Today’s New York Times features a report (“How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy”) on DOGE, providing detail (going back a year and a half) on the destructive effort and clarifying a bunch of stuff for which we already had ample evidence.
In a September 2023 dinner in the Silicon Valley, “Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge.”
The destruction, at the hands of a bunch of computer geeks, is going full throttle.
The team is now moving faster than many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk’s associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress: the U.S. Agency for International Development.
When Brad Smith, another billionaire and someone who had worked with Jared Kushner and Amy Gleason (later named acting head of DOGE), advised him on government policy, Musk resisted:
Mr. Musk expressed impatience with Mr. Smith’s caution that the team would need a phalanx of lawyers to help with executive orders and regulations. Mr. Musk wanted to tear down the government to the studs, and saw Mr. Smith’s approach as incremental.
It has been clear from the beginning that government efficiency had nothing to do with the actions of the Department of Government Efficiency. The point was, and continues to be, destruction: to tear down the government to the studs. And Musk’s crusade has been fabulously successful thus far.
His swift success has been fueled by the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.
Nothing and no one has slowed things down. Trump could, but he’s all-in. So the destruction continues apace. The damage has been so indiscriminate that many people — including Trump 2024 voters — will be hurt. There will be political blowback.
By that time, though, the damage could be immense.
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