A Year On: The DOGE Disaster

The day after Christmas gave rise to one of the most remarkable social media posts you are likely to see. Elon Musk attacked the appointment of the new head of the New York City’s Fire Department, on the grounds that “proven experience matters when lives are at stake” in public services. (Mamdani clapped back, pointing out that the appointee had decades of experience working in emergency services).It is hard to fathom anyone on the planet less qualified than Elon Musk to opine on the value of public service experience when lives are at stake. And yes, I know that pointing out that Musk is a hypocrite is like pointing out that water is wet. With DOGE, he held extraordinary public power. How did he use it? Across the government Musk put people with zero experience of government services in charge of those services, determining what contracts would be maintained, which employees would stay or go. At one point they fired the guys taking care of nuclear weapons, before rehiring them after some members of Congress got very nervous. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have died because Musk ignored the people with real experience. So a year on from its creation, its time for a reckoning: What did DOGE do? Lets dig in. It is important to distinguish between the formal mission of DOGE (“modernizing federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity”) and the reason for its creation. It is especially important to remember that Musk pushed DOGE on Trump, not vice-versa. DOGE is best understood a political project of an increasingly politically active and right-wing broligarchy. The day before Trump took office I laid out out what we might expect from DOGE. I wanted to be hopeful. The idea of DOGE was not a bad one. But having watched Musk cook his brain on social media, and listen to the stated goals of the people sponsoring DOGE, it was hard to maintain such optimism. So my bottom line was this:Here is a factual description of DOGE: it is a group run by right-wing billionaires who oppose government regulation of their businesses, and benefit from government contracts. It avoids accountability standards that we expect of other groups who seek to influence government. It is not run by people who have a deep knowledge of the function of government, or have much patience with the procedural requirements that flow from laws.A year later, I feel pretty happy with description.

I argued that DOGE would not be like traditional government commission or a sideshow — it would not deliver a report of recommendations that would be summarily ignored. I also argued that DOGE would serve as a propaganda machine to justify an assault on government that would otherwise be deeply unpopular: Evoking norms like “efficiency” or cutting “fraud and abuse” serves to abstract real cuts to real programs that people depend upon. But with a sophisticated enough messaging operation, maybe you can change the policy before enough people realize what has been taken from them.Again, this proved fairly accurate. DOGE immediately promised to cut fraud in government. This proved to be a mirage, used to justify cutting services while reducing trust in government. It turns out that 40% of calls to Social Security were not fraudulent and armies of the dead were not collecting benefits. US AID was not distributing condoms to Hamas. Such claims were grounded in internet rumors, fueled by the man who controlled the means to amplify those rumors.When a case of actual, albeit exaggerated, fraud arose in Minnesota, Musk, Vance and Trump jumped right back on the bandwagon, using it to stop payments to other safety net programs in other states. In this way, what is happening to many public services is what happened to US AID, and what DOGE tried to do across government: claim fraud, cut services. My main prediction about DOGE is that it would operate as a form of state capture: a means by which the owner class of Silicon Valley protected their businesses, as well as created new business opportunities to work with government. Their major business complaint against Biden is that he was regulating the growth of crypto currencies and AI. For example, Marc Andreessen’s explanation for supporting Trump was “They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That’s really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics.” To assess the evidence, we need to look not just at DOGE but the also the broader tech coalition that lined-up behind Trump and benefited from his election. Some of this coalition appears to be opportunistic, seeing the alignment as primarily a business move, while others, like Musk, Peter Thiel, or Marc Andreessen, who were more involved in setting up DOGE, seem to be true believers.

