Three months before the US Presidential Election, I sat down with a Member of Parliament in Islamabad to discuss the ramifications of a potential Republican tenure, now that Trump’s victory seemed impending. When the topic came to domestic politics, we shared a little laugh. “He looks like the kind of guy who would go over the top with his penchant for international scandals. But internal politics? I don’t think he’s exactly excited about that role.” This is a sentence we’ve been hearing in different forms, before, during, and especially after Trump’s historical inauguration. With his financially submissive roleplay with Israel, obsession with dehumanizing Muslims globally, and the cultural warfare preceding his government, 2025 seems to be a different term. Safe to say, we keep getting surprised.
Adding another leaf to his long list of controversial decisions, Trump’s DOGE initiative, an inevitable product of an executive order rather than a Congress consensus, is making the headlines daily. The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by the notorious free-rider Elon Musk, is a symbol of corporate ambition and an outright defiance of public sentiment. DOGE was conceived as a radical DIY project aimed at modernizing the federal government by essentially cutting down red tape costs and overhauling the country’s $36 trillion debt.
Critically, DOGE is largely autonomous, bypassing congressional approval–a feature that proponents say will help streamline institutional procedures without government bloat. In reality, it is a dangerous precedent where another government department is handed graciously to a neo-Nazi billionaire claiming to represent ethical policy-making when he is the very embodiment of “dirty cash”. It almost feels like DOGE came straight out of the White House group chat, only it failed to consider its obvious purpose to facilitate a playground for the ultra-rich.
Musk, backed by Trump, claims that DOGE will reduce waste by downsizing government operations, overseeing the ideological warfare against public institutions disguised underneath. Here is what will actually happen: the federal government currently employs approximately three million people, many in essential services like FEMA and public infrastructure; cutting down jobs means reducing consumer spending, lowering economic growth, and making everyone in the economy worse off. And for anyone with the slightest knowledge of how the economy works, extreme budget cuts rarely make the pass.
Beyond the ridicule propagated by this new venture, taking a look at Musk says everything we need to know. His rebranding of Twitter with a fifty percent staff cut, which led to the plummeting of 84 percent of its revenue, along with a 71 percent fall in its total value, is indicative of one notion: this guy clearly does not know how to run an institution without setting it on fire first. Imagine the DMV, but now it runs on Neuralink and crashes mid-appointment.
Outside the economic absurdity of it all, DOGE is bound to confront its fair share of legal barriers. Giving an unelected billionaire control of federal hiring practices, unpaid special government employee or not, is, wait for it–unconstitutional. The conflict of interest is evident here, with Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company already on the receiving end of billions in government contracts. Providing Musk free reign to decide which agencies to grow and shrink is truly a restructuring of the capitalist undertones permeating the federal government.
To put it simply, DOGE is a snarky, nefarious, and not-so-subtle attempt at a power grab by Trump and Musk. They’re not organizing the government, but reducing it to maximize their hegemony; one of the many disastrous decisions to add as we await what the new day brings for the American Government. The next time DOGE is defended for its innovative approach, remember that the last time Musk was in charge of something, Twitter became X. Maybe don’t let him do the same with the federal government.
Photo Credit:
[1]-Yahoo
[2]-Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
[3]-Getty Images
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