Smaller government and spending cuts have been core Republican objectives at least since the advent of Reaganomics in the 1980s. So when Donald Trump announced in September 2024 that he would create a “government efficiency commission” to eliminate wasteful expenditure, people were not surprised. He also made it known that the idea came from Elon Musk, who had contributed $290 million to his presidential campaign.
However, as the past month has revealed, what Mr. Musk had in mind was not merely the usual staff/spending cuts. His aim was far more radical: to drastically shrink the government bureaucracy and thereby create the space to install a regime of ‘AI-first’ governance, with the AI tools under the control of a tiny Silicon Valley elite of which he is a leading member. The AI researcher Eryk Salvaggio has described DOGE as an ‘AI Coup’.
Signing DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) into existence was one of Mr. Trump’s first moves post-inauguration. His Executive Order (EO) dated January 20 stated that its purpose was to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernising Federal technology and software to maximise governmental efficiency and productivity”. It makes no mention of reducing staff or spending cuts. Instead, it devotes an entire section to elaborating what the “modernising” technology and software would entail: throwing open the federal government’s databases to “facilitate data collection and synchronisation”. The EO states categorically that all administrative heads are bound to “ensure USDS [US Doge Service] has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems”.
Panic and chaos
DOGE was created as an entity that took over the U.S. Digital Service. The U.S. Digital Service was housed in the Office of Management and Budget, where it was subject to open records laws. But Mr. Trump created a U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organisation and moved it to the Executive Office of the President, thereby potentially exempting it from the federal Freedom of Information Act. So Mr. Musk, who does not have a clearly defined role in DOGE — Amy Gleason, a former health tech executive, is officially the acting administrator of DOGE — is answerable to no one but Mr. Trump.
In the short span of time it has been in existence, DOGE has unleashed panic and chaos in the ranks of the country’s 2.3 million-strong federal bureaucracy. Mr. Musk adopted the same wrecking ball tactics he used to eviscerate Twitter, where he laid off 80% of the staff soon after he took over. At DOGE, he sent out buyout offers, accepted by 77,000 federal staffers so far. He has sent termination notices to more than 25,000 workers. He has dismantled entire agencies, such as U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which protects Americans from loan sharks. He has cancelled leases and contracts worth millions of dollars. And all of this has unfolded at breakneck speed, without Congressional oversight or transparency, raising concerns about abuse of power.
Given the lack of transparency, the only window into DOGE’s operations is its website. Mr. Musk had claimed that DOGE’s goal was to shave off $2 trillion from the $6.75 trillion U.S. budget. The DOGE website runs, which does live updates on savings accrued and cancelled contracts (“Cancelled: $600,000 grant to study “menstrual cycles in transgender men”, says a recent entry). It claims to have saved $105 billion as of March 8. Not only is this a far cry from the $2 trillion goal, a New Yorker calculation estimates that even if Mr. Musk fired all the 2.3 million federal employees, the total savings would only be $245.8 billion, an insignificant fraction of the federal budget.
The pursuit of mega-savings through staff cuts is a quixotic venture because the bulk of U.S. government spending is on programmes and benefits, not salaries. Generating massive savings on the scale proclaimed by Mr. Musk would require eliminating those programmes, which constitutes a political decision — by definition, not the kind AI should be making. In contrast, Mr. Musk, as per media reports, has been using AI filters for words like ‘climate change’ and ‘gender identity’ to auto-reject proposals for grants in the U.S. Treasury Department
All this lends credence to the view that saving money by cutting the bureaucracy is only the means. The end is to embed AI at the heart of decision-making in the federal executive. As Salvaggio puts it, “The Trump administration frames generative AI as a remedy to ‘government waste’. However, what it seeks to automate is not paperwork but democratic decision-making.” In all this, the hatred against the ‘deep state’ bureaucracy whipped up by the MAGA propaganda machinery will only ensure DOGE retains popular support even as it decimates the very wings of government that administer their social protections.
Published – March 09, 2025 01:52 am IST