Lets take a couple of data points on their gains:Crypto: Trump has reversed course from Biden-era regulation, writing an executive order to encourage and deregulate crypto, creating a strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile. Enforcement cases have been largely dropped. Pro-crypto legislation has been passed. Banking regulations have been reversed. In short, the industry got everything it wanted. And yet—for all these sweeping changes—the perception of crypto as a questionable, even illegitimate industry lingers. Not so long ago, Trump himself dismissed crypto as “a scam.” His recent embrace of the sector seems transparently connected to broadening his political coalition, and leveraging his position to ensure his family would make billions. AI offers tech leaders another victory. Trump again revoked Biden era regulations, and also blocked state regulation. He has also green-lit the use of AI within government, with DOGE leading the push. While AI offers less obvious means of corruption than Crypto, the competition between the key players in the US allows Trump to run a mini-Apprentice style competition for his favor. For example, the co-founder of OpenAI recently made a $25 million donation to Trump’s PAC.Overseas regulation: Having defeated American regulation, the broligarchy would like Trump to use state power to advance their business interests elsewhere, like a latter-day East India Trading Company dependent on the coercive power of the British Empire. The US has sanctioned and imposed travel bans on Europeans engaged in tech regulations or drawing attention to online radicalization, a treatment normally reserved for gangsters and dictators. When X was fined for violating EU regulations, the US threatened to fine European companies and to upend trade agreements. At one point JD Vance said that US support for NATO could be pulled because of European countries regulation of Musk’s companies. Foreign opportunities: If the comparison with the East India Trading Company sound outlandish, consider also that key members of the tech coalition have been encouraging and stand to profit from Trump’s efforts to capture Greenland. Key parts of the broligarchy are openly pro-imperialist and see US territorial expansion as a way to pursue their vision of “network states” free of government oversight. Key allies and contracts: Across government, you can the new political power of Silicon Valley reflected in appointments.

Whereas in an earlier era, they typically came in to provide advice on science and technology issues, or to modernize government, many more now are running core parts of government. David Sacks, an ally of Musk and Andreessen, was appointed the as a special advisor on crypto. An Andreessen employee, Scott Kupor, runs federal government personnel. A former Palantir executive is the Chief Information Officer at OMB. Another Musk ally heads NASA, an area where Musk as critical interests. Silicon Valley sees the federal government as a potential goldmine of new contracts as it pivots increasingly to national security. But who is capturing who? After Musk threatened to expose Trump’s connection to the Epstein files and start his own political party, Trump directly threatened Musk’s government contracts and businesses. Musk deleted his posts, pledged to keep supporting Republicans financially, and continues to use his platform to advance Trump’s agenda. It was a reminder that the richest man in the world is now just one of many broligarchs, allowed to amass a fortune with government help as long as he remains loyal. This is the system they have traded for. It would be too much to say that DOGE facilitated all of these outcomes, and there is much we do not know about its inner workings. But I do think it is reasonable to say the coalition that pushed DOGE has mostly gotten what it wanted, and that DOGE was part of its ability to establish influence. How much pushback could the DOGE alliance face in an atmosphere where it had the power to remove dissenting voices from government? But what about the rest of us? Musk described the explosion of one of his space rockets as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” He did the same with your government. Musk promised to slash the federal deficit. He failed. Far from saving $1 trillion, DOGE made no meaningful impact on spending.DOGE did significantly cut the workforce. Some of this would have occurred anyway if DOGE did not exist. But it seems safe to say the cuts happened more quickly and more deeply because of Musk. Russell Vought, who leads the Office of Management and Budget saw DOGE as a useful battering ram, utilizing Musk’s political capital and power that Vought lacked.

According to the Office of Personnel Management 322,049 employees left the federal government between the start of the Trump administration and the end of last year, resulting in a net loss of employees of about 220,000. DOGE played a key role, leading the elimination of probationary employees, pushing the “fork in the road” resignations, and being involved in Reductions in Force. It notably made no meaningful effort to distinguish between good and bad employees in the purges. There is no single metric to capture the effects of DOGE. But if you look at the goal and purpose of federal programs and agencies affected by DOGE cuts, it is hard not to conclude that the US government is simply worse off with the loss of experienced employees. Democratic staffers on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform have provided perhaps the most comprehensive overview.DOGE hollowed out promising new innovations, like Direct File, and pushed experienced and skilled technologists out of government. (It is now trying to rebuild tech talent in government). It also cut employees even in cases where their work demonstrably paid for itself, such as the CFPB and IRS. Indeed, the IRS estimated hundreds of billions in lost revenue because of DOGE cuts. So much for cutting the deficit! Musk’s USAID cuts have already resulted in an estimated 600,000 people dying, with millions of potential deaths in the coming years. Trump allowed the richest man in the world, who has increasingly embraced a white nationalist worldview, to condemn potentially millions of mostly non-white people to death. Its that simple. The elimination of USAID is the greatest moral atrocity of the Trump administration to date, and one driven by DOGE. Some agencies were decimated with DOGE cuts, while others were protected, or even grew, most obviously the immigration enforcement parts of government. The pattern of cuts was partisan. As Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica has pointed out, agencies that are viewed as serving more progressive causes were disproportionately subject to DOGE cuts: DOGE systematically targeted liberal-leaning agencies for cuts while directing every budget increase to conservative-leaning agencies. The efficiency rationale was a cover for ideological restructuring.