On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as cochairs of a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. This appointment allows Musk the opportunity to simultaneously do two things that are very important to him: publicly complain about government policies that cost him money, and tweet deeply unfunny jokes about the fact that the acronym is also the name of a meme cryptocurrency.
DOGE, Trump announced, will take an “entrepreneurial approach” to government, aiding his administration’s efforts to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” A hastily created account on X, the scam-ridden disinformation machine Musk owns, promised that DOGE would be “working overtime to ensure your tax dollars will be spent wisely.” (The tweet sported the special silver verification badge that Musk invented for official government organizations.) Trump gave DOGE until July 4, 2026, to complete its work, and expressed hope that it will be “‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.” Perhaps the only thing funnier than creating a “government efficiency” office with two heads that is favorably comparing it to a secret research initiative that, in today’s dollars, cost the government north of $30 billion.
Decrying the evils of bloated bureaucracy has long been applause-line fodder for conservative types, whose passions for reducing the national debt and curtailing out-of-control spending last until the moment it is time to enact another round of tax cuts for billionaires. You can trace the right’s enduring obsession with these subjects to the legacy of the Grace Commission, which President Ronald Reagan convened in 1982 to “study cost control in the Federal Government”—or, as he put it in a speech that same year, to “drain the swamp.”
On the other hand, DOGE—depending on how few key details shake out—could be a far more malevolent manifestation of standard-issue fiscal-conservative dogma: an opportunity for an erratic Silicon Valley ghoul megalomaniac with a history of egregious mismanagement to exercise vaguely defined authority to make important decisions about things he doesn’t understand. After acquiring Twitter in 2022, Musk famously set about laying off employees he deemed inessential, eventually cutting roughly 80% of its workforce. As anyone who has tried to drink from X’s broken fire hydrant of vile conspiracy theories, sketchy ads, crypto bots, and engagement-bait slop can attest, the most obvious consequence of this shift has been delivering a product from which people are fleeing en masse.
This time, however, instead of making harebrained decisions that merely ruin a social media network, Musk would be gutting government agencies that are responsible for enforcing the law against him. Through his super PAC, Musk donated more than $100 million to Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign. Part of his reward is the right to cosplay as a good-government crusader while looking for opportunities to line his pockets.
As was true of the first Trump administration’s worst ideas, any discussion of DOGE requires several caveats up top. Although it isn’t yet clear how much power Musk and Ramaswamy will actually have, a safe partial answer is “probably not as much as they want.” Congress is in charge of appropriations, which means that a recommendation from Musk and Ramaswamy to, for example, close the federal Department of Education would require congressional approval first. As happy as Republican lawmakers typically are to give Trump whatever he wants, I am not sure they’ll be as cavalier about surrendering their constitutionally prescribed spending power to a pair of outsiders who have never held elected office.
Second, the sorts of mass layoffs that Ramaswamy has previously floated—up to 75% of some 2.2 million federal employees—would, at the very least, be subject to immediate and robust legal challenge. As you might expect, Trump aides are reportedly workshopping fringe legal theories that would allow the White House to bypass Congress and implement cuts unilaterally. That said, given that DOGE is operating on a two-year ticking clock, the glacial pace of litigation might do more to protect the possibility of a functioning government than anything else.
Finally, although DOGE has “department” in its name, only Congress can create the familiar executive departments whose Cabinet-level heads are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. (The head of one of several existing government entities that already does this sort of work, the Office of Management and Budget, is a Cabinet-level position already.) And over the last few days, there are reports that Musk, who was useful to Trump before the election but not necessarily now that it is over, is wearing out his welcome at Mar-a-Lago: According to NBC News, Musk has been “taking lots of credit” for Trump’s win and “behaving as if he’s a co-president,” which has generally been a bad idea in the orbit of a notoriously paranoid narcissist who despises insubordination and loves firing people.
Thus, there exists a very real possibility that for Trump, a position as the head of a made-up department is less a serious job than an officious-sounding vanity title designed to keep Musk both busy and quiet. If and when Musk and Ramaswamy come up with recommendations, nothing prevents the White House from thanking them for their hard work and then putting the binder directly into the nearest recycle bin. In context, DOGE might simply be the politics equivalent of shopping carts equipped with plastic toy steering wheels, which keep my kids occupied at Home Depot for a few minutes while I try to find the right hex head drill bit.
If, however, the White House intends to take any aspect of Musk and Ramaswamy’s work seriously, DOGE could be as disastrous for the country as it is beneficial for Elon Musk’s net worth. If you thought that mass firings at Twitter made the platform an incoherent mess, just wait until what’s getting plunged into chaos is, say, the agency responsible for designating maximum contaminant levels in drinking water.
DOGE could, for example, put Musk in a position of authority over employees at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which recently opened an investigation into Tesla after a series of serious autopilot-related accidents. It could empower him to meddle with the work of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is in the midst of a contentious probe of Musk’s compliance with disclosure rules related to his takeover of Twitter. He could throw sand in the gears at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has fined several of his businesses for violations of air- and water-pollution regulations; at the Fish and Wildlife Service, which is trying to get SpaceX to stop incinerating the habitats of threatened birds in Texas; and at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has proposed to fine SpaceX for failing to comply with basic safety-permitting requirements. Perhaps most importantly for Musk, DOGE could allow him to ensure that the roughly $3 billion in business the federal government does with Musk-owned companies each year is both safe, and going forward, just a starting point.
Already, Musk is involved in ambitious legal challenges to the very existence of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which protects the right of workers to unionize. Tesla is the only major U.S. automaker without a union, and the NLRB has previously accused the company of illegally interfering with its employees’ organizing efforts. Depending on how much power Musk gets at DOGE, he might be able to neutralize this ongoing threat to his bottom line all by himself.
Earlier this week, Musk floated the prospect of DOGE operating as a sort of quasi-game show, which would post “insanely dumb” expenditures of taxpayer dollars for the world to see; the project’s findings, he promised, would be “extremely tragic and extremely entertaining.” But Musk does not care about building a better or more efficient government. Nor does he care about the environment, as he reportedly supports the Trump administration’s proposal to kill electric vehicle tax credits because it would hurt Tesla’s competitors more than Tesla. He cares only about building a state that he can exploit, plunder, or ignore as he sees fit. A position of power in an administration he feels he paid for is a fine place to start.
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