The DOGE Hit List, Vol. 1: Office of Space Commerce

Traditionally, “waste, fraud and abuse” is where government careers go to die. It turns out that most (although of course not all) of the “waste” is either legally required or putatively oriented towards some idea of “fairness”. Outright fraud is comparatively rare, or a de facto set of payoffs to a constituency that was able to extract them, and thus possesses the Mandate of Heaven to take Casimir Pulaski Day as off-the-books vacation, and why would you decide to pick a fight with them over this in particular? And “abuse” - well, the government has established that the first rule of dealing with the government is that the government wins.

Journeys into refactoring are even more fraught, because every useless office was set up to manage some set of punishments for the enemy’s constituencies or gimmes for your own, which reshuffling threatens. Yes, the payoff might be minimal compared to the costs, or even at this point nonexistent - but why would you trade away the optionality that they might do something eventually, without getting something in return?

This explains why, generally, nothing gets done - but none of this actually matters if you have the actual authority to decide, no, we’re going to do it this way because this advances my interests, I have power, and I am willing to take or ignore whatever game-theoretic retaliation you would ordinarily dish out.

This is the barely-Straussian pitch of DOGE - it’s not about “good government”, it’s about finding everyone who prevented Elon from launching rockets and imposing poverty, exile, humiliation, or possibly Yakuza-style digital curtailment upon them. This, theoretically, benefits everyone in a similar situation, at the expense of the prerogatives of government bureaucrats and their constituencies at friendly, non-Elon [collecting checks to not go to] “space” companies like Boeing and Lockheed.

I am no longer an adderall-blasted 20 year old go-getter, so based on a vibe check it would be likely futile to send in my resume to DOGE. I will, however, do them one better, by doing at least part of their job for them. Cut every single position in the Office of Space Commerce - an office of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, within the Department of Commerce.

In space no one can hear the smoke detector chirp

You will find, above, these stalwart bureaucrats pictured in their hypercompetent glory. Competency at what exactly? Rather than vague mission statements, let’s take a look at their place in the Department Of Commerce’s Strategic Plan. Bear in mind, you paid for this.

Five thousand hours in Microsoft Paint

That is the sole mention of the Office of Space Commerce, anywhere in this document. It might help to understand that “partner with stakeholders” means “sit in meetings with”. They have zero substantive responsibilities. They issue no substantive regulations. They can provide zero concrete assistance, because they are not technical, legal, or commercial experts. As far as I can tell, the only actual regulation they are responsible for enforcing is making sure no one is taking too detailed satellite photos of Israel. Are they the only ones responsible for enforcing this? Goodness no, they are entirely redundant with the FAA, general State and Commerce ITAR and export control enforcement, and numerous other regulators.

If one peruses their news feed, you will see they mostly announce State and Commerce export regulations (implying, falsely, they had something to do with them), “monitor” a purely commercially implemented system for tracking satellites and potential debris (TraCSS), and go to conferences with other agencies.

TraCSS is interesting because as far as I can tell, the intention is for the Space Force to feed it data - but the Space Force actually maintains the current system and plans to keep maintaining and expanding it for military use indefinitely. Thus it seems quite possible that aside from wrangling vendors, the Office of Space Commerce itself is completely redundant in this endeavor, which is itself completely redundant with the Space Force system.

In summary, there does not appear to be a single thing the OSC does that is not useless or redundant. 29 positions down. The knife! It cries for more!