I said, Skum is a Ketamine – addled, sleep deprived, narcissistic, mediocre technocrat who inherited an emerald mine.
A somewhat-less-than-random thought: I wonder if – at least as a side benefit to Musk – the Doge boys are mining all this heretofore inaccessible, government data and handing it over to Musk for the purpose of training his AI’s with datasets of particular value that only he possesses? These datasets would probably be most useful for training special-purpose AI’s created to operate in very focused domains.
I, for one, would stop flying immediately if or when Musk’s AI engine replaces ATC in the towers. Not that I fly as much as I used to back in the 90s-00s.
And I realize you didn’t suggest this either, but hey low hanging fruit.
oh, that’s been my assumption from the start. Musk is busy dismantling any agency that regulates any and all of his business while accessing every sensitive, confidential data point on every American citizen and every one of his business Rivals. Kompromat doesn’t even begin. He can weaponize his election interference to both depress votes and turn out votes based on his whims, not to mention what he and his buddy Thiel and Palantir can do. He can ruin his rival’s businesses with inside information.
I think it more likely that Trump is harvesting it through Musk, via a new entity established this month.
Wendy Siegelman posted a thread about it: https://mstdn.social/@[email protected]/114110199769860939
It appears that Sean Duffy is the first cabinet-level MAGA hire to challenge Musk. Reporting on a closed-door, cabinet-head meeting with Elon indicates that Duffy raised the firing of air traffic controllers as if it might pose a problem(!), saying “I’m dealing with these plane crashes” and pushing back on Musk’s happy-talk insistence that everything was gonna be great in our Brave New World.
Yes, *that* Sean Duffy. I was surprised too. I underestimated during his early years, in the first two weeks of this administration, when he seemed like just another knob-polisher for Trump. Wonder how soon he’ll get the axe?
Yes, re air traffic controllers —
prompting our donald to make a rejoinder to Duffy, something like, “get them from MIT!,” forgetting for a moment how his administration is targetting devastating US higher education.
The Felon Guy is also revealing how little he knows – you can’t major in “air traffic control” in college, because they don’t teach that. Even community colleges don’t teach it. (And his funding cuts hurt them, too.)
Sure seems like the goal is to collapse the government and economy so the citizens give up on the enshittified system and the oligarchs can buy up whatever is left at bargain prices. Doesn’t appear to matter to them that the agencies and institutions that create the opportunity for creative private enterprise, from a reliable justice system and an immensely productive scientific research establishment to NOAA and the FAA, are being decimated and destroyed in the process.
“What will it take before the spineless GOP congressional caucus, in thrall to the current administration, snaps out of its sleepwalking submission to Musk’s Department of Gawdawful Errors?” It will take a revolt of their constituents spurred by late Social Security checks, Memaw being kicked off Medicaid and into the back bedroom or the streets, rescinded FEMA buyouts of flooded homes and maybe, maybe, planes falling out of the sky. Maybe having to drive hours to one of the remaining unshuttered, understaffed Social Security offices to register their newborns will get their attention. Whatever it takes, it won’t happen soon enough to prevent a shit-ton of unrecoverable losses.
I’m supporting independent media sites like this one, getting involved in the local Indivisible chapter and volunteering in town to try to save something from the wreckage. Open to better ideas. Not giving up, and not expecting anyone to bail us out.
“Will it take the crash of a plane carrying some of its members before it realizes oversight by a separate but equal branch of government is absolutely necessary to their own fucking safety?”
Probably not, but one can imagine a plane crash in which only members of the other party were among the victims being taken as a sign of Musk’s divine anointment and approval.
This reminds me of these two sentences from
Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American for yesterday:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-6-2025
Here are the two citations:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-government-spending-has-not-slowed-under-trump-so-far-data-shows-2025-02-26/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-golf-doge_n_67b50fbfe4b0319f377e6c6a
indicating how efficiency and cost cutting are just one skein in an interwoven set of fictions that Trump plus Putin are lofting, which are:
the MAGA fiction (tax reduction, de-regulate for ” the little guy”)
the pursut of global/world peace fiction
the “fire sales” of anything of value, anywhere, (US, Russia, middle east) for personal gain
the DOGE (sic) fiction
there are probably others, many actually contradictory, but spur of the moment brings these up.
in a snarky moment, one could ask why our donald continues to fly around in AF 1 if cutting waste were so paramount!
