The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, wielding a measure of power surpassing the might of run-of-the-mill oligarchs, is leading a campaign to inflict harm across the globe on human beings struggling with poverty, hunger, disease, and other calamities. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has given him the means to do so.
First up: the destruction of USAID, which is blow to the moral leadership and prestige of the United States; it will inevitably diminish our nation’s strength and security. It represents only a sliver of the damage being done to our country’s capacity to do what Americans have every right to expect it to do. For Musk and his wrecking crew (at DOGE, the fraudulently named Department of Government Efficiency), the evisceration of USAID — chiefly through a purge of its workforce — is a template for their reckless crusade across multiple executive departments and agencies created by Congress.
Both Musk and Trump are telling tales to justify the senseless damage they are causing. They have many powerful allies, including the religious right, the Project 2025 crew, and every elected Republican in Washington.
Presidential power, the Constitution, and the rule of law
Constitutional scholar Peter M. Shane offers historical background to explain, “Presidents May Not Unilaterally Dismantle Government Agencies.” I’ll cut to the chase: The president shares power with two other co-equal branches of government. The Constitution grants Congress the power to establish (and eliminate) federal departments and agencies, as well as the power of the purse (to provide funding or to cut it off). Further, Article I, Section 8 empowers Congress: “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
Trump has diverged from this path, trampling on well-established constitutional principles, Congressional legislation, and judicial precedent.
One knowledgeable observer, Peter Stier, assesses the ongoing destruction in an interview with Franklin Foer.
There is just a series of hammer blows that have been wielded against the civil service. The so-called deferred-resignation offer is their attempt to create a stampede out the door, to make it easier for them to get rid of the apolitical expert civil service. And then, on the other end, they’re creating a system that enables them to politicize the hiring and the management of the workforce. Certainly there are parts of our government—and most obvious ones, like USAID and the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that are taking it on the chin even harder. Some of the most frightening things are happening at the FBI.
Right now, we’re seeing the destruction of infrastructure, but also a culture that focuses on the public good and the commitment to the rule of law. What we are going to see next is the use of government authority that is possible because that culture has been eradicated—the use of government authority for improper purposes. And so when you think about what’s happening, for example, with prosecutors who were fired because they investigated or prosecuted January 6 rioters or the president himself, these events foretell the use of government authority to pursue a personal agenda and to go after perceived enemies.
One other point: Sometimes even the media describes this as an effort to cut costs. This is not an effort to cut costs. This is going to cost the American taxpayer and the American public in huge ways.
Corruption all the way down
Musk’s DOGE has reportedly gained access to many federal agencies, including Treasury, the General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management, Centers for Disease Control, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency. In addition, federal employees have been fired at eleven agencies conducting investigations of Musk’s companies: Transportation, Interior, Justice, Agriculture, National Labor Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Securities and Exchange Commission, Defense, Federal Election Commission, and Office of Government Ethics. Chart from the New York Times:
Elon Musk addresses the nation from the Oval Office
Trump introduces Elon to speak about the DOGE offensive:
I’m going to ask Elon to tell you a little bit about it. And some of the things which we found were just shocking. Millions and millions and millions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. And I think it’s very important. One of the reasons I got elected. I said we’re going to do that. Nobody had any idea it was that bad and that corrupt. And it’s hard to believe that judges want to stop us from looking for corruption, especially when we found hundreds of millions of dollars – much more than that – in just a short period of time. We want to weed out the corruption. And it seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that.’ So maybe we have to look at the judges. Because that’s a very serious – I think it’s a very serious violation.
I’ll ask Elon Musk to say a few words and we’ll take some questions. Elon, go ahead.
Musk speaks:
So at a high level, you say what is the goal of DOGE and, I think, a significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy. And you may say, aren’t we a democracy? …
So, if there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the President and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.
So it’s incredibly important that we close that feedback loop, that we fix that feedback loop and that the public, the public’s representatives, the President, the House, and the Senate decide what happens as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy.
The first paragraph in the New York Times report on this Oval Office address aptly summarizes what Musk had to say:
The billionaire Elon Musk said in an extraordinary Oval Office appearance on Tuesday that he was providing maximum transparency in his government cost-cutting initiative, but offered no evidence for his sweeping claims that the federal bureaucracy had been corrupted by cheats and officials who had approved money for “fraudsters.”
We had to take the president’s word for the claim that Musk had found “millions and millions and millions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse,” and moments later that he had found corruption in the “hundreds of millions of dollars — much more than that.” Not a shred of evidence was offered.
As for Musk’s comments on political theory, his insistence that he — an unelected billionaire, acting in an extragovernmental role — is an agent of democracy… Well, let’s say that’s hard to credit.
This looks more like a corrupt autocrat delegating — contrary to the Constitution and the rule of law — presidential power to a self-serving, unaccountable billionaire with the intent of rendering the United States government incapable of doing its job. That job would be, as envisaged in the Declaration of Independence, guaranteeing Americans the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Trump’s authoritarian quest
On February 11, Trump issued yet another executive order, this one empowering Musk to place a “DOGE Team Lead” within government departments and agencies. A “Hiring Ratio” will facilitate the ongoing purge of qualified, professional personnel:
…the Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall submit a plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition (Plan). The Plan shall require that each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart…
An exception is the IRS, where employees will be purged without replacement. Other exceptions where the ratio will be disregarded are agencies focused on “public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement.”
This is the furthest thing from the pursuit of government efficiency. This is nothing like an effort to eliminate waste, fraud, or abuse. What we are witnessing aims to rid the government of people with professional expertise, of folks qualified to fulfill the goals of the agencies within which they serve. The actual “Plan” is to replace civil servants with partisan hacks, some of whom might be capable, but all will be selected for their loyalty to a lawless autocrat.
And the most prominent corruption in evidence is found not within the federal bureaucracy. Rather, the corruption is embedded in the Trump-Musk-DOGE-Project 2025-Republican Party drive to strip the federal government of capacity and resilience to serve the American people.
Regime change
This playbook, hardly new under the sun, has been a favorite of foreign autocrats. The DOGE crusade, as Anne Applebaum observes, echoes the mass firings directed by Hugo Chávez and the dismantling of labor protections for civil servants by Viktor Orbán. She writes:
Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.
This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.
This will come at a great and lasting cost, as Applebaum observes:
The destruction of the modern civil-service ethos will take time. It dates from the late 19th century, when Theodore Roosevelt and other civil-service reformers launched a crusade to eliminate the spoils system that dominated government service. At that time, whoever won the presidency always got to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even for menial jobs. Much of the world still relies on such patronage systems, and they are both corrupt and corrupting. Politicians hand out job appointments in exchange for bribes. They appoint unqualified people—somebody’s cousin, somebody’s neighbor, or just a party hack—to jobs that require knowledge and experience. Patronage creates bad government and bad services, because it means government employees serve a patron, not a country or its constitution. When that patron demands, say, a tax break for a businessman favored by the leader or the party, they naturally comply.
That’s where we’re headed. And we’re well on our way.
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