Oops, DOGE Did It Again
The latest hastily reversed DOGE cut had threatened to directly hamper Trump’s own energy agenda.
The White House spent much of yesterday arguing that the Yemen attack information they accidentally shared with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was small-potatoes and unclassified. As a result, Goldberg—as he suggested he might on the pod with Tim yesterday—released the full exchange this morning, showing it did in fact contain highly sensitive operational details of an imminent mission. The best exchange, for our money:
At 1:48 p.m., Waltz sent the following text, containing real-time intelligence about conditions at an attack site, apparently in Sanaa: “VP. Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID. Pete, Kurilla, the IC, amazing job.” Waltz was referring here to Hegseth; General Michael E. Kurilla, the commander of Central Command; and the intelligence community, or IC. The reference to “multiple positive ID” suggests that U.S. intelligence had ascertained the identities of the Houthi target, or targets, using either human or technical assets.
Six minutes later, the vice president, apparently confused by Waltz’s message, wrote, “What?”
Happy Wednesday.
Drill, Baby, DOGE
by Lauren Egan
Donald Trump ran a campaign on a commitment to “drill, baby, drill.” He promised to slash regulatory red-tape in order to ramp up American oil and gas production. And he’s stacked his administration with officials like Energy Secretary Chris Wright, the former head of a Denver-based oilfield service company.
But some in the oil industry have been unimpressed with the president’s actions so far. Even in parts of deep-red and oil-rich Oklahoma, there’s been disappointment.
That frustration is largely aimed at the slapdash approach of Trump’s and Elon Musk’s DOGE, and the uncertainty that their hurried attempt to shrink the federal government has injected into the oil industry.
Adam Trumbly, the superintendent for the Osage Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs—the federal agency that oversees oil and gas drilling on Osage Nation land—was fired last month as part of DOGE’s budget cuts. The superintendent plays a critical role in managing and permitting new oil projects in the Osage Nation. And his firing set off a wave of panic about the future of new investments in the region. A few weeks later, it was announced that the Osage Agency—which provides a wide range of services including resources to help operators drill—would close its doors once the building’s lease is up in September thanks to DOGE cuts.
As with a fair number of other DOGE cuts, some of the mess-up was later corrected. Much to the relief of oil producers and shareholders in the region, Trumbly was reinstated last week. (Trumbly did not respond to The Bulwark’s request for comment.) But the chaotic handling of the situation has left many of the mom-and-pop oil producers that operate in Osage County anxious about doing business there.
“While the superintendent is back, he’s been removed once by what can only be described as reckless incompetence—and it can happen again,” said Shane Matson, a subsurface geologist and the former president of the Osage Producers Association whose family has been in the oil industry in the region for four generations. “If you threaten to close the agency without a solution, when really you should triple the budget so we can ‘drill, baby, drill,’ the effect of that on the industry is ‘kill, baby, kill.’”
Oil production in Osage County has steadily declined over the past few decades, and producers have long complained about burdensome regulation. Today, the region only accounts for a small fraction of the nation’s oil production. (Long gone are the days when oil royalties paid to the Osage made them some of the richest people in the world, as depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon.)
Still, DOGE’s move-fast-and-break-things approach there could very well result in fewer barrels of oil being produced in the United States, undermining Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra.
“This DOGE thing has just added fuel to the fire in terms of uncertainty,” said Susan Forman, an Osage shareholder and a former member of the Osage Minerals Council, which represents shareholders of the tribe’s mineral estate and advocates for increases in oil production. “Our producers rely on that office [the Osage Agency] for all the work they do. They cannot work on an existing well unless they have a permit, they cannot drill a new well unless they have a permit.”
Earlier this month, the Osage Minerals Council issued a statement insisting that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum “explain how closing our Agency and displacing BIA employees will improve oil and gas permitting.” Myron Red Eagle, chairman of the council, told The Bulwark that its members were scheduled to visit Washington, D.C. next week for a rare meeting with Burgum, during which they will seek to get more answers.
In a statement to The Bulwark, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly defended the administration: “After four years of radical environmental policies that restricted domestic energy production, President Trump has taken unprecedented action to unleash American energy and eliminate red tape for new oil projects. He will continue to deliver on his promise to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ and use the liquid gold under our feet.”
Whether the administration recognizes that Musk is getting in the way of that objective is another matter entirely. After all, the hiccups are not limited to Osage County or Oklahoma. Reuters reported that the Trump administration’s mass layoffs at departments including the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have slowed permitting in some of the top-producing oil and gas states, such as New Mexico and Alaska.
DOGE, Baby, DOGE.
YouNeverKnow
by William Kristol
If you’re a baseball fan of a certain age, you may remember Joaquin Andujar. He was a reasonably successful Major League pitcher from 1976 to 1988, a four-time All-Star and the National League wins leader in 1984.
He was also a good post-game interview. Andujar was once asked what he judged to be an unanswerable question about the future. He responded, “There is one word in America that says it all, and that one word is, ‘You never know.’”
Was Andujar alluding to Friedrich Hayek’s famous 1945 essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” where Hayek rebutted the case for a planned economy? Who knows. But Andujar’s comment is a useful and terse summary of the great economist’s argument for free markets, price discovery, and spontaneous order.
One lesson I take from my time in and around politics is that just as there are real limits to economic planning, there are real limits to political planning.
Over the last few months we’ve been awash in Democratic strategists over-strategizing and party operatives over-thinking and party pollsters over-interpreting. But Democrats would do better to hearken back to the words of a great Democrat of an earlier generation, New York Tammany Hall leader George Washington Plunkitt: When you see your opportunities, take ‘em.
