DOGE's Race to the Bottom

WIRED

13-02-2025

Feb 13, 2025 12:11 PM Elon Musk's takeover of US government agencies has happened at remarkable speeds. That's the point. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:The thing about the takeover of key US government institutions by the world's richest man and his strike force of former interns is that it's happening so fast.
It's been three weeks since Elon Musk's agents took over the government's IT and HR departments. Since then, the movements of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have had the cartography of a horror movie, DOGE picking off agencies one by one based on slasher logic, feeding an unslakeable thirst for cost-cutting and data.
Every day brings fresh incursions. Three weeks ago the United States believed in humanitarian aid. It helped people who had been ripped off by big corporations. It funded the infrastructure necessary to make America a beacon of scientific innovation. Now the United States Agency for International Development is gutted, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on ice, and National Institutes of Health grants are handcuffed. So much for all that.
These are spreadsheet cruelties, executed with a click. The loss of real peoples' jobs and lives—yes, despite what X-famous conspiracy theorists will tell you, USAID saved lives—all immaterial compared to the pursuit of a tighter balance sheet.
Three weeks ago, a 19-year-old who calls himself 'Big Balls' online didn't have access to government personnel records and more. A 25-year-old with a closet full of racist tweets hadn't gotten the keys to Treasury systems that pay out $5.45 trillion each year. Elon Musk hadn't turned the Oval Office into a romper room for his 4-year-old son.
The speed is strategy, of course, flooding the zone so that neither the media nor the courts can keep pace. Lawsuits and court orders move on a different timescale than this slash-and-burn approach. (At this pace, DOGE will have tapped into every last government server long before the Supreme Court even has a chance to weigh in.) But it's also reflexive. The first order of business in a corporate takeover is to slash costs as quickly as possible. If you can't fire people, offer them buyouts. If they won't take the buyouts, find a way to fire them anyway. Keep cutting until you hit bone.
This is how you get an executive order declaring that 'each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart,' an arbitrary ratio with no regard for actual staffing needs. It's how you get hundreds of federal government buildings on the auction block no matter how fully occupied they are. It's both extreme and ill-considered, a race to empty the town's only well.
And then … what? This is the question that Elon Musk and DOGE have failed to answer, because there is no answer. Does the United States government need to become a profit engine? To return shareholder value? Does Medicaid need to demonstrate a product-market fit in time for the next funding round?
This is consultant logic. This is an engineering sprint whose inevitable finish line is the unwinding of the social contract. Democracy doesn't die in darkness after all; it dies in JIRA tickets filed by Palantir alums.
It's somehow even worse than that, though. Suppose you take this whole enterprise at face value, that the United States should go through the private equity ringer. It does not take a Stanford MBA to know that cutting expenses only helps half of your profit and loss statement. Any serious attempt to treat the US like a business would involve increasing revenues. So where are the taxes? And why demolish the CFPB, which has paid out over $20 billion to US citizens—shareholders, if you will—through its enforcement actions?
In the coming weeks and months, as this farce continues to unfurl, remember that the goal of most acquisitions is not to benefit the acquired. It is to either subsume or discard, whichever generates the highest return.
Elon Musk's unprecedented influence over the executive branch will ultimately benefit Elon Musk. The employees in charge are his employees. The data DOGE collects, the procurement contracts they oversee, it all flows up to him.
And it's flowing too quickly to keep up with, much less to stop. The Chatroom
Do you think Elon Musk will be able to avoid conflicts of interest in his DOGE role?
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Want more? Subscribe now for unlimited access to WIRED. What Else We're Reading
🔗 Elon Musk's Financial Disclosure Will Not Be Made Public: Because why would anybody need to see a thing like that at a time like this? (The New York Times)
🔗 AI Slop of Musk and Trump on TikTok Racks Up 700 Million Views: It's not just Meta. TikTok is also suffering from an AI slop problem, particularly around political content. (404 Media)
🔗 How Elon Musk and His DOGE Goons Are Following the Private Equity Playbook: Anna Merlan smartly views DOGE through a private equity lens. (Mother Jones) The Download
If all the DOGE news is getting too hard to keep track of, check out yesterday's special edition podcast episode, WIRED News Update: Keeping Tabs on DOGE. WIRED politics senior editor Leah Feiger joins global editorial director Katie Drummond to dig into all things Elon. Listen now.
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