The blinding contempt of the DOGE bros

Washington Post

24-02-2025

More often than not, when conquering armies storm across borders or into rebel strongholds, they set about finding ways to humiliate the people they find there. They are capricious and cruel. They want their enemies to understand their own insignificance.
In Elon Musk's siege on Washington, the first village taken was the U.S. Agency for International Development, which dispensed roughly $32 billion in foreign aid last year (or less than half a percent of the federal budget). And for four weeks now, his Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — has made a chilling example of the people who served there.
I recently had a series of conversations with a senior USAID staff member who witnessed the agency's takeover from the inside. (I'd love to have asked U.S. DOGE Service about these events, but despite Musk's grand claim of historic transparency, his department has no contact with the media beyond self-serving social media posts.)
A DOGE official first arrived at USAID's offices on Jan. 27, a week after Donald Trump's inauguration. Late that night, a group of senior employees were hastily summoned to a teleconference with the two men who were to become their DOGE-era overlords: Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger.
Farritor, 23, is a former SpaceX intern and University of Nebraska dropout who became famous in the tech world for having been part of a team that decoded an ancient Roman scroll. Kliger, 25, is a deep-state conspiracist on social media who, according to Wired, attended Berkeley and worked for an AI start-up. (He's also the guy Musk has now installed at the Treasury Department.)
Farritor and Kliger appeared to USAID staff as remote figures on a computer screen, bringing to mind the 'Wizard of Oz.' They wore T shirts and polos and seemed to be Zooming from their offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. They were unfailingly civil but not much for listening.
The first thing they did, in a series of calls and emails, was to gather information about how the agency's bills were paid and where the data was stored. They demanded and were given access to the payment system, but only on what you might think of as a 'read only' basis; according to the official I talked to on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution, they could not, initially, alter any transactions. Trump had decreed a freeze on all USAID spending five days earlier, and the two DOGE bros, as the staff would come to call them, wanted to make sure that order was being followed.
The cordial atmosphere darkened three days later, on Jan. 30, when White House officials learned that some USAID grantees overseas had somehow gotten paid through the Health and Human Services Department after Trump issued his order. The White House team believed USAID had been secretly funneling money through fellow bureaucrats in the labyrinth of deep-state agencies. This is what Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and nominal head of USAID, was talking about when he told reporters traveling with him in Panama that the agency's staff had been 'insubordinate' and needed to be brought to heel.
In fact, the explanation here, like the explanations for most things in government, was pretty mundane. It turns out that most of the government's humanitarian grants — as opposed to contractor payments — are administered through HHS. (Ironically, this is an efficiency measure, because it creates a central storehouse for multiple agencies' grants.) USAID staff wasn't going behind anyone's back to disburse the grant money; it's just that no one had told HHS to shut off the spigot.
You can imagine, though, that DOGE didn't have much use for the boring government realities here. Musk's team needed a pretext for gutting the agency, and they decided they had one.
The White House immediately decapitated the agency, putting 65 senior staff members on administrative leave. In internal conversations with senior staff, Farritor and Kliger demanded that all senior managers be stripped of their power to authorize payments — and that they alone become the authorizers.
The most public clash at USAID revolved around DOGE officials who showed up at USAID headquarters at the Ronald Reagan Building and demanded access to its sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, where confidential records are stored; three officials who refused to let them in were either fired or resigned. Out of view, though, the agency's most essential humanitarian programs overseas became the object of a weeks-long standoff between the State Department and DOGE.
Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs — such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa — would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency's interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.
But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments — a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries like Congo. A pregnant woman in an undisclosed country has sued the Trump administration because she was denied a Medevac helicopter. In another case, I was told, an employee in southern Africa who needed chemotherapy was also denied a chopper because no one would authorize the money.
One night, as staff tried yet again to assemble a list of necessary payments, the agency's computer network went down for two hours. When it came back on, members of the IT team whispered to colleagues to be wary; during the outage, they believed, spyware had been installed on the network to monitor communication among employees.
Finally, on the second Saturday in February, the two IT guys from DOGE shut everyone else out of the payment system entirely. They were now the only people who could even see the payments waiting to be approved. Hardly any of the essential funding promised by Rubio had been processed as of earlier last week.
All this rigmarole over paying bills probably seems arcane compared with, say, mass firings or forced resignations at the Justice Department. But if you step back for a moment, what's happened at USAID over the past couple of weeks is unfathomable. A $50 billion agency — funded by taxpayers, empowered by Congress and employing something like 11,000 people around the world — is now tightly controlled by a handful of 20-something software engineers who have never worked a day in government. They disregard promises from the American secretary of state while agonized policy experts stand by helplessly.
In the coming weeks, courts will have to decide if those engineers and their billionaire boss had the right to fire pretty much everybody who worked at USAID. If I were betting (admittedly, this would have to be one very un-fun gambling site), I would wager that a year from now the agency itself will have disappeared, with much of its programs and staff continuing on at State. All of which probably could have been achieved in a more orderly and humane way had the agency been allowed to wind down more gradually under Rubio's supervision.
