Brainiacs

Meet DOGE’S patriotic Musketeers — led by Elon and the belief that America needs their expertise, now

Most Americans know very little about Elon Musk’s team of brainiacs at the Department of Government Efficiency, and may have misconceptions about who they are.

It's a fawning op-ed from the New York Post. And yeah, at least some of it's true. But incomplete.

It's happened before.

The last time we had a squad of brainiacs in the government they were called Whiz Kids.

Whiz Kids was a name given to a group of experts from RAND Corporation with which Robert McNamara surrounded himself, in order to turn around the management of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) in the 1960s. The purpose was to shape a modern defense strategy in the Nuclear Age, by bringing in economic analysis, operations research, game theory, computing, as well as implementing modern management systems to coordinate the huge dimension of operations of the DoD, with methods such as the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). They were called the Whiz Kids, recalling the group at Ford Motor Company that McNamara was part of in the 1940s and 1950s.

That from a stub article in Wikipedia. More here. Sound familiar?

McNamara and his Whiz Kids got us into the Vietnam War. And kept us there.

Just mentioning.