You Don't Have to Hand it to DOGE

There is no doubt in my mind that if Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election, then the Republican Party would already be telegraphing a strategy of blanket opposition to all of the new administration’s priorities. On the other hand, the Democrats—being Democrats—are much more ambivalent and internally divided on the question of how to deal with Trump’s return.

In particular, I’ve been struck by how many Democrats seem to want to work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a fake “department” headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that will, according to Trump, “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

So Bernie Sanders has applauded Musk for floating cuts to defense spending. Ro Khanna has done the same. And Jennifer Pahlka has gone so far as to call DOGE perhaps our last best hope for meaningful government reform.

Pahlka writes:

Closer to the end of the above post, she writes: “We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully.”

Now, I have an immense amount of respect for Pahlka, both as a public servant and as an abundance-aligned thinker. (Her book Recoding America is an indispensable guide for those who want to rebuild American state capacity.) But I think she’s badly misreading the situation here. The “let’s try to work with them” approach—or even the “let’s not jump to conclusions before we see what they do” approach—might be defensible if Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy were new on the scene, or if we had any reason to believe that they have a sincere interest in government efficiency. But all three (well, mainly Trump and Musk) have extensive resumes. We know who these guys are; we’ve seen how they operate; we know their objectives.

Trump has already been president once, during which he presided over an unprecedented effort to loot the public treasury for private benefit. Musk has not held public office, but he has presided over “streamlining” and “efficiency” efforts at various companies, including a very public overhaul of Twitter/X. Since Pahlka’s area of specialty is technology policy, I would ask her to consider how that overhaul worked out.

Is X circa 2024 a better product than Twitter circa 2021? My personal experience is that it is jankier and less functional. Everything is slower, and content moderation on the site is fundamentally broken. Consequently, X is hemorrhaging users and has now largely turned into a holding pen for the worst posters on the Internet: amateur eugenicists, sociopathic engagement farmers, Gamergate hobgoblins, AI trash farmers, and a sprawling diaspora of pornbots.

Some of this is no doubt the result of Musk’s incompetence, but quite a bit of it is intentional. He has converted a social network into a vehicle for white supremacist propaganda, in furtherance of his own political goals. Maintaining the integrity of Twitter as a product on its own terms was simply beside the point.

We have every reason to believe he will treat his “government efficiency” mandate similarly. In fact, he’s already doing it: siccing his followers on individual public servants, exploring abolishing the FDIC, going after the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. For his part, Ramaswamy is evidently looking for ways to boot recipients off the Medicare and Medicaid rolls.

None of this bears any resemblance to Pahlka’s own project of making government work better for people who are trying to access its services. Pahlka has written insightfully about the problem with bureaucratic cultures that emphasize compliance over outcomes; do we think that civil servants will exercise more initiative on behalf of the public if any false move could lead Musk to paint a very public target on their backs? Similarly, do we think eliminating the CFPB entirely will do anything to benefit consumers?

Instead of aiming for government efficiency, Musk and Ramaswamy are transparently working toward its opposite: they are working to hollow out the state and make it less effective. This is both a right-wing ideological project and an opportunity for private contractors to swoop in. In effect, they are participating in the long-running Trump project of repatrimonialization: subduing the modern state and bringing it back under the control of private warlords who can marshal it toward their own ends.

Musk is, of course, one of the contractors who stands to benefit from this project. His company SpaceX alone holds some $15 billion in contracts with the federal government, mainly through the Department of Defense. This is who will ostensibly make DoD run more efficiently? I’m especially flummoxed that Bernie Sanders is playing along with this charade; after a career warning against billionaire capture of the government, he is publicly supporting a corrupt billionaire’s bid to rewrite the budget of his own biggest client. If you want to know how that’s likely to turn out, consider the track record of Musk’s Boring Company, which is responsible for several of the worst municipal infrastructure boondoggles of the past few years.

We don’t need to wait and see with any of this. And going along with the pretense—imbuing DOGE with unearned legitimacy—risks causing tremendous harm. I understand Pahlka’s frustration with the Democratic Party, but let’s not kid ourselves about this stuff. When we already know what the con is, we are under no obligation to turn ourselves into marks.