Explainer

We left off at Part 1 begging the question "Why are we so focused on procurement in the first place?" Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. The federal government has become completely dependent on contractors for technical talent. Engineers, designers, product managers—they're all contracted rather than hired directly by agencies.

Let's be honest, government procurement doesn't exactly scream "excitement." But it's a big deal.

Der Doppelstaat, or "The Dual State" is a political theory developed by German lawyer and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel in 1941. The theory describes how Nazi Germany operated with two states running at the same time:

Editor's Note: This post was shared with permission from Don Moynihan's Substack

Trump’s maximalist strategy of firing off one executive action after another seeks to overwhelm us. Finding some tangible way to respond sometimes feels impossible. So, here is something that you can do:

In recent weeks, DOGE posted about the government's records mine in Pennsylvania, where more than 400 million federal retirement records are stored. They claim they've completely digitized the retirement process—but this isn't their victory to celebrate: The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) started digitizing this process long before DOGE got involved. DOGE also canceled existing contracts and reduced staff on the project.

The unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is likely violating the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) with their “Join DOGE” form on the doge.gov website. This rule, largely unknown by the public, was put in place in the 1980s and updated in the 1990s in order to minimize the paperwork burden on the public and the federal government.

Sharing taxpayer data with ICE: The risks to Americans are greater than they appear

Editor's note: This article was originally published at The Cloud is Down and is reposted here with permission from the author.

We know you want to get your message out, DOGE. That's the point of running your own website, right? We recently ran aXe DevTools on your site and we found a bunch of accessibility concerns for your website. We want to help.

Here's what we learned:

Editor's note: This story is posted with permission from the anonymous federal employee who shared it with us. Some edits were made for length and clarity.