To the casual eye, or to the terrified civil servant fearing a sudden life-wrecking email, the modus operandi of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency enterprise appears a model of speed and scary technological wizardry: With the tools he and his handpicked underlings appear to have uniquely mastered, DOGE crawls websites for red flags, deploys AI to analyze programs and personnel, then strikes like a heat-seeking missile to send inefficient and superfluous personnel and in some cases everything they do into oblivion.
Musk clearly loves to depict DOGE as a lean, mean efficiency machine. But it seems increasingly obvious that its efforts to reduce personnel levels and spending mostly reflect an ideology that treats whole areas of government as illegitimate and completely arbitrary reductions in force as a valuable end in themselves. It’s obvious why Musk and his MAGA backers use the language of efficiency and sound business principles to justify its spending suspensions, firings, and employee-buyout “deals”; in most cases their legal rationale is as an exercise of executive-branch agency management rather than a usurpation of the congressional policy-making that has shaped most of what bureaucrats do. But in reality, DOGE’s “savings” mostly fall into two baskets that have nothing to do with efficiency or rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.
One is via ideology-driven demolitions of activities and whole programs that Trump simply doesn’t like. That’s why DOGE began (after it conquered the commanding heights of the federal government by taking on the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, which control, respectively, federal human resources and physical assets) with a frontal assault on the USAID program, that great symbol of woke internationalism at the expense of America-first principles. And now DOGE is training its sights on the Department of Education, which Trump has promised to shutter. Trump’s executive orders banning DEI initiatives and any other kind of gender- or race-conscious policies or programs have enabled DOGE to dive into multiple agencies to force dismissal of personnel allegedly complicit in such evil activities. “Waste” or inefficiency has had nothing to do with it; it’s all about ideology. Musk has often talked about attacking “fraud,” but that’s just a term MAGA folk use for whatever they oppose on ideological grounds, as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake has explained:
[Trump and Musk’s] efforts to disrupt the U.S. government and hamstring federal agencies are increasingly predicated on the idea that they’re combating fraud. Trump and Musk used that word more than a dozen times in the Oval Office on Tuesday, and the Trump administration keeps citing fraud in defending itself in court. “We have massive amounts of fraud that we’ve caught,” Trump said. Except they seem to be having trouble locating the actual fraud … Trump would indeed seem to believe that many things he simply doesn’t like or agree with are fraudulent, which helps explain the White House’s posture right now. But that doesn’t mean they are fraudulent. And that’s a problem when you’re using that as your justification for dismantling large portions of the government.
A second DOGE strategy represents mindless terminations of federal employees who are easy to fire, not those who are doing a particularly poor job. The employee-buyout scheme, which was at best a limited success, got rid of people fearful their jobs would be eliminated or who had built their lives around remote work — neither a sign of “waste” nor inefficiency. A second big DOGE target has been the termination of probationary employees — of which there are an estimated 200,000 across federal agencies. These bureaucrats don’t have civil-service protection, so cashiering them avoids the kind of legal problems associated with longer-term employees, particularly those with collective-bargaining agreements. But there’s no particular reason to think tossing them aside indiscriminately improves government’s efficiency.
All along, Musk has been focused on adding notches to his belt: achieving pulled-out-of-the-air but impressive-sounding amounts of alleged savings, rather than making government less wasteful or more accountable. It’s not surprising for someone whose worldview is that of a Silicon Valley billionaire who seems to have been equally influenced by video-game warrior ethos and Ayn Rand–style hatred of government as an instrument for wealth redistribution. Both were reflected in recent comments about beneficiaries of federal programs being “parasites:”
So don’t be too fooled by the smoke and mirrors of DOGE technological virtuosity in doing its job. At bottom, it’s the same approach to the federal budget that knuckle-dragging conservative ideologues have adopted at least since the Reagan administration. Like his low-tech predecessors, Musk regards even good government as inherently wasteful, which in turn makes efforts to improve what taxpayers get for their money a waste of time. What DOGE is doing could in theory be good, bad, or just mindless. But it’s mostly a blast from the past rather than any sort of cutting-edge “reform.”
