Elon Musk’s surrogacy of Donald Trump’s campaign was largely cringeworthy and humiliating, as was his self-proclaimed “first buddy” tour at Mar-a-Lago, which prompted Trump to quip that he “can’t get rid of him.” Even so, Musk’s participation in key meetings and planning sessions — which included a call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, just weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had regular contact with Vladimir Putin since late 2022 — reflects his worryingly powerful position within the incoming administration.
One of Musk’s recent rewards for his service to the Trump campaign was the unveiling of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on November 12. According to the Trump transition team’s announcement, DOGE will aim to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” To lead DOGE, Trump taps Musk as well as biotech mogul and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who also joined Trump on the campaign trail as a surrogate and sycophant.
As with many of Trump’s policy proposals, the details are vague and contradictory. For example, DOGE “will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” and is clearly not a government department, which would require an act of Congress to create. On its face, DOGE’s position as an external advisory body makes it seem totally toothless, relegating two feckless losers to the kids’ table to get them out of Trump’s hair.
It’s hard to take this proposal seriously, but even the unserious parts of it have adverse ramifications. Naming the “department” after a ten-year-old meme is just one of a litany of pathetically unfunny Elon Musk moments, but it has also had the likely-intended impact of driving up the price of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin — of which Musk may possess billions. Given that Trump brazenly enriched himself from his own presidency, this type of behavior is not only tacitly encouraged, but illustrative of what the government can do for the ultrawealthy.
Dangerous Contradictions in DOGE’s “Efficiency” Mission
On the campaign trail, Musk arbitrarily declared that he could easily identify and eliminate $2 trillion in wasteful government spending, despite all discretionary spending in 2024 coming out to only $1.6 trillion. It’s hard to believe that Musk put any critical thought into this figure. If the government were to slash $2 trillion from the budget, it would be almost impossible to do so without decimating Social Security and Medicare. To someone as egotistical and contemptuous of working people as Musk, these social costs may be worth it just to prove that he could do it.
As of November 19, the few posts on DOGE’s Twitter/X account, which Musk lent a governmental/multilateral verification despite its unofficial and nongovernmental affiliation, exemplify a superficial and sensational approach to what constitutes government inefficiency, such as government-funded research and the amount of words in the US tax code.
Ironically, DOGE has the potential to put the Trump administration in a tricky position — for example, Ramaswamy and Musk have indicated an interest in creating a mobile app for individuals to file their taxes. This juvenile “solution” betrays a lack of familiarity with how tax reform is carried out via legislation as well as the negotiation that goes into decisions like these. Notably, a major part of why the US tax system is so convoluted is because companies like Intuit have lobbied for years to keep the system complicated and expensive for taxpayers.
The fact that much of the inefficiency in the current system is due to corporate overreach and monopoly might be a hard pill to swallow for free-market evangelists like DOGE’s leaders. In a similar way, a natural target of an organization like DOGE should be the bloated Pentagon budget, which has received much-deserved scrutiny since President Joe Biden’s unconditional support of Israel’s all-out military campaign (and war crimes) in Gaza began just over a year ago.
The implicit contradiction in having two cochairs of a body dedicated to combating waste and inefficiency is already laughable — not to mention that Ramaswamy and Musk are unlikely to see eye to eye on every issue. Ramaswamy has signaled an interest in reforming the federal contracting process with an eye to fraud and abuse of the system by entrenched players — such as Musk, whose companies receive billions of dollars in federal contracts. It is hard to tell how Ramaswamy, for whom slashing the government apparatus was a major facet of his presidential campaign, will square the circle when the same big-money interests that secured Trump’s election are those that benefit from the status quo.
In this way, the best-case outcome of DOGE’s mandate is that it provokes infighting among conservatives and corporate interests that exploit the current system for their own gain. Realistically, however, the conflicts of interest implicit in Musk and Ramaswamy’s leadership of a government oversight body mean that it will only benefit big business at the expense of workers and consumers.
In Musk’s case, his companies have been subject to probes and enforcement actions from a range of government agencies due to myriad financial and labor-related regulatory violations. Placing Musk in charge of an oversight body, even if it is merely an advisory position outside of government, is a prime example of regulatory capture, allowing the regulators to be co-opted by those they regulate. Or, as progressive watchdog Public Citizen stated in a press release, “the ultimate corruption.”
The Milei Model
Musk and Ramaswamy’s admiration of Argentine president Javier Milei offers us a glimpse into their ideal end state. Ramaswamy tweeted on November 18: “A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids.”
When Milei assumed office last year, he declared that conditions would worsen before things would get better; Musk similarly warned that DOGE’s recommendations may cause “temporary hardship.” Meanwhile, in Argentina, Milei’s austerity measures have targeted the country’s social safety net, causing the poverty rate to skyrocket while only lowering taxes for the country’s wealthiest citizens, a troubling outlook for a second Trump administration if DOGE’s advice is ever implemented.
A second Trump term will undoubtedly see a multipronged attack on any institution that seeks to constrain big business, and DOGE will lead the charge. After all, in DOGE’s public call for collaborators, it seeks “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries”; that’s how they see themselves. We can only hope that, by virtue of how evidently insufferable they are, DOGE’s relationship with the Trump administration flames out spectacularly.
Casey Wetherbee is a freelance writer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He shares his long-form essays on his Substack, Meanderings.
