On Dec. 22, 2025, an Inspector General report on the Social Security Administration, triggered by demands from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), documented a sharp turnaround in the agency’s phone service during Fiscal Year 2025. Average wait times fell from roughly thirty minutes earlier in the year to single digits by September. The agency handled 65% more calls than in the prior fiscal year, serving 68 million callers in total. Claims backlogs declined by 35%.
This is an amazing improvement for an entrenched bureaucracy, and in less than a year. Much of this can be ascribed to reforms suggested by the Department of Government Efficiency.
Those results cut directly against months of media coverage portraying DOGE as being disruptive without delivering measurable gains. Whatever one thinks of DOGE's style or politics, it demanded the system respond to pressure. Performance improved, demonstrably and at scale.
That outcome matters because it clarifies what DOGE actually represents, and what it does not.
DOGE's stated mission
Publicly, DOGE was framed as a government efficiency initiative. Its stated goals were straightforward and broadly popular: reduce waste, speed up services, modernize systems, and bring private-sector discipline to federal agencies long criticized for inertia. It even promised a dollar amount of savings, as much as $2 trillion.
Supporters emphasized outcomes. Critics focused on tone and optics. But nearly everyone evaluated DOGE as if it were meant to be a conventional reform program, something designed to embed quietly, win buy-in, and slowly reshape bureaucratic behavior from the inside.
But if DOGE were merely an efficiency drive, much of its behavior would be difficult to explain.
It operated on compressed timelines. It tolerated public controversy. It pushed against entrenched systems without first securing institutional comfort. It accepted backlash as a cost rather than treating it as a failure condition.
That is not how traditional reform bodies behave. Bureaucratic reform, when it aims at permanence, is cautious by necessity. It prioritizes process harmony, avoids provoking internal resistance, and works patiently within existing norms.
DOGE did none of that, which suggests its purpose was not limited to efficiency alone.
DOGE as a stress test of the administrative state
A better explanation is that DOGE is functioning as a stress test of the federal bureaucracy.
Stress tests are not designed to produce immediate, permanent fixes. They are designed to apply pressure and observe outcomes: where systems bend, where they break, where they resist, and where supposed constraints turn out to be optional once incentives change. It is a drive to gather data, not repair issues.
Under this model, efficiency gains are not the primary goal. They are signal, evidence of latent capacity revealed under load. Resistance, delay, panic, and narrative hostility are also signal. They show where authority actually resides and which processes exist because they are necessary, versus merely habitual.
The Social Security Administration results fit this model precisely. When pressure was applied, performance improved quickly and measurably. That does not prove the system is now permanently fixed. It shows something more revealing: The capacity was there all along.
Why the Musk lens matters
This interpretation aligns closely with how Elon Musk has repeatedly operated across very different domains.
Musk does not treat institutions as abstract ideals. Thinking like an engineer, he treats them as systems that must be tested under real conditions. His approach favors empirical stress over theoretical reassurance and exposure over simulation.
One of the clearest expressions of this philosophy is SpaceX’s use of the acronym RUD, “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” referred to by most people as a big old explosion. Rockets are pushed until they fail. Failure is not an embarrassment, but rather a valuable data collection moment. Each breakdown reveals load-bearing assumptions that no white paper can surface.
The goal is not to avoid failure at all costs. The goal is to fail fast enough, visibly enough, to learn where the system’s true limits are, and to learn it quickly.
Viewed through this lens, DOGE’s behavior becomes coherent.
It applied load to bureaucratic systems that have not been seriously stressed in decades. It compressed timelines. It disrupted established workflows. It removed procedural slack. It made inefficiencies visible rather than politely tolerable. Some systems adapted. Some resisted. Some leaked. Some appealed to norms rather than outcomes. All of that is information.
From a stress-test perspective, controversy is not proof of failure. It is proof that pressure reached something structural.
Related: Let Them Eat Twinkies: A Short History of Getting American Hunger Wrong
DOGE's value
If DOGE were evaluated solely as a permanent reform vehicle, critics might plausibly call it incomplete or unfinished. But stress tests are not judged by permanence. They are judged by diagnostic yield.
By that standard, DOGE is generating high-value information:
- Which agencies can improve rapidly under pressure
- Which bottlenecks are technical versus managerial
- Where authority actually resides, regardless of organization charts
- How quickly performance changes when incentives shift
The SSA audit is not an isolated anecdote. Rather, it is a data point that supports the broader claim: much of what is presented as unavoidable bureaucratic limitation is, in fact, a choice maintained by lack of pressure.
DOGE didn't fail
The insistence that DOGE has “failed” says more about expectations than outcomes.
Many critics assumed DOGE would behave like a traditional reform body: slow, quiet, consensus-driven. When it did not, they concluded it was unserious. Others expected instant, permanent transformation and dismissed anything short of that as insufficient. Both expectations misunderstand the function of a stress test.
Stress tests do not fix systems. They map them. Most importantly, stress tests are not one-off events. They are iterative. Early results inform later action. Reconnaissance precedes restructuring.
Seen this way, DOGE is not a concluded experiment but an ongoing diagnostic phase. Its value lies not only in the efficiencies already observed, but in the clarity it brings to future reform efforts, which will likely be quieter, more targeted, and more surgical precisely because this information now exists.
DOGE did not collapse the system. It forced parts of it to move. We see that today in this IG report. Once you accept that as the goal, the claim that DOGE “failed” becomes difficult to sustain.
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