The Return of the DOGE

Current Events. 700 words, 3 minute read. With Claude Sonnet and Midjourney.

The fluorescent lights of the USAID headquarters flickered like dying fireflies. Catherine Martinez stood at her window, watching Tesla's autonomous drones sweep the plaza below. Her secure phone buzzed—a message from the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa: "Catherine, military blocking aid convoys again. Need your back channel. Lives at stake."

She typed back: "USAID shuttering. No diplomatic authority after midnight." Then, softer: "Try the World Food Program. Tell Bekele that Catherine sent you." Twenty-five years of shared coffee and crisis management, reduced to a final forwarded contact.

Through her office window, the Washington Monument pierced an orange sky. On her desk, next to stacks of half-packed folders, her tablet displayed DOGE's latest efficiency report: "AI-driven aid distribution models show 47% cost reduction potential. Human decision-making introduces unnecessary delays..."

The door clicked open. Elon Musk entered, followed by two former SpaceX engineers clutching tablets. He paused at a wall of photographs—Martinez and her teams across decades of disasters and recoveries—that had been hastily painted over.

"Your algorithm missed the coup in South Sudan," Martinez said without turning. "Last month. Predicted 'regional stability' the day before the presidential palace burned."

"Early growing pains," Musk replied, picking up an old brass letter opener—a Marshall Plan relic, of incalculable historical value. "The neural nets are learning. Yesterday's model predicted the grain shortage in Zimbabwe three weeks before your analysts."

"And how many calls did your analysts make to get those grain shipments through customs?" Martinez turned, fixing him with a steady gaze. "Our analyst didn't just predict the shortage. She called the port director—who used to be her student at the USAID training program—and got forty trucks through before the borders closed."

Her secure phone buzzed again. She glanced down: "Bekele unavailable. Convoy still waiting. Temperature in trucks reaching critical."

Musk set down the letter opener, point first. "The market will adapt. When I restructured Twitter—"

"Twitter wasn't moving medicine past armed checkpoints." Martinez pulled up another screen. "Here. Last week. Our AI flagged this bridge in Honduras as 'structurally sufficient' for aid convoys. Our local coordinator—who'd been working there since the last floods—redirected the trucks. Bridge collapsed that night." She swiped to another image. "The algorithm said to wait for better weather. Our people on the ground knew the villagers couldn't wait another day."

A slight smile played at Musk's mouth. "You're proving my point, Catherine. All these personal relationships, intuitive decisions... it's inefficient. Unpredictable. One person's retirement shouldn't derail an entire aid network."

Her phone buzzed a third time: "Vaccines reaching critical temperature. Please advise."

Martinez felt the weight of the moment settle onto her shoulders. "Two years ago, during the earthquake in Turkey, we had six hours to get blood supplies through a military blockade. No phones, no power. You know how we did it? The colonel at the checkpoint—his daughter had been in our medical training program. He recognized our logo, let us through. That's not inefficiency, Mr. Musk. That's how human systems work."

She glanced at his engineers, young and earnest. "Your algorithms see the world as data points. We see it as people. Messy, inefficient, brilliant people who build relationships that last longer than any satellite network ever could."

Musk walked to the window. Below, the drones had finished their precise, mechanical inspection. "This is too important for that, Catherine. I’ve got a planet to reach."

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