Summary

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) began recruiting “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” willing to work 80+ hours per week with no pay to help slash federal spending.

Appointed by President-elect Donald Trump, the panel is tasked with recommending spending cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and agency restructuring by July 4, 2026.

Musk and Ramaswamy advocate for drastic measures, including cutting grants to nonprofits and potential mass layoffs.

  • unmagical@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    No high-iq individual will work 2 weeks per week with no pay in a society that requires money to live.

    • meco03211@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      That’s a common tactic in scams. You want to weed out the actual intelligent people as early as possible lest they disrupt your scam. That’s why scam emails tend to have misspellings and grammatical errors. Smarter people instantly ignore that. Dumb people click on through.

          • slacktoid@lemmy.ml
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            9 days ago

            im saying get in and get that cut, and also disrupt their agenda, i mean someone is gonna take that bribe, might as well take it and fuck their plan.

    • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      No they won’t… but rich people who can afford to support themselves while indulging in their love of making poor people suffer will be lined up around the block.

      Making a position unpaid is a classic tactic to keep out the poors.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        It’s disappointing so many aren’t getting this…

        It’s the same as “unpaid internships” being advantage to rich kids who can afford to work without pay.

        Like, there is an inordinate amount of rich assholes that would love to spend 80 hours a week finding way to cut taxes, regulations, and the social safety net.

        If you’re rich enough to begin with, this could pay a hell of a lot better than anything else you would spend your time on. Couple hundred million in the bank or stock market, and it would be more profitable than any actual job.

        And let’s be honest, Musk and Trump aren’t judging IQ by the freaking Wechsler exam, when rich idiots talk about IQ, they mean zeros in a bank account.

        • chaosCruiser@futurology.today
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          9 days ago

          So, if you own a coal plant and the government is spending time and money on regulating your livelihood, then that would be an obvious thing to cut from the budget.

          • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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            9 days ago

            As a hypothetical sure…

            But we broke fossil fuel production records under trump, we broke them under Biden, and there’s no reason to think trump won’t break them again.

            For fucks sake, they had both of the only two options be pro-fracking this time…

            Billion dollar fossil fuel corporations don’t have to worry, they already bought both parties. And have been lobbying trump to leave Biden’s “signature climate change legislation” intact, because it makes them a bunch of money and comes with zero negatives.

            So as a hypothetical you’re example would fit.

            Except no one is doing this but currently:

            the government is spending time and money on regulating (fossil fuels)

            • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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              8 days ago

              Right, but stick with me here… what if they could make MORE money? All they need to do is stop requiring them to clean out the lead in the toxic waste that they dump on their worker’s towns and the owners can put that money into another vacation house.

              • chaosCruiser@futurology.today
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                7 days ago

                And why does the government need to have so many people inspecting industrial facilities? Can’t a single person handle the entire country? On second thought, that takes money, and the goal was to cut spending. Just have the companies send reports every 20 years and we’re all good. I’m sure they’ll do a great job with notifying the government if something violates regulations.

  • arc@lemm.ee
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    8 days ago

    So a billionaire wants people to work 80 hour weeks for nothing. People tell him to fuck right off. As in, find a cliff and keep walking.

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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      8 days ago

      I don’t think these positions will remain empty. Corporations will send a few lobbyists to check if the cost/power ratio is beneficial and if so, just flood the department.

      • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        I hadn’t thought of that, but this is 100% exactly what will happen. BP oil will surely pay someone VERY handsomely to ‘volunteer’ 80 hours a week toward eliminating all oversight of drilling rigs in the gulf.

      • TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz
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        8 days ago

        My first thought was spies… because they are already on someone else’s payroll.
        Also, bootlickers and extremely desperate people that would take on any job.

        • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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          8 days ago

          People “desperate for any job” are actually desperate for money and willing to work for it. They won’t take an unpaid position, what are you thinking?

  • 1SimpleTailor@startrek.website
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    8 days ago

    America’s saving grace may in fact be that the fascists are too stupid and lazy to do the work required to dismantle the federal government and cause mass human suffering.

      • b161@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 days ago

        It’s gonna be like when he fired all those Twitter staff then hire some back again. Or when we got a bunch of servers shut down without knowing what they do and locked people out of their accounts. Or like the fucking CyberCuck.

  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    Good grief. It’s like he asked ChatGPT “how do I hire people suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect?”

    Dear meme-lords: I need something with much more facepalm than the Picard one. A “super facepalm” if you will. Thank you.

  • sibachian@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    do “high-IQ” individuals even exist on the republican isle? why would a lefty want to get involved in this shit, especially unpaid? what idiot would accept unpaid labour under a multi-billionaire?

    • laserm@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      High IQ individuals definitely exist on the republican side. The only thing is that they are the most selfish kind (hence why they are republican) and hence they won’t work for free.