In that Letter, HCR also noted a Reuters report from 3/5 that the administration was planning to deport 240,000 Ukranian war refugees — people who came with financial resources, paid taxes while in the US, had been properly vetted, had family contacts in the US, etc.
A better word would be “re-homed,” given that they are being thought of as domestic[ated] animals.
With regard to Ukraine, do not fail to read Timothy Snyder’s post about the antisemitism underlying Trump and Vance’s assault on Zelenskyy.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/antisemitism-in-the-oval-office
Thank you so much for that link. Urging all to read it. It’s phenomenal and very apropos. I’m gonna quote some of the concluding paragraphs, which are supported by what he demonstrates earlier in the piece.
I was wondering the same thing recently re: GOP bigwigs and or/Congresspeople dying in plane crashes. What would their response be? Actual giving a damn or saying its God’s Will?
I can’t begin to imagine the number of “thoughts and prayers” which will be offered after such an event.
Not sure if they can break out of compliance mode long enough to offer much. Someone shooting up an R congressional softball game (and killing a cop) did not shift anybody on sensible gun regulation.
Cowering for their lives on J6 did not create a wave of votes certifying the election and then impeaching Trump and barring him from running again (which would’ve fixed the whole “we’re too scared to speak up” conundrum).
So for those not killed in the plane wreck – inner fear, outward thoughts and prayers?? Continued denial? Hard to say.
What will it take?
I think the only thing that *might* shake the congressional GOP out of its sycophancy is a truly widespread catastrophic event, such as a total breakdown of the SSA payment system, with all benefit payments suspended.
Such an event just might be the tipping point that triggers the “3.5% solution”.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world
I predict that if SSA payments are suspended, and not restored within 30 days, the Democrats could very likely win supermajorities in both houses of congress in the midterms.
I’m serious.
Unless, of course, the Dems find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, like say, following Third Way’s plan to move to the “Center”.
The GOP congressional caucus had already been warned to avoid in-person townhalls. We’re right up next to the tipping point but organizers will have to figure out a new calculus for avoidant representatives.
Maybe their Democratic challengers can hold Town Halls instead.
When people who hate government (except for the bits that benefit *them*) go into government, it’s hard to get them to see their errors.
(I kind of hope for a listeria or salmonella outbreak in the congressional cafeteria. Because regulations are bad, in their benighted views.)
If your question was not meant to be rhetorical, then for an answer we can look to other fascist legislatures. That says, never.
In 1948, H.L. Mencken returned to reporting from the national political conventions after an absence of 20 years. Much of his reputation had come from his reporting from the conventions in the early 20th c. He observed that ‘there were not as many actual halfwits’ as he recalled from the conventions that nominated men like Wilson, Taft, Harding, Cox and so on. (Quotation from memory.)
He did not elaborate. But some years after his death, the historian Page Smith published ‘A letter from My Father : the Strange, Intimate Correspondence of W. Ward Smith to His Son Page Smith.’ Ward Smith was a wardheeler in the New York Republican Party around the time of World War I, and he wrote detailed accounts of the conventions he was part of.
Mencken wasn’t kidding or exaggerating about halfwits. Smith recounted how the party bosses recruited an assortment of drunks, mental defectives and nuts to fill the seats. It is not obvious (to me anyway) why the 1948 conventioneers were better, but for one reason or another, the parties are much more like they were a hundred years ago than 50 years ago.
Meh. I think filling seats depends on degree of cheerleading and on money these days, at least what I’ve seen of GOP events.
would love some reporting on what is IN the debris being spewed into our atmosphere and raining down on all life below. anyone seen anyone from the scientific community with this info?
Not an expert, but a lot of it simply burns up, so, charred metal fragments would likely be most of what’s left. Temperatures can be over 3500 degrees F. NASA apparently requires that re-entry systems be able to withstand double that temperature (7000 degrees F), but that would be for heat shields, not for the other parts of the containers.
Follow Prof. Sam Lawler who keeps track of equipment in orbit including Starlink:
She gets righteously angry because astronomy is fucking difficult now that Starlink has polluted the night sky with craft, and it rains down chunks as well as creating metal vapor.
Lawler has collected a lot of pieces, and some of them belonged to SpaceX.
