The DOGE Boys Are Going To Pay
There is a real and furious chunk of the electorate demanding accountability for DOGE
Preemptively moaning about elected Democrats not sufficiently fighting the authoritarian scourge is every online doomer's favorite game. Some have made a career out of it. You gotta respect that kind of hustle.
And I get it. I've done my share of this sort of engagement-friendly posting during my decade and a half of microblogging. It's always some variation of a theme: Democrats won't do this or that because they've never done this or that. This kind of posting is contagious, and it lays the groundwork for elected Democrats to do exactly nothing when they have power. It has the added effect of discouraging Democrats' constituents from applying the kind of pressure that leads to the good sort of power wielding.
Maybe it's the do-good shitlib in me, but I don't think it's smart to set low expectations for the elected leaders who are going to be tasked with holding accountable the criminals who run the Trump regime, those who have gleefully violated bedrock constitutional principles and court orders with no repercussions (because the American political system is grounded in the presumption of good faith, and because the current Justice Department is operating under the logic of competitive authoritarianism). The coming accountability agenda will include the DOGE boys who worked for Elon Musk in his coup of the U.S. government in early 2025.
Denny Carter
These fellas might just be guilty of something like half a billion felonies. That's more than a typical number of felonies.
There are various efforts – quiet so far while economic issues take the stage during election season – to prime congressional Democrats for prosecuting the broccoli-cut government hackers of DOGE. The Action Network is organizing rallies for DOGE accountability and steering folks toward avenues for pressuring their congressional representatives to go after the Musk-worshipping chuds who stormed federal agencies with gun-wielding security guards, stole sensitive government data, and overrode congressional authority because Musk sees himself as invulnerable (and so far, sadly, horrifyingly, he's right).
Ayanna Pressley: "Elon Musk is a Nazi nepo baby."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 4, 2025 at 5:44 PM
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Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee, meanwhile, are practically frothing at the prospect of going after Musk's DOGE soldiers once Republicans lose their majority in November. Oversight committee Democrats since the spring of 2025 have launched more than 150 investigations and letters of inquiry, filed a multifaceted FOIA request, and introduced two formal House resolutions of inquiry related to the DOGE attack on the U.S. government.
These include more than 1,000 requests for information and documentation sent to the regime, Musk, and DOGE on "issues related to national security, the illegal termination of federal employees, the unlawful and wholesale dismantlement of federal agencies, and rampant conflicts of interest and corruption." Democrats on the Oversight Committee have met with federal whistleblowers for almost a year now. My guess would be nothing has yet come of this because Democrats interested in DOGE accountability are keeping their powder dry until they have the House majority.
Here's a DOGE accountability petition toolkit if you're into it
I would guess the doomer reaction to these efforts would look something like this: Oh no, please don't send me another letter! I can't take another FOIA request! A doomer would do better, I think, to see this as useful groundwork for future accountability actions when the rule of law has been re-established, and to recognize many members of the incoming Democratic House majority are more willing – even eager – to go after the regime's bad actors. Democrats' requests for information and low-level investigatory work also serves as a signal to you and me and everyone who desperately wants Musk's DOGE monstrosity to be punished for its thousands (millions?) of crimes against the country and against humanity.
"We will see you in the courts, in Congress, in the streets. Musk is a Nazi nepo-baby. To our Republican colleagues: If you do not see the light, we will bring the fire," Rep. Ayanna Pressley said back in March 2025, not sounding like someone who will soon forget the DOGE blitzkrieg on American self governance.
DOGE-boys-to-prison pipeline needs to happen
— Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) March 24, 2026 at 8:17 AM
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It doesn't matter much that polling from 2025 showed DOGE had a 40 percent approval among registered voters. The 60 percent who were against DOGE's lawless ransacking of the U.S. government would easily expand if (or when) DOGE's mission is properly and accurately explained to the American electorate.
Like all fascist programs, DOGE was lovingly granted to presumption of good faith – by media outlets and some opponents – when it injected itself into the government's bloodstream in February 2025. Musk's Department of Government Efficiency was taken at its word that they only wanted to streamline government services and spending, to trim waste and examine potentially superfluous federal agencies and programs. And who is against efficiency? Who is against streamlining?
Anthony Reimer
This was a lie, and an easily detectable one if the Newspaper was interested in such things. DOGE was a bad-faith demon born from the bloody depths of the fascist internet, a dank Musk meme come to life to wreak unceasing havoc on the American government and the people Musk hates. His DOGE boys were tasked with removing the names of any person or color of LGBTQ person from government buildings, programs, and even battleships. The DOGE boys admitted this in their March 2026 testimonies: They were told to destroy anything in the U.S. government that could conceivably be considered "woke" and to defund any effort to help any group that was not white, including creating the conditions of mass starvation in parts of Africa. Think of DOGE as the weaponized fascist backlash to the brief moment of racial reckoning we had in 2020.
DOGE's mission was Muskian to its core: To digitally purge the federal government of anything and everything that symbolized the progress of women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks, and to torment those Musk hates for their immutable traits, namely their skin color. Their cuts to international aid could kill hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable, needy humans alive today. DOGE was, in many ways, the culmination of Musk's grandfather's hate-filled life journey.
DOGE's bad faith was exposed a handful of times in 2025, most prominently when they erased all mentions of Jackie Robinson and Dorothy from The Golden Girls from federal government websites. This, mercifully, helped personalize the DOGE coup for millions of Americans who had believed media outlets that described the group as nothing more than a cost-cutting blue ribbon panel. DOGE was hatched by Musk to wreck the U.S. bureaucracy and digitally install the right's unreality into the inner workings of whatever remained of the government.
That, in short, is the good-faith interpretation of the DOGE mission. It makes me sweaty and agitated if I dwell on it too long.
Muh Pardons!
For the doomers who, for whatever reason, see it as their job to convince others that the regime's many criminals will never be held to account thanks to the abuse of presidential pardons, please consider the Justice Department itself recognizes that presidential pardons are "limited to federal offenses" and can't save someone from state convictions. On an importantly related note, attorneys general from fourteen states are pursuing cases against the DOGE bros, and have been for some time.
There's also the complicated question of pardons that come from a president who has reportedly promised them to members of his regime as literal Get Out Of Jail Free cards once they're done destroying the US and selling it for parts. I asked Joshua Erlich, a civil rights lawyer and an excellent Bluesky poster, whether that kind of blatantly corrupt pardon party would hold up in court.
"So, if you straight up sell a pardon, is that a real one? Technically yes but it’s never been tested," Erlich told me. "Theoretically though, the pardon is literally a royal power derived from monarchy, so the basis for restricting them is pretty tenuous, at least if we’re going by history."
"To my mind, the path to resolving this questions for Trump is to treat his presidency itself as a legal nullity," Elrich continued. "He was never constitutionally elected because he wasn't eligible to run under the 14th Amendment. So the question is less about whether the pardons are legal and more about whether the person giving them is legally president in the first place."
Strategically I think it's a mistake of folks on the left to walk around over the next two years whining about pardons as a surefire way to short-circuit justice. That time and energy would be better spent bugging your congressional representatives to use their power in ways that discourage future anti-democracy federal officials from ignoring the very basics of constitutional guardrails.
The DOGE boys are going to pay. They have to. It's a matter of national survival.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
