The Billionaire, the Bureaucracy and DOGE
The prominence of Elon Musk in the Trump administration has been one of the most striking and unusual aspects of this now month-old presidency. That was made even more pungently clear last week when Trump held one of the more unusual White House press conferences in recent memory. There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about Trump, who was sitting, as expected, behind the storied Resolute desk in the Oval Office. Standing to his right, though, was Elon Musk, dressed in the typical Silicon Valley attire of a dark blazer over a T-shirt—as well as a black “Make America Great Again” hat—while his 4-year-old son, X, pranced around. In a half-hour-long monologue during which Trump remained mostly silent, Musk explained why DOGE (the new Department of Government Efficiency, which he appears to head) was engaged in a lightning-strike downsizing of the federal bureaucracy and why Trump had signed an executive order demanding just that.
But even as the optics of the conference suggested that Musk, an unelected private citizen who is also the world’s richest person, is the figure in charge—a theory held by many who have watched the early weeks of Trump’s second term with extreme alarm—that assumption is wrong.
I’ve just written a long Foreign Affairs piece that examines the role of wealthy men in American politics over the arc of several centuries and puts Musk in that context while examining what is unique about him and his current place in the firmament of Trumplandia. I don’t have a crystal ball, and unlike many commentators, I don’t pretend to. In that spirit, I think the most salient point about Musk just now is that he is an emanation of Trump and that his power and influence derive purely from his relationship to the president. That means that at the proverbial end of the day, the stunning success or abject failure of what Musk is doing will be Trump’s—and, of course, experienced for better and for worse by America writ large.
There is nothing pernicious about the role Musk is occupying, even if one believes there is something pernicious about what he is doing or how he is doing it. In short, we should be less focused on Musk’s position or person and more on what is being done. Musk is an endlessly tempting story, much like Trump, but the story that matters most is what DOGE is attempting to do and how it does it. And there, too, it’s not as binary as DOGE bad and the institutions under assault good. DOGE could do some good, or much harm, or ultimately not as much as we think. The system we have is hardly perfect and could use some disruption, which most would agree on in the quiet of their own circle of friends, removed from the passions of the moment.
I will give you some credit for at least mentioning the real heart of the evil and the danger:
"he appears to believe that the U.S. president should have powers analogous to a CEO’s, with the American electorate functioning as a board that votes every four years."
This is, quite simply and without exaggeration, fascism. No system where the president has that level of power can protect civil liberty or the rule of law. Elected dictatorship is utterly foreign not only to American tradition but to all civilized and humane values. And elected dictatorship is precisely what the Trump cabal is trying to foist upon us now.
Musk and DOGE are acting in seriously confidential areas of our government records and that is not right, no matter how it looks. Even the skilled current workers he is firing were not allowed the access he has. He was neither elected nor approved by the Senate, so he should be escorted out of the WH until those conditions are met. I am not going to speculate on the supposed results: at $8M/day, we deserve personnel who are vetted and approved. Period.