Delayed Democracy and Delusion: Why Elon Musk and DOGE have NO CHOICE. Why do we need to protect ourselves and our children?
This is consultant logic. This is an engineering sprint whose inevitable finish line is the unwinding of the social contract. Democracy is not dead in darkness after all, because it dies in JIRA tickets filed by Palantir alumni.
And then, what? This is the question that Elon Musk and DOGE have failed to answer, because there is no answer. Does the United States government need to become a profit engine? To return shareholder value? Does Medicaid need to demonstrate a product-market fit in time for the next funding round?
This is how you get an executive order declaring that “each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart,” an arbitrary ratio with no regard for actual staffing needs. It’s how you get hundreds of federal government buildings on the auction block no matter how fully occupied they are. It’s both extreme and ill-considered, a race to empty the town’s only well.
The speed is strategy, of course, flooding the zone so that neither the media nor the courts can keep pace. This slash-and-burn approach has a different timescale for lawsuits. (At this pace, DOGE will have tapped into every last government server long before the Supreme Court even has a chance to weigh in.) It is also reflexive. The first order of business in a corporate takeover is to slash costs as quickly as possible. If you can’t fire people, offer them buyouts. If they choose not to take the incentives, find a way to fire them. Keep cutting until you hit bone.
These cruelties are executed with a click. Despite what some people will tell you, the loss of real people’s jobs and lives isn’t significant when compared to a tighter balance sheet.
A teenager who calls himself Big Balls didn’t have access to government personnel records three weeks ago. A 25-year-old with a closet full of racist tweets hadn’t gotten the keys to Treasury systems that pay out $5.45 trillion each year. Elon Musk hadn’t turned the Oval Office into a romper room for his 4-year-old son.
Every day brings fresh incursions. Three weeks ago the United States believed in humanitarian aid. It helped people who had been ripped off. It funded the infrastructure necessary to make America a beacon of scientific innovation. The United States Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Institute of Health have all been gutted. It was much less for all that.
The First 100 Days of Elon Musk’s Amalgamation: Doing Business with the Richest Man in the World and Implications for His Corporate Success
As President Trump seeks to roll back the size, scope and spending of the federal government, a key figure in those plans has been tech billionaire Elon Musk. The Department of Government Efficiency was created by Musk in order to look at how the government works but has turned into an entity that can eviscerate purchases, programs and staff, and have unfettered access to federal agencies.
The takeover of US government institutions by the richest man in the world and his striking force of former interns is happening very quickly.
We’ll be covering the first 100 days of the Trump administration on Friday mornings. Get more updates and analysis in the NPR Politics newsletter.
As we outlined last Friday, DOGE has had a busy few weeks, encouraging federal workers to resign, pushing for the shutdown of USAID — responsible for doling out about half of U.S. foreign aid — and accessing agencies’ records, including sensitive payment information at Treasury. And this week’s pace was no different. The continued onslaught of headlines discuss the power that the world’s richest man is wielding to remake the United States, the lack of transparency into his actions and the concerns that his companies stand to benefit from many changes.
Appearing virtually Thursday morning at the 2025 World Governments Summit in Dubai wearing a “tech support” shirt, Musk said he’s helping what he called “America, Inc.” engage in a sort of “corporate turnaround” that should include deleting entire agencies.
“It’s kind of like leaving a weed: If you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back,” he said. It isn’t enough to remove the roots of the weed to keep weeds from growing back.
What Do You Want to Learn From DOGE? Jennifer Pahlka at a Knife Fight against the DoGE/UTS Era
Before the inauguration, Jennifer Pahlka, former deputy chief technology officer under Obama and one of the USDS founders, wrote an essay called “Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight,” which summed up the feeling: “A lot of the government tech community … don’t see DOGE as their savior, but they are feeling vindicated after years of shouting into the void.”
Even though she headed Technology Transformation Services, she tried to see the DOGE takeover in a positive light. It took only a short time for the light to dim. She tells me the private sector model of bringing in fresh thinking people is a great idea. “But we’re not seeing people from the private sector with lots of experience who want to understand how everything works.”