The Lincoln Logue | America Carves the Bird While the Government Continues To Carve Itself Apart

The short week didn’t offer a reprieve so much as a compressed version of the same unraveling we’ve learned to recognize by scent alone, a pace that feels almost festive in how efficiently it stacks dysfunction. Washington kept pretending the machinery was still humming while the administration quietly dissolved the very offices it once claimed would save the republic from waste, turning governance into a stage prop that collapses if you lean on it. Accountability remained a rumor, legality a suggestion, and the people meant to safeguard the public interest were instead forced to calculate how much truth they could say out loud without triggering retaliation. It’s a strange kind of civic holiday: gathering around the table of American democracy to carve up the norms that once held the place together, passing platters loaded with shortcuts and strong-armed directives. The week reminded us that the presidency has absorbed the state like a black hole pulling in every guardrail it touches, insisting the collapse is efficiency. And the tension in the air is a constant reminder that power is most dangerous when it claims to be tidying up.

Still, beneath the confusion, something steadier pulsed — the instinct to name the absurdity even when it comes wrapped in patriotic language and sold as inevitability. The stories this week weren’t random outrages but connected threads of a government trying to tighten its grip while insisting it is merely enforcing order. It’s the season when the White House dresses its crackdowns in holiday cheer and hopes no one notices the contradictions spreading like frost along the edges. And yet, people noticed anyway, even as the week raced toward its abbreviated end.

So here’s the story of a few days that tried to compress months of institutional strain into a single stretch of calendar quiet, daring the country to look away while insisting nothing was wrong at all. The cracks widened, the pressure sharpened, and the country braced for a holiday where gratitude feels like rebellion rather than retreat.

Welcome back to The Lincoln Logue. Hope you has a good Thanksgiving!

Monday, November 24 — “Chainsaw!!!” Department Dies a Quiet Death

▌Bold ideas, bold chainsaws, leaving with an Irish goodbye.

The Department of Government Efficiency died the way most Trump-era experiments do — loudly at launch, silently at burial, and carried out by officials insisting the body was merely “elsewhere.” The administration spent a year holding DOGE up as a symbol of cleansing fire, brandishing Musk and his chainsaw as proof that government could be trimmed into obedience through spectacle alone. Instead, it slipped into the bureaucratic ether eight months early, leaving behind a trail of half-finished cuts, unverifiable “savings,” and a record so opaque it could have been designed by a magician. What remains is a shell game where the Office of Personnel Management quietly absorbs DOGE’s functions while the White House pretends the project is still a living beast prowling the capital.

The spectacle of DOGE always depended on conflating destruction with innovation, a trick that played well on social media but proved less convincing when held up to the dim light of actual governance. The supposed cost-cutting achievements never came with receipts, a handy omission when the goal is theatrics rather than truth, and the absence of data now feels like the real mission rather than an oversight. As former DOGE staffers scatter into new roles at HHS, State, and the National Design Studio, the through-line becomes unmistakable: the administration has not abandoned the ethos of erosion, only redistributed it. AI tools are being sharpened to target entire regulatory regimes, not because the work demands nuance, but because deletion is louder than diligence. What began as a promise to “delete the mountain” has morphed into a broad assault on anything that slows the president’s will, leaving agencies stripped of staff, clarity, and continuity.

Perhaps the most revealing detail is not that DOGE died early but that the administration refuses to say so out loud, speaking of it in nostalgic past tense while denying its absence like a superstition. The chainsaw imagery, the swaggering declarations, the parade of tech titans were always about creating the sense of inevitability — that shrinking the government was not a choice but destiny. Now destiny has dissolved into a shrug and a transfer memo, exposing the gap between the myth of transformation and the reality of institutional decay. The states copying the model offer their own warning: this ideology replicates even when the flagship collapses, spreading a blueprint for dismantling public capacity under the guise of modernization. In the end, DOGE was never about efficiency but control, a method of turning complexity into a liability and expertise into a threat.

Source: Reuters...