That “metal vapour” has ozone depleting capabilities so one can say the Musk’s StarLink, which has about 5 satellites per day dropping out of orbit, is destroying the ozone layer from above. A little more fanciful is that idea that he and his fellow space-crazy billionaires are building a Dyson Sphere around Earth which will make it impossible to get out of our gravity well and explore space in the near future.
If they want to “occupy Mars”, they’re going to have to hurry up. By the time they’re ready, they’ll have to have the deflector shields from “Star Trek”, and that’s going to take a long time to arrive.
Long before Musk et al create a Dyson sphere they — most likely Musk and SpaceX — will set off a Kessler syndrome cascade.
Gee, I wonder how much less efficient government will be when it loses access to satnav, telcom via satellite, satellite intel collection, etc.
“Why wasn’t the FAA given enough advance notice of the possible (and likely) threat from debris so that flights could be re-routed or delayed BEFORE the launch attempt?”
FAA was notified. FAA gave SpaceX the launch permit, just like they have for every other rocket launch in the US. Purportedly, they were satisfied with SpaceX’s response and changes after the last rocket that blew up. I think there’s a major conflict of interest here, much like what led to the 737 Max disasters.
As for why flights weren’t re-routed, they are re-routed in areas where the rocket flight would have direct and immediate impacts, regardless of whether things went right or wrong. There’s a larger area where planes can fly but have to be ready to divert if something goes wrong with the launch. I don’t know this 100% sure, but most likely the FAA doesn’t clear the entire corridor because it would be too much impact on the air traffic system. I also don’t know what authority the FAA has for commercial air traffic over other countries (Haiti, Turks & Caicos, etc.).
As for where they go from here, at a bare minimum the next Starship flight should be in the middle of the night like the first Blue Origin flight was, to minimize impacts of a more risky launch (in this case, a rocket with proven history of failure, in BO’s case, a first flight which is always inherently more risky). It may also be appropriate to clear the entire airspace where debris might fall if the rocket fails during the engine firing.
Leon seems oddly fixated on FAA. My guess, from his dissing of the agency, is that he wants to replace air traffic controllers with AI. I’m not necessarily against that, but with Teslas driving themselves into walls, I’d want years of testing.
I think AI systems are a long way from safely running ATC systems. For starters, their code should be open and available to the govt, to verify, audit, and track. Millions of lives are at stake. I’ll reconsider that when Elmo the Dick manages to safely operate a single self-driving car.
He can’t even admit that self-driving cars aren’t happening in the next five years.
“but most likely the FAA doesn’t clear the entire corridor because it would be too much impact on the air traffic system”
Um, you mean like the impact on the air traffic system incurred because of the explosion? Look, a launch schedule should reasonably include advance clearance of area beneath the craft’s flight path — and if it wasn’t cleared it looks like somebody at FAA didn’t get the message.
As for Haiti-Turks-Caicos-etc.: flights leaving the US for airports there should have been delayed or rerouted *in advance*; ditto incoming craft landing in US airports. The fact flights across the east coast were affected by the explosion tells us scheduling accommodations didn’t happen.
This Starship launch should have been in the middle of the night because the last launch only weeks ago also failed.
Perhaps nighttime launches are too easy to photograph, especially when they explode and spread debris for miles.
The launch window for that particular test flight was 1 hour long. The earlier Blue Origin window was four hours long. Closing airspace for that length of time comes with a lot of costs. And of course, re-routing to get out from under failures comes with a lot of costs too. Shortening the launch window to reduce airspace closure costs would encourage “go-fever”, which has doomed a lot of rockets, including Challenger. And yeah, SpaceX has a particularly bad case.
I really don’t know what the right answer is. I just know that there are tradeoffs to be made. Up until a few months ago, I mostly trusted the FAA to deal with those appropriately in regards to rocket launches. Now that Elon is at the helm of far too much, it’s hard to have faith.
@ earlofhuntington, 1:32pm re: night launches
There’s a lot of data that can be gathered from launch site video during day launches that’s harder to get during night launches. I don’t think that they’re too worried about outside photographers–they share lots of video themselves and there are plenty of photographers around. They may also be averse to night launches because of ground crew schedules and possibly rules about when they can force people out of their homes in Boca Chica. But that’s a whole ‘nother issue.
Night launch windows can be longer than daylight launches. Surely the vaunted SpaceX engineers Musk thinks can solve every problem we face can also develop better data collection systems for use at night.
