Nobody much knows how to deal with the Department of Government Efficiency, whose DOGE acronym is based on a cryptocurrency-adjacent meme. Donald Trump’s recently acquired buddy Elon Musk seems to have developed the idea of a sort of cartoon superhero agency designed to destroy the deep state — or maybe it was just a joke, suggests Decrypt’s Liz Napolitano. DOGE has no legal status, no public funding, no authority to do much of anything other than bloviate, headed by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, two men with zero experience inside the federal government they promise to expose and largely blow up.
Musk came up with the wild $2 trillion goal for federal budget savings that DOGE will allegedly generate (out of $6.75 trillion in total federal spending, including such trifles as mandatory interest payments on existing public debt, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, national defense, and a thousand other programs and services, most of which have enjoyed bipartisan support for decades). While he has argued that deep-state bureaucrats soak up most of this excess spending, the reality is that total government wages and salaries amount to around $800 billion. Ramaswamy has chipped in with the gimmicky idea of killing off any programs for which appropriations are being made without formal legal authorization (an extremely common practice that the whiz kid seems to misunderstand as involving illegal spending), which would, among other things, eliminate veterans’ health care services, perhaps the most sacred cow of all federal programs. Ramaswamy has also suggested that a model for what DOGE would accomplish is Argentina’s radical austerity program under President Javier Milei, which has pushed that country into a recession and doubled poverty rates.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed that laid out their vision for cheerfully blowing up the public sector, Musk and Ramaswamy suggested that Trump might be able to unilaterally implement their recommendations via the illegal means of presidential impoundment (i.e., cancellation) of congressionally appropriated spending, a trick that contributed to Richard Nixon’s downfall when he tried it. The dynamic duo also vaguely but alarmingly said they’d pursue reforms in government contracting via a “temporary suspension of payments,” which sounds a lot like abrogation of federal obligations.
Now, it’s possible that this is all just a fantasy exercise by two rich boys or even a way to keep them busy and out of the actual work of the Trump administration (though Musk and Ramaswamy have been assured the president’s Office of Management and Budget, which prepares Trump’s own fiscal recommendations, will be paying close attention to their findings).
Certainly, the idea that DOGE will be a rhetorical playground for extremist rhetoric was reinforced by the step House Republicans just took to provide oversight of the pretend department, as The Hill reports: putting Marjorie Taylor Greene in charge of oversight with the aptly named “Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee.”
Now, unlike her new partners in the demolition business, she’s has a grand total of three years in the public sector, though all of it has been spent running around the country like a firebug promoting the MAGA cause and headline-grabbing through high-profile antics in the House. The sort of deep thinking on government efficiency we can expect Greene to exhibit was expressed by Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer in his defense of the much-mocked Georgia extremist:
“We don’t care if someone’s feelings get hurt if we eliminate their fat-cat bureaucratic job in Washington,” Comer told conservative commentator Benny Johnson.
Greene, Comer said, is “not afraid to back down or walk away from a fight.”
She’s also not afraid to speak authoritatively about stuff she knows literally nothing about. She has a very safe ultra-Republican district and now a license to demagogue even more than usual. Greene, Musk and Ramaswamy form quite the three musketeers of what will likely be a pretend war on inefficiency that will generate headlines and social media fire and not a lot more.
