Did they or didn't they? Only their DOGE hairdressers know for sure. And they may be preparing a haircut the like of which PBS has never had. 

The mystery unfolded last night, as The Free Press reported. The CEO for PBS issued an email to staff closing the DEI office at the public broadcaster, ostensibly to comply with Donald Trump's executive order to end all such activities. But Josh Code smelled a rat:

Just before 5 p.m. on Monday afternoon, PBS CEO Paula Kerger sent a staff-wide email announcing the departure of the company’s two DEI executives: “To ensure that we are complying with the President’s Executive Order we have closed our DEI office, and Cecilia Loving and Gina Leow are leaving PBS. I know you join me in wishing them well in their future endeavors.”

The message announcing the departure of Loving, the senior VP of DEI, and Leow, the director of DEI, continued: “I know that this will raise many questions for people across the organization and look forward to discussing this in more depth at the upcoming All Staff meeting on Wednesday.”

But the timing of the announcement raised several eyebrows in our newsroom.

What made Code suspicious? Earlier in the day, Code explained, he had asked PBS to comment on a claim the FP got from a "high-ranking" PBS exec. Their source had informed them that PBS planned to play a Three Card Monte with their DEI initiatives by reassigning both Loving and Leow to other parts of the organization to carry on their DEI mission covertly, away from prying eyes at the White House.

The exec also told them Kerger could probably count on support from most of the organization at PBS:

“The employee population at PBS loves DEI,” the high-ranking source told The Free Press. “They’re unwilling to change; they’re unwilling to adjust; they’re unwilling to make concessions in order to protect the sustainability of PBS. Instead, they were trying to play chicken and move things around and try different things to circumvent the executive order.”

If that's the plan, Code notes, it comes at a very bad moment. Elon Musk and his DOGE team think they can cut up to $2 trillion in federal spending without disturbing most taxpayers. Back when Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy still worked together on DOGE planning, they explicitly singled out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question. But even without relying on that view, DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.

Truth be told, that money would likely have gotten pulled no matter what Kerger does with DEI. Right now, it's likely a low priority compared to the efforts to focus on USAID, with the Department of Education next on the list. However, if the White House finds out that Kerger's trying to play games with compliance on his DEI EO, Musk and his DOGE team may take a brief detour to cut off CPB and PBS just to make an example of Kerger pour encourager less autres. This sounds like flat-out fraud, and Trump probably would looooove to make an example out of a defiant bureaucrat. Or several of them.

In a different context, Glenn Reynolds posits that the whole system is set up for fraud:

Generally, when auditors find that an organization’s accounting system makes errors easy to commit and difficult to spot, they assume the system is designed that way because it is intended to facilitate fraud.

Maybe that’s not true here. Maybe the federal government is simply incompetent.

If that’s the case, though, then maybe it shouldn’t get so much of our money. 

But as Musk also noted, he’s getting a lot of help from lower-level officials who have wanted to do this for many years, but have been stopped by prior management.

So maybe the problem isn’t incompetence. Maybe the system is in fact set up to facilitate fraud. 

Even if it weren't deliberately set up to facilitate fraud ... would they have set up the system in any different fashion for that purpose? That's probably the question to ask.