Department of Government Ideology
“We wanted to colonize Mars. Instead, we got the anti-woke commission.” — Peter Thiel, I think
I am not a fan of Elon’s politics, aesthetics, personality, etc. Invariably, when you don’t like someone’s politics or beliefs, you’re tempted to reduce the entirety of the person. It’s exhausting to not lump people into the buckets of good and bad. My instinct is to discount Elon’s achievements, and I definitely haircut them more than the average Silicon Valley-type. Nevertheless, some of his successes are undeniable. Yes, Tesla wouldn’t exist without government incentives and subsidies (what a Republican might call a “government handout”), but still, almost no one can actually do it. It’s a trillion dollar company. And, look, have you seen those rockets land themselves? It’s cool. It cannot be just luck or having a rich dad or stumbling into an elite network from Paypal. He must have some ability. But I don’t think that Elon is good at everything; I don’t think anyone is good at everything. Elon might be bad at lot of things.
Elon is good at setting an audacious vision and identifying the talent and capital partners to turn it into reality.
He’s shown exceptional ability to grow very big, bold, businesses. However, Tesla and SpaceX, for instance, were not built like normal, ho-hum, small businesses with an eye towards profitability from the start. They got an enormous amount of money from the government and investors as they ran unprofitably for years and years. While these businesses may have been efficient, it’s a good reminder that efficiency is not profitability.
Elon has now set his sights on his next ambition, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At face value, this seems like a fine thing. No one wants an inefficient government. It’s been discussed to death, but the cuts they’ve made so far are mostly meaningless. Like, yes, there is some really wasteful spending, some silly sounding programs, but these aren’t meaningful parts of the federal budget. Axing entire programs that don’t suit your political ideology isn’t efficiency.
So far, everything done at DOGE could’ve been accomplished by a totally average Deloitte team, and would be done 10x more thoughtfully and rigorously by the Blackstone Value Creation team and Bain PEG. The only thing really special about DOGE is that Elon has the megaphone, the bully pulpit. The cuts to various programs and organizations such as USAID look impulsive and thoughtless. This cannot be the best way to implement a strategy of efficiency and budget balancing, but that’s because DOGE is about something else. The Republican budget has $4.5T in tax cuts. It’s not about the deficit. To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the culture war, stupid!”
The DOGE cuts aren’t to balance the budget or tackle the deficit.
The cuts are two things: 1. an effective political communication strategy that ties their anti-woke and anti-interventionist beliefs to a broader, if not false, ideal of fiscal pragmatism and responsibility and 2. a manner through which they can reorganize the federal government with anti-woke ideology as its raison d'être. Be a real Reagan or paleoconservative and tell me you are cutting defense spending, healthcare, and entitlement programs! At least then, we can have actual argument about the role of the government.
Instead, DOGE has cornered us into the dumbest conversations about the deficit and federal spending I have seen in my lifetime. Useful idiots in Silicon Valley like Jason Calacanis are thriving in this climate with such toddler-like, myopic, and naive views of the world that they tweet things like this:
C’mon…
Elon is not innovating, he’s retaliating
What happens when someone skilled at setting audacious visions and identifying talent decides that, instead of trying to go to Mars, they want to fulfill the cultural vision of the most brain-wormed, internet-addled, anti-DEI MAGA weirdos?
It is not the Department of Government Efficiency, it is the Department of Government Ideology. DOGE is now the frontline of America’s endless culture war and another vector for Elon Musk’s unquenchable thirst for attention and praise. What DOGE won’t do is meaningfully shrink the federal budget; what they will do is fire as many career employees as possible and fill as many of those roles as possible with MAGA ideologues.
Great, I’m glad Elon has taken feedback from LibsofTikTok and tackled America’s most pressing problem: gender identity forms. Not to go all 80 year old Democratic Senator, but, does this make my groceries cheaper?
The DOGE Takeover
Career civil servants are set to be purged in the name of efficiency, but really, Elon and DOGE are just making sure the only people remaining and the only people being hired have the ‘right’ beliefs. On February 11th, an executive order was released detailing hiring and management protocols for the OMB. It calls for some headcount reduction, but most importantly dictates that all decisions regarding new career appointments must be made in consultation with the agency's DOGE Team Lead. In theory, this is about efficiency. In reality, it means an Elon loyalist gets final say over all hiring, and I’m not sold on how they’ve gone about staffing so far.
“I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.” This is a tweet from Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer, who appropriately resigned (was fired?) after a series of racist and offensive tweets were uncovered including: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool” and, “Normalize Indian hate.” He was rehired.
Mr. Elez has company. “Gavin Kliger, another DOGE staffer, was reported by Rolling Stone to have previously reposted content from Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who has dined with President Donald Trump. ” - NBC News
It is not by accident or coincidence that these are the people Elon has chosen to help set the direction of federal agencies. These people, this ethos, is why, despite its name, DOGE will do little to balance the budget and make the government more efficient but a whole lot to federalize the culture war. DOGE won’t shrink government. It will make it more dysfunctional, more extreme, and more beholden to cultural zealots.
I really believe that Elon is exceptional at developing a big vision and building teams to execute it. Sadly, his big, bold idea here is not to balance the budget, make the government more efficient, or to make the lives of every day Americans better. His vision is to federalize the culture war and propagate his anti-woke ideologies.