And the Trump administration is providing Democrats with plenty of opportunities. His national security team decided to discuss highly sensitive matters on Signal, and to invite a journalist to join them. His co-president Elon Musk decided to try to wreck the Social Security Administration. Trump himself decided that tariffs were key to economic success. The anti-immigration fanatics in his administration decided to launch a jihad against law-abiding men and women contributing to our economy and society.
The American public is turning against these ill-conceived efforts. The political opportunities are becoming apparent. Can Democrats see those opportunities and take them? It shouldn’t be that hard. How much political damage can they do to the Trump administration? More, I suspect, than many now think. But of course, as Joaquin Andujar pointed out, you never know. Until you try.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Peace? No Peace… If the Russian dictator rejects Ukrainian sovereignty, what room is there for compromise? TAMAR JACOBY on the impossibility of ‘peace’ with Putin.
The COVID-19 Revisionists… are twisting the record. CATHY YOUNG on how lockdown skeptics and mask critics are crowing—and distorting what happened five years ago. COVIDiocy never ends!
The Authoritarian Playbook… Former Amb. ERIC EDELMAN (co-host of Shield of the Republic) joins MONA CHAREN on Just Between Us to talk about Trump’s systematic destruction of U.S. moral authority, alliances, and leadership in the world.
Quick Hits
MUSICAL CHAIRS: Who’s going to be left holding the bag for Signalgate?
The first round of blame went to National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, the guy who oafishly ushered the Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg into the group chat in the first place. Waltz staggered through a Fox News interview last night, sheepishly admitting it was he (not a mystery “lower-level” staffer, as Trump had suggested earlier) who had made the flub.
But while adding Goldberg was a big dumb mistake, it wasn’t criminal. Any government employee who shared classified info in that space, on the other hand, may well have been committing a crime.
In this respect, the biggest possible culprit appears to have been Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. And as they parried questions about their participation in the chat in a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe seemed to be subtly pointing fingers at their DOD counterpart. Per the New York Times:
Ms. Gabbard initially declined to confirm that she was even added to the chat. And Mr. Ratcliffe, who said it was up to the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to determine what information could be shared in an unclassified chat, flatly rejected the conclusion of one Democratic senator who asked him to agree that the entire episode had been a serious and damaging mistake.
It took the intelligence chiefs several rounds of questions from lawmakers about the Signal chat, detailed Monday in The Atlantic, to describe their view of events. But the picture that emerged from two hours of testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee—a previously scheduled hearing that was supposed to be about the array of threats against America—was the spy chiefs’ contention that no sensitive information from their areas of responsibility was shared.
Instead, Mr. Hegseth is under the microscope for his decision to put sensitive defense information, most likely classified, into the chat.
BLUE TEA PARTY WATCH: If you were a little-known GOP Senate candidate in recent years, an easy way to build your MAGA brand was to agitate against then-Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Now some Democratic hopefuls are starting to adopt a similar approach.
Mallory McMorrow, a rising Democratic star with her eye on Michigan’s opening Senate seat, told Politico this week that it’s time for Chuck Schumer to go:
“I think it is” time for Schumer to step back, McMorrow said. “There’s still this idea that Democrats and Republicans are still abiding by the same rules and still believe in the same norms and systems and structure. There seems to be a lack of recognition that this is no longer the Republican Party. This is a MAGA party. And the same approach is not going to work.”
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IT IS YOU DO HERE? Late last month, Elon Musk set off a firestorm when he announced that government employees would be required to email five bullet points describing their accomplishments from the prior week—and that, if they didn’t, it would be considered an act of resignation. Musk insisted this was management 101 and that people were being entitled or, worse, lazy if they couldn’t handle it. Perhaps they were dead.
Four weeks later, the “five bullets” program appears to be a bust, in part because Musk’s DOGE team didn’t set up an email system that could handle the incoming. Four government employees from different agencies tell The Bulwark that they or their colleagues recently attempted to send in five-bullet emails only to receive a bounce-back response that the OPM mailbox was full.
“If you sent your message to OPM and received this response, then please save your email to OPM for your records, but otherwise there is nothing more you need to do today,” Securities and Exchange Commission COO Ken Johnson told employees in an email this week.
“We are aware that emails to HR@opm.gov are being returned as undeliverable. Please send your weekly accomplishments to HR10@opm.gov and cc your supervisor,” read an email from a leadership official at Health and Human Services.
An official at the Social Security Administration told us that “a bunch of people” had their emails returned as well. “They can’t even be bothered to clear out the inbox let alone read them,” the official said. “Such a waste of time.”
The sources indicated that the bounce-back issue was eventually resolved as the Office of Personnel and Management set up new inboxes. But they also suggested that many government employees have stopped really caring about the five bullets. One official at NASA said that they’d been told to just send their five bullets to their direct supervisor who would “handle the situation with us.” Another government employee said they stopped sending anything at all. “Because,” the employee explained, “F that.”
Cheap Shots
This whole Signal thing is stupidity of the first order. I wish news would leave Goldberg out of it, because he is not the story, he is simply how we found out.
"Six minutes later, the vice president, apparently confused by Waltz’s message, wrote, “What?”
This is priceless and perfectly sums up the incredible incompetence of this whole administration.
I’ve often criticized our modern politics for having a very short “vision” of basically the two years between elections. Reading about DOGE’s bumbling with the oil drilling has helped me realize that situation is going to get much worse, as they cripple or eliminate features of our government that actually had a long view. Along those lines, I think more attention needs to be paid to the closure of our seed storage bunker, after 100 years of keeping a wide variety of seeds viable in case of unforeseen crop disasters. Most of DOGE actions seem to have a strong ingredient of malevolence, without discernible purpose.