Josh First's Blog

DOGE

Tonight I was inspired to send a DM to the folks managing the DOGE page on X. Not necessarily because I have thought all the time about ways to make government efficient or better (though I have written essays about it at American Thinker), but because over the years and last few weeks I have tried to reach out to some of my former US EPA colleagues in DC.

And not one has responded.

These people were close friends when we were young. We worked together, we socialized together, we watched each other get raises and promotions, cheered each other getting married, then have kids, etc. And over the last 27 years since I left DC I would occasionally get an itch to talk with some of them, and I would email and call. Some of my old friends came and visited me, fished with me, hung out around the campfire. It was fantastic.

To say that most of my phone calls were returned would be untrue. That many of the conversations were odd or forced would not be an understatement. I think most of my former DC friends viewed me as a traitor, or worse, some kind of infidel or crazy man, for leaving federal service and Washington DC. Really. I mean this. That is how tightly the horse blinders are on the people living there; they really cannot relate to most of the Americans outside of the Beltway.

Lately I have been trying to reach my old friend Paul. Paul did well. Went from EPA to NIH. He too won’t respond in kind. Just silence. I guess being a GS 15 in DC means you are automatically at the top of the American hierarchy, and above people in Flyover Country, too important to stoop so low. Even to connect with former close friends who helped you with your career. No condescending to speak with us lowlives, us worker ants, us neandethals. And yes, these epithets are indeed how many, many DC Beltway government apparatchiks view Americans outside the Beltway. Those of us toiling away in the dirt, with dirt under our finger nails. Grubby.

And so while my heart hurts from being ignored by people I had felt great affection for, and who I naturally expected to receive it in turn from, the pain reminded me of why Trump was elected, and just how cancerous, arrogant, uncaring, and out of touch the federal government has become in all of its heavy handedness and overlording it on us little people. And how effing spoiled brat entitled and unaccountable so so many federal bureaucrats have become.

So, thanks guys, my dear old friends, for inspiring me to reach out to the Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They are taking volunteers to help take a meat cleaver to the bloated federal bureaucracy I fled from. If there is one thing I have gotten very good at, it is volunteering. God knows, someone has to help fix what so much bad government has screwed up, and like cleaning up old tires in a trout stream, you can’t fix what is broken without volunteers. People who wade into the muck and get covered in mud to make the trout stream clean and habitable once again.

So…Private First reporting for duty, Captains Ramaswamy and Musk. Chainsaw, bulldozer, dynamite, chisel, sledgehammer or screwdriver, whatever is needed to help dismantle the out of control DC bureacucracy, I can do it. I know it all too well.

UPDATE: Apparently the power of the word is still great, because my old friend Paul called me. And we had a lovely conversation. Yes, he voted for Kamala, and I voted for Trump, but still, we were able to talk about our kids, our careers, our patient wives. There is hope for America.