A Quick WatchCats Update!

News Roundup, Episodes in the Pipeline, and a Community Discord

If you’ve been itching for your next WatchCats fix, we wanted to offer a quick update to tide you over. The Flu Fairy paid an unwelcome visit to Chez Noah this week (don’t worry, he’s rapidly recovering) and, as we are not yet a sprawling media empire, we had to push back some scheduled recording. The good news is, we have some especially exciting episodes lined up to release next week.

For our much-appreciated supporters, who make it possible for us to actually get these things produced, we’ve got a preview of what’s coming up below the fold, as well as a link to our new community Discord, where folks can chat with each other as well as give us feedback, suggestions, and questions for future guests. Scroll to the bottom if that’s you, or join their ranks if it’s not! And for all our listeners, here’s a quick guide to what we’ve been reading so you’re not bereft of DOGE news while we work on our next episode.

Let’s start with a few outlets that have been killing it on the DOGE beat that may not already be part of your regular news diet.

Researcher Nathan Tankus at Notes on the Crises has been producing well-sourced deep-dives on the takeover of the Treasury Department’s financial payment’s system, one of the more potentially ominous power-centralizing steps DOGE has taken.

Wired, which most folks think of as primarily a technology publication, has been running rings around much of the established political press on DOGE. The latest episode of their Uncanny Valley podcast hits the same topic we touched on in WatchCats Episode 4: How Elon musk is recapitulating his Twitter takeover playbook on the federal government. (It won’t hurt out feelings if you want to listen to that one too.)

The investigative reporters at ProPublica have racked up an impressive set of DOGE stories, including building a catalogue of the actual DOGE team and gaming out the fiscal impact of radical reductions planned for the Internal Revenue Service.

The Washington Post this week brought us the inside scoop on a meeting between Elon Musk and Republican senators who are apparently beginning to voice some timorous reservations about DOGE’s usurpation of the power of the purse, no doubt spurred by a wave of constituents raging at town halls over the Department’s cuts. The proposed remedy: A hotline legislators who remain in the administration’s good books can call to plead for specific statutorily appropriated funds to be restored. Not exactly the separation of powers the Constitution envisions, but a canny escape valve for discontent that might otherwise lead Congress to reassert itself collectively.

Over at The New York Times, the latest in a series of stories we’ve been following with interest concerns the all-important question of whether the Department of Government Efficiency is actually, well, making government any more efficient. Musk and DOGE have been making some awfully ambitious claims about the billions of dollars they’ve saved and the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fraud they’ve uncovered. The only trouble is, those claims keep turning out to be false, and often end up quietly memory holed from the official DOGE tally. If you want a handy single-serve round-up, the libertarian magazine Reason has a good one—and rest assured, nobody would be more enthusiastic about touting legitimate findings of government waste and fraud than the folks at Reason (where one of your humble Cats used to be an editor). Expect a full-blown WatchCats episode focused on this one in the not-too-distant future.

We hope that’s enough to get you through the weekend. If you’re a paid subscriber looking for a preview of what to expect from WatchCats next week (or want to become one now!), we’ll see you below the fold. Allons-y!