Dem
47
GOP
53
Elon Musk thinks that the government should be more digital. If done right, there is probably some value in that, provided that people who are not computer savvy don't get left behind. In 2015, the Pentagon realized that it needed a unit to make tech fixes fast during a crisis and generally push digitalization in the military, so it created the Defense Digital Service. It is locally known as the "SWAT team of nerds."
The DDS has completed many projects since then, including building tools for the military during the Afghanistan withdrawal, databases to transfer military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, drone detection technologies, counter-drone technologies, and much more.
Elon Musk has decided that the DDS falls under fraud and waste so he has killed it off. Nearly all the workers quit or will be fired at the end of April. The staffers left, if any, will be transferred to the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office.
This is just another example of how Elon and the Muskrats are killing off government programs willy-nilly, without regard to what they do or how well they are doing it. Like any piece of the large Pentagon bureaucracy, there was politics and some infighting going on, but no one was complaining that the products it was producing were useless. None of that matters to Musk. A former senior DoD official described Musk's meddling into the DoD as damaging and unproductive. The official said: "They're not really using AI, they're not really driving efficiency. What they're doing is smashing everything." (V)