The factor in regards to the takeover of key US authorities establishments by the world’s richest man and his strike power of former interns is that it’s occurring so quick.
It’s been three weeks since Elon Musk’s brokers took over the authorities’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 businesses one after the other primarily based on slasher logic, feeding an unslakeable thirst for cost-cutting and knowledge.
Each day brings recent incursions. Three weeks in the past america believed in humanitarian support. It helped individuals who had been ripped off by huge firms. It funded the infrastructure essential to make America a beacon of scientific innovation. Now the United States Company for Worldwide Improvement is gutted, the Shopper Monetary Safety Bureau is on ice, and Nationwide Institutes of Well being 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 steadiness sheet.
Three weeks in the past, a 19-year-old who calls himself “Large Balls” on-line didn’t have entry to authorities personnel information and extra. A 25-year-old with a closet stuffed with racist tweets hadn’t gotten the keys to Treasury methods that pay out $5.45 trillion every year. Elon Musk hadn’t turned the Oval Workplace right into a romper room for his 4-year-old son.
The pace is technique, in fact, flooding the zone in order that neither the media nor the courts can maintain tempo. Lawsuits and courtroom orders transfer on a distinct timescale than this slash-and-burn method. (At this tempo, DOGE may have tapped into each final authorities server lengthy earlier than the Supreme Court docket even has an opportunity to weigh in.) But it surely’s additionally reflexive. The primary order of enterprise in a company takeover is to slash prices as shortly as doable. In the event you can’t hearth folks, provide them buyouts. In the event that they received’t take the buyouts, discover a strategy to hearth them anyway. Hold reducing till you hit bone.
That is the way you get an govt 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 lots of of federal authorities buildings on the public sale block irrespective of how absolutely occupied they’re. It’s each excessive and ill-considered, a race to empty the city’s solely effectively.
After which … what? That is the query that Elon Musk and DOGE have didn’t reply, as a result of there isn’t any reply. Does america authorities must turn out to be a revenue engine? To return shareholder worth? Does Medicaid must show a product-market slot in time for the following funding spherical?
That is advisor logic. That is an engineering dash whose inevitable end line is the unwinding of the social contract. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness in spite of everything; it dies in JIRA tickets filed by Palantir alums.
