Headlines About DOGE Ranked According to an Ultra-Scientific ‘How Is This Real’ Scale

Amid all the chaos, there is something particularly crazy-making about the sheer existence of the Department of Government Efficiency. This completely made-up, meme-named demon child of Elon Musk, with an obviously bullshit stated goal of rooting out waste and fraud across the government and an actual goal of removing regulatory roadblocks for Musk and other ultrarich marauders and generally breaking the functions of the government, did not exist a few months ago and has already remade huge chunks of the federal apparatus and upended millions of lives. The fact that it managed to burrow so deeply into decades- and centuries-old institutions with so little pushback functions as a searing indictment of the supposed norms and guardrails those very institutions supposedly provide.

As the infestation has spread, the media’s collective work documenting DOGE’s moves has been, on the whole, relatively good. There are still too many stories that allow the department — which again is obviously designed as a destructive force and run by malevolent know-nothings with no idea why canceling any given project or office or policy might function like hacksawing a leg off a chair — to pretend it is searching for the mythical “waste, fraud, and abuse.” But even still, outlets from independent and small to the biggest there are have done well to uncover the increasingly absurd machinations.

That reporting produces headlines that, on their own, are enough to make one question one’s sanity. How did this happen? How did this cadre of Palantir interns and 8chan lurkers end up with access to Social Security databases? Why is this misshapen personified ketamine high in the Oval Office, or participating in a Cabinet meeting? How is any of this real?

While each individual story is bizarre and frustrating on its own, the collective few months of news DOGE has produced is a sort of dirty bomb of cognitive dissonance; viewed together, it makes less and less sense. And so, here is a ranking of some of those headlines — there are many, many more — based on an intensely scientific formula assessing not how impactful or important the stories are, but the degree of the sanity-questioning it produces.

31. A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data

30. Musk touts DOGE transparency but downplays his own potential conflicts of interest

29. Judge relaxes ban on DOGE access to sensitive US Treasury information

28. How DOGE may have improperly used Social Security data to push voter fraud narratives

27. DOGE is collecting federal data to remove immigrants from housing, jobs