In fact, the problems SpaceX creates are solvable by SpaceX if the company spends the money on solutions instead of foisting the problems on others. Musk simply doesn’t want accountability for SpaceX’s problems.
The most irksome moment for me was watching the two engineers/hosts grin like idiots as they told us that the flight would launch over “the Gulf of America.” Almost turned it off right there.
The least they could do is a 5-second delay to insert a warning: “Mature Content: Oral Sex and Fellation“
This AM there’s reporting that Homeland Security has abrogated the TSA union’s CBA. Congress members are frequent flyers; bet that will be a factor to consider moving forward.
The biggest owner of Tesla seems unfamiliar with the traditional automotive manufacturer’s one-time obsession with Six Sigma process analysis and improvement. In fact, he seems to actively despise it, because, like Trump, he already knows whatever he needs to know.
Which is why his Uglitruks are held together with glue and plastic clips, instead of bolts and welds.
The grounding of aircraft after Musk’s latest explosive failure was at least 45 minutes. That will have caused a lot of dysfunction at airports, availability of aircraft and flight crews, delayed departures and arrivals, and substantial overloads for ATCs. That’s before you get to the environmental degradation and debris raining down. Just because some of it went into the ocean, doesn’t mean it didn’t cause considerable harm.
Engineering by trial and error. Not only wasteful but dangerous.
Assuming SpaceX does manage one success, I don’t know how they could assume that the success is not just a happy accident. They appear to be making little effort to isolate variables or discover or understand problems. Just keep tweaking until something works and declare all problems solved, whatever they are. Meanwhile, spewing rapidly moving junk over vast airspaces. That’s not engineering – it’s just playing with big toys.
What really busts my buns is how much the FAA has had to do to investigate SpaceX failures, inform SpaceX of their findings, restrain SpaceX from making more failures putting the public at risk…but Musk thinks this is regulatory overreach.
WE’RE DOING HIS DAMNED COMPANY’S JOBS FOR HIM. If his company wasn’t engineering-by-trial-and-error — you know, maybe even using some of Musk’s own AI to exhaustively model launches first — the FAA would only have to schedule launches.
They have NASA and the European Space Agency as models for How To Do It. (Ariane launched a satellite the same day.)
In addition to ignoring all of the lessons that NASA, et al learned over the years about rockets. FWIW, ESA’s Ariane 6 launched flawlessly on the same day.
The thing about AI is that models have to learn what isn’t already programmed in about contingencies. Humans are far better at that task – knowing what consequences would arise from unexpected events and avoiding them. AI would blunder in even assuming it was programmed to detect the event and that the sensors worked. One cannot expect that capability from anything tied to Musk these days.
Lastly, Musk as repeatedly said that mistakes would be corrected immediately but that is not happening. Remember that the DOGE commissars also mucked around in the office that actually releases the checks and they’re not doing it for USAID even with SCOTUS telling them to do so. It’s kayfabe / smoke & mirrors / head fake correction.
Play ball, or else…. Allegedly it’s an ‘error’ but I don’t believe in coincidences with this crew.
https://www.salon.com/2025/03/07/after-governors-clash-with-trump-us-makes-it-harder-to-register-newborns-in-maine/
“What will it take before the spineless GOP congressional caucus,
in thrall to the current administration, snaps out of its sleepwalking
submission to Musk’s Department of Gawdawful Errors?”
Perhaps a mass casualty event. Perhaps nothing. I think they’re totally without conscience. The admin is a White Supremacist backlash to integrative progress. It’s led by thieves, scoundrels and traitors.
It’s thoughts and prayers for school shootings. Their chosen POTUS inspired/led a highly violent insurrection. They had a gallows on the lawn. They are shaking down Ukraine for the sake of Vlad Putin. The very first thing Trump did was pardon his personal brown shirts as both a thank you and as a threat to anybody who thinks of resisting his admins decrees or publicly questioning his integrity.
We’re being governed by the mob. Maybe public outcry will cause them to change course; but only if it means a loss of power by losing elections. And we know they have no issue with stealing elections so I’m not getting my hopes up.
Always good to read your columns Rayne. Thanks.
I found this YouTube channel after the January failure. He talks like an engineer, and seems to know his business. Here’s his analysis of the latest catastrophic dis-assembly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl8p-9sX63E