Musk and DOGE -- How Will It End?

 

Look, Elon Musk's "move fast and break things" approach can only continue so long.  It only continued so long at Twitter, and it will only continue so long in the government.  At Twitter, the whole plan was to do mass firings and then hire back anyone who turned out to be essential.  In government, that approach is turning out to have its drawbacks when the fired essential workers turn out to include, say, ones who safeguarded our nuclear arsenal.    

So eventually this will end.  How?  I have no idea.  But I can offer some suggestions.

Everything completely and irretrievably breaks down

Yes, it does look like this sometimes, but I don't think it will happen this way.  The Muskrats have backtracked at least on occasion.  And Musk is not as exempt from public pressure as it may appear.  So while there will no doubt be irreparable damage, I think it will stop short of complete and total breakdown.

The Muskrats learn some lessons in government and humility

I know this one seems decidedly unlikely.  Elon Musk is never going to admit he was wrong about anything.  But Elon Musk is not acting alone, nor can a mere six men manage so extensive a takeover.  Wikipedia has named 47 employees.  There are also collaborators inside the agencies -- not many, but at the highest levels.  It is not so far-fetched that at least some of these may learn that government is a lot more important and more difficult to  manage than they thought and act accordingly.  Or be coopted by the system, depending on how you look at it.

DOGE declares victory and pulls out

Already DOGE is set to expire on July 4, 2026.  If public outrage gets too strong, one option is certainly to declare mission accomplished and return to the private sector.  Everyone else will be left picking up the pieces -- deciding what can be salvaged, what is irretrievable, and what really wasn't worth keeping.  The Muskrats will return to the private sector with terrifying amounts of data exfiltrated from the government, and probably any number of backdoor hacks into the system and do who-knows-what with it.  This will look like defeat for DOGE (or victory for the rest of us) in the short run, but can be really scary in the long run.

DOGE declares victory and digs in

DOGE will announce that they have achieved their savings.  Each government will have a DOGE employee or a DOGE team breathing down its neck, managing its computer system, cancelling projects, and firing employees at will.  This will all be completely illegal, but maybe Congress will take actions to legalize it retroactively.  I can see at least two ways this shakes out.  One is as stated above -- DOGE learns something about government and becomes part of the "system."  The other one is truly terrifying.

DOGE learns enough about government to take it over

DOGE establishes its own dictatorship over the entire US government.  It fires any employee who displeases it and deletes their computer access.  It cuts off money to any individual or organization that displeases it.  Elections cease to matter because DOGE controls all.  Democrats could win control of Congress in 2026 and arrive, only to find that they are shut off from the actual workings of government, and DOGE completely ignores any laws they pass.  A Democrat could be elected President in 2028 and arrive at the White House, only to find that the White House has been locked out of the government computer system and DOGE is running everything, completely ignoring the White House.  The actual Deep State that right wingers so fear will have been accomplished -- and right wingers will love it because they control it.  This is REALLY scary.  I have no idea how likely it is.

Quiet Trump/Musk split

People on our side have been pushing for this, but so far it shows no sign of happening.  I suspect two factors are working against this.  One is that Trump seems to be intimidated by bigger authoritarians than he is.  He is submissive toward Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong-un.  A similar dynamic appears to be underway with Musk.  The other factor works the other way.  Musk has the money and the tech, but Trump has the law and the guns.  If push comes to shove, law guns, and public outrage will defeat Musk and his money and tech.  Presumably Musk knows this and is wary of going to far.  Nonetheless, in case of a Trump/Musk split, it seems most likely that they will attempt to conceal the split.  If Musk declares victory and goes home, it may very well not be altogether voluntary.

Open Trump/Musk split

As discussed above, the forces of mutually assured destruction make this unlikely.  However, it is not impossible that Trump will tell Musk "You're fired."  That carries all the danger of Musk taking home all the information he has gained and doing who-knows-what with it.  The only way I could see to do such a thing would be to arrest Musk and all his minions.  I am sure there is a very long list of criminal charges that can be brought.  I think we can safely rule this out.  If the Muskrats face criminal charges, they will undoubtedly view it as betrayal -- and talk.  They will reveal just how complicit Trump really is in all their crimes.  That alone would deter such a course of action.  Of course, I can still have my fantasies about this, but they lead in a disturbing direction.  A Trump-Musk split would be fun to watch, but in the long run one of them would win.  Scary thought!  And much as I can relish the thought of the Trump Administration using the Department of Justice to bring down the world's richest man, as scary thought follows.  If Trump does bring down the world's richest man, what can he do to any of us?

