DOGE Bro Wannabe

Alex Shieh is a sophomore at Brown University.

So he's obviously a pretty smart kid, with the requisite grades, AP courses, SAT's, and enough of the eye-catching goodies to catch the eye of someone in the Brown admissions office. Enough goodies to differentiate him from the tens of thousands of pretty smart kids who apply to Brown every year, with against-the-odds chance of acceptance. 

From his LinkedIn profile, I'd say that Shieh's main eye-catcher was so-founding a (now defunct) political poll while he was a student at Phillips Academy. 

Since his acceptance at Brown, he has also contributed a couple of op-ed pieces to The Boston Globe. Topic: the need to get rid of affirmative action in university admissions, which Shieh argues disadvantages Asian-Americans. 

He's certainly entitled to his opinion.

And he's certainly entitled as well.

Yes, he's the grandchild of immigrants. But they came to the States to get their PhDs and stayed. And he went to Phillips Academy, an elite prep school that's a feeder to elite colleges and universities. (Not that this guarantees acceptance, any more than legacy status, athletic prowess, celebrity parents, or a family that can afford to name a building guarantees acceptance. Okay, maybe naming a building does. But it sure helps to come from a feeder school.)

And Alex Shieh is something of a DOGE Bro Wannabe, who took it upon himself to set up an online publication to track what he deems inefficiencies that contribute mightily to Brown's price tag. (Tuition is a bit over $70K, and when you factor in housing, fees, etc., the tab is a bit over $90K.)

Bloat@Brown is modeled after the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency and purports to highlight administrative waste within the University. (Source: Brown Daily Herald)

To help him find all the waste he was looking for, on March 18, Shieh, positioning himself as a reporter for what had been Brown's (long inactive) conservative newspaper:

...Shieh sent emails to approximately 3,800 Brown staff members asking them to “describe what tasks you performed in the past week,” mirroring a similar February email DOGE sent to federal employees. Before Shieh decided to take the site down due to repeated hacks, the AI-powered database featured a search function that returned ratings of “every Brown administrator in three domains: legality, redundancy and bullshit jobs,” according to the website.

He only got a few responses - one of which was "Fuck Off" - but his work caught the eye of the Brown administration, which decided that Shieh was in violation of the student conduct code. 

And, as Shieh was no doubt hoping, he also caught the eye of Elon Musk and "conservative activist Bill Ackman [who] described the effort as “impressive,” lauding its “remarkable” parallels to the Musk-led DOGE."  (Musk you know; Ackman is a billionaire hedgie and big man off campus, going after a number of elite schools that he perceives as anti-Israel. A former supporter of Democrats, Ackman's now a major Trumpean.)

Hoping to catch even more eyes, Shieh has used X to address Trump and "Secretary of Education" Linda McMahon, appealing for their support under the mantle of free speech and transparency. And it looks kinda-sorta like Shieh would like to make a federal case out of things. As in 'look how Brown is going after righteous me; gee, don't they realize that thanks to their DEI, Brown's federal funding is at stake.'

Righteous me claims that his aims are noble.

“I’m trying to help the administration to find people that might be redundant,” Shieh said.

Hmmm. "People that," not "people who?" Sure sounds to me like Shieh just might consider people as inanimate objects, not people as actual living, breathing, sentient human beings. How DOGE-like. (Then there's that posing with the chainsaw.)

“I’m a big fan of cutting wasteful spending,” Shieh, 20, told The Post. “This is no different to what Elon Musk is uncovering in the federal government,” he added, referring to the DOGE head and Senior Advisor to President Donald Trump. (Source: NY Post)

Of course, we've yet to see much detail on all that waste and fraud that DOGE has uncovered. Just stupid stuff like claiming that little kids collecting Social Security is evidence of fraud. (As someone from a family whose kids collected Social Security after our father died, I know up close and personal that this ain't fraud.) And willy-nilly cutting legitimate and important programs like food inspection, veterans' suicide prevention, etc., while all the while treating government employees with wanton cruelty and disregard. (Not saying there isn't any government waste; you just need to go after it more planfully, and involve those who actually know how government works and what programs do. And, yes, government does work. Or did until the current regime was installed. And, yes, there's probably plenty of stupid spending at Brown. How about college and university tuition madness as the topic for another post?)

Anyway, there went Alex Shieh, with his so called "journalistic inquiry," asking Brown employees: 

...“explain [their] role,” “describe what tasks [they] performed in the past week,” and “explain how Brown students would be impacted if [their] position was eliminated.”

Seriously, who wants to emulate members of the DOGE brigade, those soul-less, heartless, empathy-less punks?

Oh, I know. Some smart kid who wants to catch the eye of Trump, Musk, et al., and gain notoriety - fame and fortune, of course - at the expense of decency. Why would any Brown employee have to explain themselves to this tool?

Shieh's hearing is tomorrow. I'm sure he'll get what he's hoping for, i.e., any kind of slap on the wrist that he can throw into the maw of the Alex Shieh publicity engine.

What was it that one Brown employee told him. Oh, yeah, Fuck Off!