Betting his life savings against DOGE, and winning

The rise and fall of DOGE was an interesting state capacity story to me on a number of dimensions: DOGE cuts threatened to undermine state capacity in a number of ways; it was pitched as a way to bring in outside tech expertise to boost state capacity; it was an attempt to show that at least a small arm of the state could build the capacity to bring the whole budget to heel. If it was the latter, though, it totally failed, and that meant that prominent tax economist Alan Cole made himself $128,000 by betting his entire life savings that DOGE would fail to reduce federal spending. Congratulations, Alan!