Is There a Method to Musk's Madness?

 

Watching the latest antics of Elon and the Muskrats is giving me some idea of how far they will go, and helping me discern some method to Musk's madness.  It gives me no insight whatever on how it will end.

How far will it go?

I initially thought when Musk was tasked with finding $2 trillion in federal spending cuts that three outcomes were possible -- (1) he would find cutting spending was not as easy as he thought and would lose interest (2) he would scrape together $200 billion in cuts (possible if not easy) and call it $2 trillion over ten years, or (3) he would actually propose $2 trillion in cuts, which would be completely politically unsustainable.

It did not occur to me that he would hijack the treasury and start making cuts unilaterally.  But now that he has done that, the same possibilities remain.  Will he find cutting is harder than he thought and lose interest, fall back to the usual ten year gimmick, or actually make cuts on the scale he proposes.  There are probably other possibilities as well.  But I am now confident that he will not make cuts anywhere approaching $2 trillion or even $1 trillion.

Why am I convinced?

Simple.  Musk deleted USAID.  USAID is a $60 billion agency with precious little constituency in the US.  He deleted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  It has a budget of less than $1 billion and a longstanding conservative bugaboo, without a really strong constituency.

Then he zeroed in on the Department of Education, which right wingers, including Trump, have long vowed to eliminate.  In fact, he actually claims to have eliminated it.  A little budgetary background is in order here.  As of 2024, the Department of Education had a budget of about $268 billion, or about 4% of the total federal budget, and a workforce of 4,100 employees.  Its budget made up about 21% of education spending in the US.  Of the $268 billion, approximately $160 went to college student loans and grants, $83 billion to elementary and secondary schools, $20 billion to special education, and everything else was pocket change.  

Needless to say, shutting all this down would provoke an immense outcry.  It would largely cut off student loans for higher education and mean serious budget cuts to elementary and secondary schools across the country.  When Donald Trump says he wants to eliminate the Department of Education, he has never made clear what he means by that.  Does he want to eliminate it as a department and fold its functions into some other part of government?*  Or does he want to shut down its programs altogether?  Needless to say, a mere administrative shuffle would cause some minor disruption at the top but not serious problem, but not a lot of savings, either.  Shutting down all the Department's functions would be a different matter altogether and provoke a serious outcry.

Well, Musk shed no light on what Trump had in mind, because confronted with "shutting down" the Department of Education, he choked.  He cut somewhat less that $1 billion -- less than one half of a percent of the total budget.  The cuts appear to have been mostly cancelling contracts with the Institute of Education Science -- the office that studies and evaluates student performance.  

Also significant -- Musk has set his hypothetical goal at $2 trillion and a more realistic goal of $1 trillion.  Well, he has put out a list alleging savings of $55 billion, "a very good start," but nowhere near the goal.  Upon closer inspection, the amounts are much less -- closer to $8 billion.

This suggests that even Musk is not immune to political pressure.  He knows there are limits to how far he can go before the outcry becomes so strong that he will be forced to stop.

The method to Musk's madness

This also suggests to me that there is some method to Musk's madness.  He seems to have three main targets -- longstanding targets of conservative wrath (see USAID, CFPB), government employees, and offices that track and manage statistics.  

As for specified agencies -- well, he is carrying out a longstanding far right fantasy.  

Much the same probably applies to government employees. It is right wing dogma that they are worthless moochers.  It is also Musk's longstanding approach to labor force to fire massive numbers of people and then hire back the ones who turn out to be necessary.  He is in the process of learning the hard way that that approach has drawbacks when the people being fired are in charge of, say, safeguarding our nuclear stockpile, or testing for bird flu in the middle of a serious outbreak.  Musk probably also thinks that most federal employees can and should be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Again, he is learning the hard way which ones cannot.

Finally, Musk's reasons for hating government statistics gathering is obvious.  He sees it as trespassing on the domain of tech companies -- especially his tech companies.  He also has been firing many rival contractors for government statistics work.

