In March 2010, Barack Obama created the Affordable Care Act with zero Republican support. The law was a light form of socialized healthcare similar to how such systems are operated in Europe.
Obamacare needed every single vote in order to pass. It took a lot of work to get the necessary votes to pass the overhaul of an entire industry.
The 60-39 vote to pass the bill in the U.S. Senate was reliant on the Senate Democrat votes from Alaska, Mark Begich, who won after the Department of Justice lied and prosecuted Republican Senator Ted Stevens. One of the two prosecutors from the Department’s notorious “Public Integrity” division in the Stevens case, Nicholas Marsh, committed suicide when the Department started investigating his crimes while prosecuting the case. The vote to pass Obamacare was also reliant on the suspicious recount in the Minnesota Senate race where Coleman won re-election only to be recounted into a 312-vote loss to comedian Al Franken.
The passage of the partisan, controversial, overhaul of the nation’s healthcare also sparked the Tea Party movement of motivated conservatives who wanted an outright repeal of the program. The Tea Party is largely credited with Republicans retaking control of the U.S. House in the 2010 when 63 House seats changed hands and 6 Senate seats changed in favor of the Republicans.
When passing Obamacare, Democrats lied about whether you could keep your old insurance. They lied about the costs and quality of the coverage. They lied about whether it would lead to rationing of care. They lied about whether it would lead to higher costs. They lied about whether it would cover illegal immigrants. They lied about whether it would cover transgender surgeries. They lied about whether it would cover abortions. They lied about how Obamacare would affect the economy. They lied that it would create jobs.
As part of the law, some of the savings used to create a form of nationalized healthcare, the sales and marketing of the system was put online so that instead of hiring salesmen and spending money on marketing, everything would be handled through an agile and robust website.
Part of the alleged massive savings of the program was going to come from digitizing some of the traditional back-end services like sales and marketing, by putting them on the website.
The only problem was, like most left-wing fantasies, reality got in the way.
The Obamacare website was a disaster.
They originally said it cost $200 million to make. In the end it would cost over $840 million. It wouldn’t work at all in the Safari browser. It regularly crashed.
When then-President Barack Obama tried to symbolically sign up for the system, it crashed and couldn’t verify his identity.
The Obamacare website contract had been given to a close personal friend of Michelle Obama, her college classmate at Princeton Toni Townes-Whitley. Townes-Whitney was a Vice President at government contractor CGI Federal. The firm was not up to the challenge. Since then, Townes-Whitley has led defense contractor Science Applications International, or “SAIC,” as its CEO.
For her part, asked last month about DOGE on Bloomberg, Townes-Whitley said she looked forward to engaging with Musk’s team and admitted that government spending will “likely be more circumspect.”
Asked by Bloomberg if she had been approached by DOGE or Musk, Townes-Whitley said she had not.
In 2014 when the government was trying to fix the broken Obamacare website that her firm had made, the new contractors they brought in were unable to do so. The contractors were caught doing nothing, sitting at computers, and simply hitting refresh.
Even the New York Times was forced to admit the website’s disastrous rollout was a “serious problem.”
As a solution to the problem, instead of admitting that the vendor with personal friendships with Obama had created a billion dollar website that did not work, the solution was to create the “United States Digital Service.” The USDS was given the authority to fix the Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov.
The USDS was formally created on August 11, 2014 and its first head was a former Google engineer Mikey Dickerson. Dickerson is now a professor of Computer Science at Pomona College. Dickerson was succeeded by Matt Cutts, another engineering veteran from Google. Cutts was replaced by Mina Hsiang who served as the Administrator during the Biden administration.
Dickerson told the New York Times in 2017 that Trump’s first election in 2016 was a “crisis” for him and his staff, who felt as though it was a “punch in the gut” when they realized they had new bosses. But, they said, friends of the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner came to their meetings to reassure them.
Dickerson oddly shows up in the 2018 Senate race in Alabama, where left-wing billionaire funder Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, gave $750,000 that was spent promoting disinformation in the hotly-contested Senate race between left-wing lawyer Doug Jones and conservative attorney Roy Moore. Dickerson helped promote an entirely false narrative that Moore was supported by Russian bots and agents of Russia.
In 2017, Donald Trump tried to repeal Obamacare but lost by one vote when RINO Senator John McCain voted against it, reportedly out of spite for Trump, even though lying McCain had campaigned on voting to repeal the law.
Even though Obamacare was not repealed, and even though the HealthCare.gov website was now functional since the Google engineers were brought in to bail out Michelle Obama’s friend, the U.S. Digital Service or USDS continued with funding and staffing and authority as a ‘technology unit’ of the Executive office of the President.
Importantly, the service was given the authority to investigate and operate the tech backends of all federal departments and agencies.
President Trump tasked USDS, aka DOGE, with a “Software Modernization Initiative” to update software, network and IT infrastructure across the federal government. This gives it access to the entire government, and makes refusing their requests a violation of a Presidential order.
The USDS website claims it was previously “solving big problems” but its list of projects make it seem like it was barely poking around the margins of the massive $6 trillion federal bureaucracy with 2.2 million employees.
The USDS proudly showcased on its website that it was working on:
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Creating COVID-19 “Vaccine Finder” tools
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Conducting research on how to improve the Social Security Administration’s website
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Helping create a plain language way for Veterans to update their discharge status
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Simplifying veteran services on VA.gov
So when Elon Musk came storming into Washington with Trump’s authority and blessing seeking to trim a trillion dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse from the budget, when Musk wants to look into Treasury’s financial systems that never turn down a financial request, when Trump wants to audit the Pentagon, this ornamental service left as a holdover from Obama fixing his wife’s mistakes in choosing vendors, was not up to the task.
Musk is finding massive evidence of fraud throughout the systems he is investigating. Just within the last few days, Musk has said the Treasury is making regular payments to individuals without social security numbers or other identification, a situation where long-time Treasury officials suspect up to $50 billion in annual fraud is occurring.
The structure was set up for Trump to create DOGE using existing authority, an existing governmental entity, with existing funding. Normally a new department would not only need to be authorized by Congress for its legal authority, but its funding would also have to be separately secured in the annual appropriations process.
Trump did not need Congress to act, where NeverTrumpers like Mitch McConnell might stall or delay his agenda. Trump was empowered to act because Obama had set up this service with dedicated funding in order to fix the mess he made by giving a vital government contract to his wife’s college classmate.
In President Trump’s Executive Order authorizing DOGE, Trump reorganized and renamed the United States Digital Service as the United States DOGE Service. The DOGE teams had the authority to work in the information technology backend of every governmental agency.
Attorney Tom Renz has an excellent analysis of Trump’s Executive Order creating DOGE.
In one Executive Order, Trump was able to give Elon Musk access to, and authority over, the government’s technological backbones.
The irony of the situation is certainly not lost on Obama, as Trump dismantles the many funding mechanisms the left has used to perpetuate and amplify its financial and ‘soft power’ domestically and internationally.
Obama Judges are currently trying to stop Musk and DOGE claiming it will cause “irreparable harm” if Musk and his team are given read-only access to financial payment information. Democrats are trying to set up weak nationwide protests against Musk and Trump. Musk has since proposed that Congress remove 1% of the worst federal judges every year.
The tech division that Obama set up is, today, in the process of shutting down Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
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