You Still Don't Have to Hand it to DOGE

I regret to inform you that Jen Pahlka is at it again. Here she is in a recent interview with The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas:

The thing is, it’s not hard to know what DOGE will do. As the New York Times has reported, Musk and various other Silicon Valley reactionaries are hand-picking unpaid functionaries who will serve as their eyes and ears in federal agencies. These “volunteers” and their managers largely come from the tech world, and many of them—including Musk himself—draw a sizable amount of wealth from government contracts. When they recommend cuts, they will be generating opportunities for their own contracting firms to fill the gaps in state capacity that they’ve created. In effect, this is about letting billionaires write checks to themselves from the public treasury.

But I’m repeating myself. I already dealt with this argument last month, when I wrote (again in response to Pahlka) that DOGE was part of “the long-running Trump project of repatrimonialization.” So what I’d like to do in this post is stipulate, purely for the sake of argument, that Pahlka is correct, and both Musk’s intentions and DOGE’s purpose remain a mystery. If there really were some chance that DOGE would create an opening for government reform, then what would be the appropriate response?

My answer remains the same: blanket opposition to DOGE. Here’s why:

(To be fair to Pahlka, her interview with Demsas was recorded before Musk went full Dr. Strangelove at the inauguration. But he’s been pretty open about his views for quite some time.)

Here’s a longer answer. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall has an aphorism he uses from time to time: Political power is unitary. As he puts it, “You can’t be gaining [political power] in foreign policy and losing it on the domestic front. It’s all one thing.” If Musk accrues the power to successfully run DOGE, he is accruing the power to enact his will in Washington more generally. And if DOGE founders, then Musk’s overall political influence takes a hit.

Sometimes it’s prudent to collaborate on shared goals with your political opponents. If a Democrat cosponsors bipartisan pro-housing legislation with a Republican, that’s a nice feather in the Republican’s cap. But even for partisan Democrats, the value of the policy win may be worth it. That’s part of the give and take of small-d democratic politics: elected officials rarely do anything for free, so if you want a large enough coalition to do good things, you need to be willing to offer them something.

You should not, however, pay more than a particular objective is worth. And the price for maybe getting DOGE to do some substantive government reform work is too high. The cost is more influence and legitimacy for an unreconstructed fascist who is working to destroy democracy in multiple countries. There’s no way to collaborate with Musk on even narrow policy goals without granting him some of that power and legitimacy. Because, again, power is unitary.

Let’s try an analogy. Imagine you’re a transportation planner in 1920s Italy. The new fascist regime has promised to make the trains run on time. (Mussolini never actually did make the trains run on time, but let’s say for the sake of argument that he’s making a credible promise to do so.) Does your commitment to accurate train timetables override your otherwise anti-fascist intuitions? Do you think you can realistically collaborate with the regime on transportation policy without compromising yourself and the cause of antifascism? My own view is that it would be perverse to answer either question with a yes.

Thinking through a historical example is useful because these things become clearer with the benefit of hindsight. So here’s a little hindsight for you. Ten years ago, I took a trip to Italy, where my then-girlfriend and I stayed at the home of a friend’s cousin. One day, we were driving around some southern Italian farmland with our host, and the topic of fascist Italy came up. “Everyone’s family was in the resistance,” our host told us. “If you ask anyone, their grandparents were in the resistance against Mussolini.”

He didn’t mean that literally. He meant that everyone claimed antifascist grandparents, because to do otherwise was shameful. A collaborator in the family was considered a disgrace. Even to have grandparents who kept their heads down and passively acquiesced to fascism was an embarrassment. And rightfully so. So my question to any liberal who intends to work with Musk is as follows: What do you want your grandkids to say about you?

If you want to tell me that I’m being hyperbolic, here again is my response:

One last point, which is that there’s another cost to collaborating. Over the next few years, much of the most important governance reform and abundance-oriented work needs to happen in blue cities and states. These are the places facing the most severe housing shortages, and many of them have deeply sclerotic, ineffective governments. As I argued in a previous post, getting blue cities and blue states to function properly needs to be a top priority for the anti-MAGA advocates and policymakers who call them home.

I’m engaged in that work as a pro-housing advocate in a blue state. And for me to do that work, I need persuade and build relationships with fellow progressives: Democratic elected officials, professional advocates, left-leaving voters, and so on. I need to be capable of plausibly arguing that the abundance agenda aligns with their values. I happen to believe that’s true, but it becomes a lot harder to make the case if some of the abundance movement’s standard bearers are cozying up to Musk. It’s a gift to left-NIMBYs who want to pretend that abundance politics are intrinsically reactionary.

In other words, this is the sort of thing that can shatter political coalitions. And for what?