      • voldage@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        IQ tests intentionally omit any questions related to empathy, emotional intelligence and creativity, so it can favour people from the top of the pile and act as accurate perdictor of success in ruthless capitalist society. It implicitly promotes lack of those traits in individuals and explicitly promotes the definition of intelligence that’s unrelated to them. While you don’t get lower scores if you’re highly creative or empathetic person, so it’s not directly a detrimental for society and can be a useful metric for some cases like specific jobs, it’s image as sole measure of intelect is manufactured to promote “specific kind of people”, to which group many republican businessmen would belong.

        I’m not disagreeing with what you said, just thought I’d expand on that.

  • bstix@feddit.dk
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    9 days ago

    Ok, get this. You elect politicians to “help slash federal spending”.

    What the hell is Musk even doing and why is he outsourcing this job to unpaid idiots, when politicians already get paid to do this?

    Okay, I’ll do a few suggestions for free:

    • Stop subsidizing companies. All of them.
    • Tax the rich to boost the federal income.
    • Legalize all immigrants so they can be tax paying citizens.
    • Crack down on employers using illegal underpaid illegal immigrants.
    • Provide universal health care. Sick people don’t work.
    • Cut down on police force spending.
    • Cut down on car infrastructure spending.
    • Cut down “defense” spending in artificial oil wars.
    • Help Ukraine to defeat Russia, so Russia will have to surrender and disarm their nukes, so that USA can also cut down on cost for maintenance of nukes.
    • Expand renewable energy. It’s free energy yo, and it creates jobs for tax paying citizens.
    • Stop mining fossil fuels. It will cost more to clean that shit up than is earned.
    • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      I just wanted to add some context for one of these bullets.

      The US is upping the amount it spends on nuclear weapons maintenance and production because China has reentered the game as a major player. They’d been stable at 300-350 warheads for decades but is expected to ramp up to producing 100+ per year by 2030.

      So one major adversary has just been replaced by another. Everything old is new again, including the cold war arms race.

      • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        How are they making them? Just fuel reprocessing? You can make them pretty cheap as a side effect at scale of you want to. US can’t though.

        • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          8 days ago

          Reprocessing of old pits.

          It’s more a matter of precision, purity, infrastructure, and staffing.

          And you can have them effective/guaranteed to work, safe/without personnel or environmental contamination, or cheap. Pick two.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      Russia will have to surrender and disarm their nukes,

      Interesting. During the Cold War, that was unthinkable, mostly because there’d be nobody to counterbalance a US monopoly on nuclear arms. Things have proliferated considerably since then, so perhaps a nuclear Russia isn’t as important. If anything, they’re proving themselves to be a liability.

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Ah, this will be the Department of Dunning-Kruger. The workers are idiots who think they are supergeniuses. Led by an idiot who thinks he’s a supergenius.

    During Trump’s first term, this was just a metaphor, suggested by random comedians. Now, life will imitate art to its full extent.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    There are only two types of “Super High-IQ” people who will go for an unpaid job working in politics for the likes of Musk:

    • Very naive young things, hence very inexperienced and who are going to do all mistakes in the book and then some for the next couple of years as they learn the ropes. By the time they know enough about the job they’ll be burned out from working for a guy like Musk not to mention knowing enough to know they’re better of elsewhere.
    • Grifters looking for making maximum money from being in politics. Since they’re not getting paid, that means corruption, lots and lots of corruption.

    Also, even amongst the “very naive young things”, in my own personal experience, the high intelligent types with the personality to be real believers of far right stuff, are at most above average intelligence but below genius level IQ (which is 120) and hence not really “super high”-IQ (which would more 160+) - I once worked with a guy like that who thought himself very intelligent and in his new job ended up working in an office with two genious level colleagues and he was very entertaining because of his “buttons” were so obvious and he was so easy to give the run around.

    Super-high IQ people are often the very opposite of street smart, but one thing they aren’t is stupid and at most fall into the first part of the saying “you can deceive most people some of the time, or some people all of the time, but you can’t deceive most people all of the time” - they can be swindled but they’ll figure it out faster than most.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      9 days ago

      Also, most actual intelligent people understand that IQ is incredibly flawed at best, and put little stock in it.

      But I guess if your goal is “anti-DEI” or whatever, then of course you’re cool with intelligence tests that make white people seem smarter.

      • elucubra@sopuli.xyz
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        9 days ago

        I’m a guy with a high “test IQ”, and my sister, who is in the normal range is way more succesful that me in most aspects of life. You don’t want high “test IQ”, you want “smart people” not the same, and far more difficult to measure. High IQ basically means you are good at solving certain types of puzzles

  • rustydrd@sh.itjust.works
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    9 days ago

    Fun idea: Flood their contact addresses with fake applications and fake credentials like certificates with high scores on made-up IQ tests or Mensa membership cards.