I don't know how long this "move fast and break things" approach will continue, but sooner or later a critical mass of people are going to figure out that Musk's damage to savings ratio would never be tolerated in the private sector, and the moving fast and breaking things will end.  

The question is how?  I have no idea, but my next post will offer several suggestions.

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*Before 1980 it was part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Has Our Side Gone Overboard on DEI?

 

Republicans in general and Donald Trump in particular have made clear their absolute opposition to DEI -- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  Trump has been ferociously nativist while winning nearly half the Latino vote and made significant inroads into the Black vote despite being the most racist candidate for President since George Wallace.

So this raises an obvious question -- has our side gone too far on DEI issues?  And I am inclined to think that the answer is yes.  Various polls have shown that white, college educated Democratic voters stand well to the left of Black and Hispanic voters -- even on issues of race.  When the intended beneficiaries of your anti-racism politics think you have gone too far, it is a sign that you have gone too far.

And it is not so hard to see why Black and Hispanic voters might get tired of endless identity politics.  Constant focus on peoples' racial and ethnic identity tends to put people in pigeon holes and deny their individuality.  Telling people their identity is now and forever as a victim and can never change is not exactly an uplifting message.  Encouraging people to focus constantly on their ethnic identity and nothing else can be stifling.  And some ideas about "white" versus "black" approaches to thinking and management sound suspiciously like old stereotypes in new packages.  

Complaints about the "woke" left being the language police are not crazy.  At the height of the George Floyd protests, there was even talk about whether it was retrograde to say "master bedroom."  I recall reading from a report all the way back in 2016 asking women who supported Trump what the appeal was.  The women said their concern was over "political correctness."  Specifically, they found themselves up against incomprehensible rules over what was and was not acceptable to say, and that if they ever figured out the rules, someone would change them, and that this felt like class oppression.  They also feared that their husbands could lose their jobs for saying things that were perfectly acceptable to say just a short time ago.

These are reasonable concerns.  DEI went too far.  People lost their jobs, and were exposed to online harassment and shaming for careless remarks.

But Trump's backlash is truly going to extremes.  We have reached the point that if a plane crashes or a ship strikes a bridge, it is immediately blamed on hiring unqualified minorities.  Instead of forcing people to attend tiresome DEI training, the Trump Administration is now firing people for being forced to attend DEI training.  Instead of internet shaming for unthinking remarks, people are being shamed on the internet for being too DEI.  Whole websites are being taken down to scrub them of possible DEI language.  Tip lines are being set up to report covert anti-racist language.  And the new language police are banning terms like:

Anti-Racism
Racism
Allyship
Bias
DEI
Diversity
Diverse
Confirmation Bias
Equity
Equitableness
Feminism
Gender
Gender Identity
Inclusion
Inclusive
All-Inclusive
Inclusivity
Injustice
Intersectionality
Prejudice
Privilege
Racial Identity
Sexuality
Stereotypes
Pronouns
Transgender
Equality

Many of these words are used in non-DEI contexts.

And it seems frankly absurd that after running a campaign based on denouncing experts and intellectual elites, the Trump Administration suddenly proclaims itself in favor of pure meritocracy.  Appointing officials like Pete Hegseth and RFK, Jr. should be more than ample proof that being white and male is not in itself proof of being qualified.  Trump appealed to minority voters by promising to MAGA (Make America Great Again), but really his slogan should have been MRRA (Make Racism Respectable Again).

And who knows.  Maybe Latinos supported Trump because they like nativism.  Maybe Black people moved in his direction because they found his open racism refreshingly honest.  Maybe Hispanic voters who are harassed by ICE, asked to prove citizenship, arrested, and even have their tires slashed will be pleased at the Trump Administration's zeal in cracking down on illegal immigration and see any personal inconvenience as a small price to pay.  Maybe Black people want to be scapegoats every time something goes wrong and be fired from any good jobs as unqualified DEI hires.

But it seems unlikely.

A Brief Note on the Ukraine War

 

About the time Donald Trump was sworn in, I saw a surge of stories about the Ukrainian war saying that Russia's economy was in shambles, that the ruble was dropping, inflation was getting out of control, manpower shortages were rampant, etc. etc.

I would love for these stories to be true, but color me skeptical.  

They sounded very much like stories aimed to an audience of one geared to encouraging him to hang in there and victory would be his.