Maybe this unsettles Farritor and Kliger on some level — maybe they toss and turn on leather couches in the Eisenhower Building, troubled by a suspicion that Musk has them doing things they will one day regret. But I doubt it. Like young revolutionaries everywhere, Musk's former interns are probably swept up in the cause, reveling in the power to torture a bureaucracy they've been taught to loathe. Humiliating career public servants isn't some accidental by-product of the quest for efficiency. It seems to be the point of the exercise.
The swift sacking of USAID shook official Washington and set the tone for how DOGE would attack the rest of the government, starting with the Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For me, it raises a fundamental question about Musk's work, and I don't think I'm alone in asking it. Is it what Musk is trying to do that makes me recoil — or is it the way in which he's doing it? Is it even possible to separate the substance here from the style?
After all, in the abstract, most critics of an ever-expanding federal bureaucracy — and I'm solidly among them — would be open to bold moves like folding USAID into the State Department or padlocking the Education Department. If anything, as I've written, I'd like to see Musk take on even more controversial fights, like modernizing the entitlement programs that are the drivers of unsustainable debt or overhauling the corrupt and outdated system by which the Pentagon gets its weapons. You don't have to work hard to convince me that we have too many agencies and too many low-impact programs.
But does this really need to be done — can it be done effectively at all — by branding lifelong public servants as 'criminals' and making them suffer for sport? What's the perverse joy to be had in making some of the foremost experts in their fields prostrate themselves before a couple of grad-school-level coders who probably couldn't find Congo on a map?
Here's a thought exercise: Let's imagine for the moment that Kamala Harris had won the presidency, and she had immediately gone out and recruited, say, Mark Cuban to reprise Al Gore's old mission of 'reinventing government.' Let's imagine that Cuban brought with him to Washington a cadre of young, idealistic MBAs, and in the first week they held meetings at some small agency and very respectfully asked for their personnel and payment records, so they could suggest some meaningful reforms. And let's say the agency told them to go to hell.
Would all of us who believe in the value of government service be jumping up and down and screaming about breaches of protocol and congressional prerogative? Or would we be saying: Who are these bureaucrats to think they can deny the president access to anything?
The problem isn't that Musk has been given a brief to reassess program and budgets; it's that he evinces no real intellectual interest in any of these things. Musk — who, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, calls other people 'stupid' the way most of us say 'please' or 'thank you' — seems to have chosen his hires not for any remotely relevant experience but rather to send a message about how little respect he has for public service generally. A couple of my interns can do this better than all of you. Posting on X, Musk said it was time for USAID to die and crowed about feeding it to a wood chipper. It's impossible to overstate the level of his contempt.
You can ascribe that contempt to right-wing or libertarian political ideology, but I'm guessing it has at least as much to do with the tech industry generally. From the moment Silicon Valley exploded in the 1990s, and probably before that, its leading denizens have subscribed to a kind of techno-chauvinism — a belief that only engineers know how to solve the problems of humankind, and if you work for the government, then you can't be very smart, so you must be doing everything wrong.
Rep. Ro Khanna, (D-California), whose district includes legendary tech meccas like Cupertino and Sunnyvale, expressed it to me this way: 'They have this view that they have more knowledge, more chutzpah, that they are the ones who are moving civilization forward and building new things, that they're entitled to rule or govern, and that they do a better job of it than democracy.'
No one embodies this idea more fully than Musk and his young adherents. They behave as though the federal government is just some legacy company they acquired for not very much (with Trump as their front man), and now they're going to shutter it. They marched into USAID as you would march into any newly owned subsidiary on the verge of bankruptcy. They see themselves, I'm sure, as selfless; they could be back west plotting new start-ups and reaping untold billions, but they've decided to save their country from mentally challenged bureaucrats instead.
You have to wonder, though, if all that contempt is blinding Musk to the obvious ways in which government agencies aren't — and shouldn't be — analogous to bloated companies at all. For one thing, the goal of any company, when you get past all the Messianic blather about changing the world, is to make money for its investors — period. The more efficient you are, the more money everybody makes.
The central goal of government, on the other hand, is to protect its citizens and enforce its laws — and to address the imbalances that a free market can't.. Efficiency is desirable and often lacking for no good reason — but it is not an end in itself.
Why does it take multiple people and several days just to authorize a batch of payments at USAID? Because every agency has a system of checks and balances to make sure the taxpayers aren't being cheated. Government always trades off some efficiency to safeguard the integrity of the system.
And when you buy a failing company, you own it outright, whereas, in government, Congress is a permanent and coequal board of directors that can't just be ignored. This is why DOGE's ransacking of departments has already drawn a raft of legal challenges, some of which will likely be sustained, though that could take months if not longer. Musk's unelected engineers are unilaterally unmaking decisions that only Congress has the constitutional power to undo.
It would have been easy enough for Trump's White House to go to its sheep-like caucuses in Congress and ask them to eliminate a bunch of agencies in the next budget. But Trump and Musk wanted the immediate gratification of a blitzkrieg instead, which means they may well end up having to give back some of the territory they so triumphantly seized.
You could argue, and I'm sure Musk would, that such a view is hopelessly naive — that a government that's been spreading its tentacles slowly for 100-plus years can only be hacked back viciously and all at once, without all the legal niceties that entrenched bureaucracies are adept at exploiting. But my instinct, having been around Washington a lot longer than anyone at DOGE, is that most of what's done here thoughtlessly and by fiat is generally undone by someone at some point.
Terrorizing an agency really isn't the same thing as permanently reforming it. Although to Musk and his band of engineers, it might be a lot more fun.