Another Govie Bites The Dust

The hits keep coming.

My recent blog post, The Data Engineer’s Struggle In a Fragmented And Politicized World, is not even a month old, written the day after the BLS chief’s firing in the wake of a displeasing economic report.

Yet during the intervening weeks the firehose of similar stories has surely pummeled your brain, only one such event being the firing of the DIA chief, doubtless for publishing a displeasing intelligence assessment on the Big Beautiful Bombing of Iran.

And now we find ourselves pondering the leaked “forced resignation” letter of now-former SSA Chief Data Officer Charles Borges in the wake of what he characterized as “data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens’ most sensitive personal data”, which he attributed to a DOGE-driven debacle.

These firings and resignations have three outcomes, each at a different time scale…

1. Short-term: we find ourselves unable to trust the narrative on the triggering event — people are purged, records vanish.
2. Mid-term: our trust in the remaining staff’s ability to interpret and react to upcoming events degrades — politicization and incompetence taint everything.
3. Long-term: we choke off the hiring and mentorship pipelines, leaving ourselves diminished for a generation — institutional knowledge evaporates and would-be talent goes elsewhere.

This is how a nation mortgages its future far more subtly than a mounting financial debt and deficit crisis. The chaos and short-termism that are laudable in the highly Darwinian ecosystem of start-ups, and even carefully managed government SkunkWorks, make far less sense when broadly yeeted into federal government — unhedged, unconstrained, and unsupervised.

Yes, we do need new talent and fresh approaches, but let’s temper that with Chesterton’s Fence, striving at least to understand a thing before setting out to destroy it.

For those wanting more, I’ve explored related themes in earlier pieces such as Explain The Deep State To Me Like I’m (Thirty) Five, From Signal Pete To Deepfake Rubio, and The Hamfisted Hegemon — available in both blog and podcast form.