Just a Few More Notes

Just a few more notes.

Trump really did order the Army Corps of Engineers to release water in California.  It did not flow down to Los Angeles and end the southern California drought.  The release did no good whatever.  It went to farms in the San Joaquin Valley, not to Los Angeles.  It was not wanted by farmers, who need to irrigate their crops in the summer, not the winter.  The lack of notice even threatened farm equipment and homeless encampments by the river banks.

I am going to give Trump the benefit of the doubt and accept that he had California's best interests in mind and really did intend to end the drought in the south by releasing water into the San Joaquin Valley.  Nonetheless, he has now learned that poorly managed releases can harm California.  Look to him to keep this tool in reserve next time he has a showdown.

And then there is the matter of tariffs. Donald Trump has a lot of certifiably flaky ideas about tariffs, such as that the costs are not paid by US consumers, that tariffs are an unlimited cash cow that can replace income tax, and (quite possibly) that the US should not import anything at all.  But there is at least one rational reason he might like tariffs so much.  A President's authority (granted by statute) to raise tariffs unilaterally is a great way to circumvent Congress' power of the purse strings.

Might that be his real motive?

Will Musk Overreach?

Much the same applies to Elon Musk's coup.  Whether it succeeds or fails will depend on how far he over reaches.

I will admit I did not take his (or Trump's, or the Republicans') talk about budget cuts seriously.  Republicans have been demanding massive budget cuts since Ronald Reagan's day and not acting on them.  Every time a Democrat is in the White House, Republicans freak out about excessive spending.  As soon as Republicans are elected, they lose all interest in spending cuts until a Democrat is elected again.  Then they bemoan their excessive spending in the last administration and vow to mend their ways, a vow that they stick to until the take the White House again.

I expected this time would be the same.  When Elon Musk claimed that he would find $2 trillion in spending cuts, I thought one of three things would happen.  Most likely, he would find the cuts were not so easy and lose interest.  Next most likely -- he would find $200 billion in spending cuts and call it $2 trillion over ten years.  This is a longstanding scam.  Or maybe he would actually propose $2 trillion in spending cuts and be torn to pieces by the outraged mob.  But it seemed unlikely.

I did not anticipate that he and a handful of merry minions would seize control of the treasury and start shutting off funds at will.  I felt at least a small relief when Trump named his advisors that at least Michael Flynn was not among them.  Now Flynn is apparently sorting through treasury records to decide which funds to cut off.  No doubt others of similar ideological bent are also joining in.  

When Donald Trump said he would use impoundment to refuse to spend any  appropriations he disapproved of, I did not anticipate it would take place on a large scale for a simple reason.  All spending has some sort of constituency.  Invariably, the constituency hurt by spending cuts has a louder voice than the broader desire for spending cuts in the abstract.  That is why spending cuts have always been so difficult to do.

The question is going to be how far Elon Musk takes it.

As of January 30 (Thursday), his target was $4 billion a day.  He may be claiming to have "found"  sufficient savings.  Do the math.  It comes to over $1.4 trillion dollars per year -- not that far short of his original $2 trillion goal.  Current budget is about $6.75 trillion.  That is roughly a 20% cut.

It gets worse.  Taking Social Security and Medicare off the table (as Trump has made clear he wants to do), these two programs make about 40% of the budget.  Taking the reduction only from the remaining 60%, would require 30% cuts to everything else.  And then there is interest on the national debt.  I have seen estimates from 13% to 17%.  Take that off the table, and over half the budget is off limits, meaning that to achieve a 20% reduction, you would have to cut everything else by 40%.  Alternately, Musk just might be crazy enough to default on the national debt, which would mean the end of the dollar as the world's reserve currency with unknown but almost certainly ruinous ramifications.

Look, I get that low information voters probably don't even know that Musk has seized control of the treasury.  The idea that he is not elected, or confirmed by the Senate, or subject to the rules that control federal employees is too abstract to matter.  Ditto any laws that Musk may be breaking.  They may very well see the idea that our payments are being controlled by someone outside the government as a good thing.  And the idea of disrupting the status quo and burning it all down is very appealing right now.

