The factor concerning the takeover of key US government institutions by the world’s richest man and his strike force of former interns is that it’s taking place so quick.
It’s been three weeks since Elon Musk’s brokers took over the government’s IT and HR departments. Since then, the actions of his so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity have had the cartography of a horror film, DOGE choosing off companies one after the other based mostly on slasher logic, feeding an unslakeable thirst for cost-cutting and knowledge.
Daily brings recent incursions. Three weeks in the past the US believed in humanitarian aid. It helped individuals who had been ripped off by large firms. It funded the infrastructure essential to make America a beacon of scientific innovation. Now the United States Agency for International Development is gutted, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on ice, and National Institutes of Health grants are handcuffed. A lot for all that.
These are spreadsheet cruelties, executed with a click on. The lack of actual peoples’ jobs and lives—sure, regardless of what X-famous conspiracy theorists will inform you, USAID saved lives—all immaterial in comparison with the pursuit of a tighter stability sheet.
Three weeks in the past, a 19-year-old who calls himself “Big Balls” on-line didn’t have entry to authorities personnel information and extra. A 25-year-old with a closet filled with racist tweets hadn’t gotten the keys to Treasury systems that pay out $5.45 trillion each year. Elon Musk hadn’t turned the Oval Workplace right into a romper room for his 4-year-old son.
The velocity is technique, after all, flooding the zone in order that neither the media nor the courts can preserve tempo. Lawsuits and court docket orders transfer on a special timescale than this slash-and-burn method. (At this tempo, DOGE can have tapped into each final authorities server lengthy earlier than the Supreme Courtroom even has an opportunity to weigh in.) Nevertheless it’s additionally reflexive. The primary order of enterprise in a company takeover is to slash prices as rapidly as doable. For those who can’t fireplace individuals, provide them buyouts. In the event that they received’t take the buyouts, discover a strategy to fireplace them anyway. Maintain chopping till you hit bone.
That is the way you get an executive order declaring that “every company rent no a couple of worker for each 4 workers that depart,” an arbitrary ratio with no regard for precise staffing wants. It’s the way you get hundreds of federal government buildings on the auction block irrespective of how totally occupied they’re. It’s each excessive and ill-considered, a race to empty the city’s solely nicely.
After which … what? That is the query that Elon Musk and DOGE have didn’t reply, as a result of there isn’t a reply. Does the US authorities must turn into a revenue engine? To return shareholder worth? Does Medicaid must exhibit a product-market slot in time for the following funding spherical?
That is guide logic. That is an engineering dash whose inevitable end line is the unwinding of the social contract. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness in any case; it dies in JIRA tickets filed by Palantir alums.
