Summary
DOGE staffers Tyler Hassen and Bryton Shang tried pressuring the Bureau of Reclamation to open a California water pump to aid Los Angeles during January’s wildfires, though the system couldn’t reach the city.
When denied, they flew there to do it themselves but failed due to maintenance and access restrictions.
Critics called DOGE a “slapstick operation of 20-somethings they’re seeing as whiz kids but have zero knowledge.”
Trump later ordered dam releases, flooding farmland. Critics called DOGE’s actions reckless and uninformed.
First, the power was off due to planned maintenance. Second, Shang wasn’t an official federal employee yet, meaning he couldn’t access the pump. Hassen couldn’t do it either, CNN reports, because he had to fly back before the power would be restored.
“They didn’t get their photo op,” an unnamed source with knowledge of the incident told CNN, adding it represented “what DOGE has been this entire time — this slapstick operation of 20-somethings they’re seeing as whiz kids but have zero knowledge.”
lol that’s amazing levels of incompetence.
There needs to be more articles like this that calls them out by name. It’s easy to name Trump and Musk, but call out the cronies too!
Too much credit is given to Trump, which means that if Trump leaves office people will think everything is fixed despite all the other people who steer Trump towards his worst impulses will still be around wreaking havoc.
Trump is 90% a figurehead for the shitty conservatives who wrote Project 2025. He didn’t come up with most of this stuff, he is just going along with it. The 10% of the time things are his idea are fucking terrible too, but he definitely doesn’t deserve most of the credit.
Yeah but it’s MAGA’s weird adoration of Trump that makes this all possible. Also Trump did say he wasn’t going to do Project 2025 during the campaign. People either believed this (despite him being convicted of 34 counts of fraud) or actually wanted Project 2025.
There will always be ghouls that will want to do these kinds of things. But what needs to happen is for voters to learn that bad things happen when you vote for someone like Trump who enables this kind of thing.
These idiots actually thought the only reason the fires were still burning is because someone hasn’t opened up a faucet yet, and that no one else but them have thought of it.
F*cking idiots.
Most of us, raised by Hollywood, imagine critical infrastructure has guards and ID checks. Keys. Guys with machine guns. The last 10 years, it’s pretty clear the major controls are just that no one tries. “I’m from DOGE” is going to be the penetration tester’s go-to social engineering hack for the next four years. Just walk in, press the Big Red Button, and leave.
This instance shows that it is, in fact, how that works, at least in part:
Shang wasn’t an official federal employee yet, meaning he couldn’t access the pump.
No credentials, no access. Most infrastructure like this has physical security like fencing, padlocks, steel doors, and so on. I don’t know if there’s a break-in alarm, but even if not, they’d still have to figure out how to access the pumps and turn them on. They’re probably computer-controlled, so you’d have to get access to the computer system. I’m sure you could override it on the PLC, or just plain hotwire it, but that takes a whole new set of skills.
I would not be the least surprised if the sum total of the “l33t h4x0r skills” of these teenagers boils down to knowing the least bit about whatever the latest Javascript frontend framework is, combined with some LLM to help them with it…this is what happens when a whole lot of idiots think that being young == being tech-savvy.
People hand the tech decisions over to complete morons with no understanding and so much Dunning-Kruger that they not only don’t know shit about something like PLCs, and may not have even heard of them, they’ll be too fucking arrogant to ask people that DO know, because, gosh, they might be OLD (i.e., > 30 years old) or something.
I’ve got some bad news for you…
If it is locked, the key is usually nearby, and it’s usually the cheapest, least secure, possible lock to buy.
So to protect critical infrastructure, when someone says “I’m from DOGE,” the correct reply is “Off you fuck.”
I wish I had the confidence of a DOGE tech bro even for a week.