And if Musk limits himself to ending foreign aid and eliminating a few programs that seem too "woke," he may very well get aways with it.  But if he attempts cuts on anything approaching the scale he is proposing, even the lowest information voters will notice -- and care.  Political pressure will become overwhelming.  At that point either Musk will back down and seek to maintain his position by reducing his cuts to a manageable level, or Trump will come under overwhelming pressure to remove Musk and his merry minions from the treasury -- by force if necessary.  

Stay tuned.

Shock and Awe Versus Salami Slicing

 

Donald Trump has clearly taken the shock and awe approach to seizing absolute power.  The advantage of this approach is that its promise of getting the seizure of power out of the way right away before anyone can resist.  The disadvantage is that extreme measure do tend to incite resistance.

The alternative is salami slicing tactics -- making one small power grab after another, each too small and inconspicuous to provoke much opposition, but collectively disastrous.  (This is also called the boiling frog technique).

The Monday, January 28 funding freeze is an example of shock and awe gone awry.  The Office of Management and Budget temporarily froze all grants to check for ideologically objectionable content, with the proviso that it did not intend to include Social Security of Medicare.  Medicaid portals closed in all 50 states.  Head Start was put at risk.  So was Meals on Wheels.  Clearly, this was not politically sustainable.  A federal judge ordered payments to resume, pending hearing on Monday, February 3. It seems a safe bet that the judge will hold the freeze to be illegal and probably unconstitutional.  

A part of me wishes the judge had left the stay in place for the week, or at least for a day or two.  A lot of innocent people would have suffered, obviously.  But political pressure would have built.  With the stay in place, Republican members of Congress pasted a smile on their faces and declared their support.  A week of this, or even a few days, would have produced some cracks.  His approval ratings still at 50%, would have suffered. And he would probably have backed down in the face of political pressure.

On the other hand, if Trump had completely backed down (he appears to have only partly backed down) we would have been denied the opportunity for a court ruling on the constitutionality of his actions.  And let us be plain.  The willingness of courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular to hold Trump's actions unconstitutional is driven, at least in part, by how afraid they are that he will defy the ruling.  It seems a safe assumption that there is no risk he would defy the ruling if it meant shutting down all Medicaid portals, defunding Meals on Wheels, etc.

The alternative would be salami slicing. Refuse to spend properly appropriated money for some small project that Trump found ideologically objectionable.  Today's Supreme Court would no doubt have found a way to find his action constitutional, no doubt with some cautionary words warning that there were limits on what they would allow.  So Trump would test those limits with a larger impoundment and see his limits expanded once again.  And so on until all legal limits on Trump's impoundment power ended.

But the political limits would remain.

Which brings back the subject of Elon Musk's coup.

Democracy Died This Weekend. I Don't Know if It Can Come Back

 

When I read this article on how Hitler undermined democracy in just 53 days, I was actually mildly reassured.  Hitler's actions did not look like anything Trump could duplicate.  Hitler had his band of Brown Shirts ready to enforce his will.  Trump has his Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters, but they were suppressed during the Biden Administration and will not reconstitute over night.  Germany made it possible for the federal government to move in and take over state police ministries.  US police power is much too diffuse to allow such a thing.  And then there was the Reichstag Fire -- so convenient to Hitler that many people suspected that the Nazis were behind it.  Current historians believe that the Nazis were not involved in the fire, though obviously they exploited the occasion.  It was the fire that made Hitler's seizure of power possible.  So I suppose if our Capitol burns down, anything is possible, but it seems unlikely.

In any event, I never believed the Trump was Hitler.  Putin, Erdogan, Orban, or even Venezuela's Hugo Chavez seemed like more likely role models.  And all of them took time to subvert democracy and establish a dictatorship.

Traditionally, the way anti-democratic parties have subverted democracy has been to take over the power ministries -- army and police -- and subvert them.  Hence the anxiety (which I share) over appointing Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, Matt Gaetz (or Pam Bondi, though she is somewhat less scary) as Attorney General, and Kash Patel as Director of the FBI.  I am still fearful in this regard, but it will take time -- time for Trump to overreach and resistance to build.

This was not my biggest fear, mostly because of the extremely diffuse nature of police power in the US and the strong tradition against the use of military force for law enforcement.  My bigger fear of was of using the administrative state to shut down the opposition.  For instance, Congressional Republicans could summon lobbyists and tell them that if their clients did not cease all contributions to Democratic parties, candidates, and non-profits by a certain date, no bill they proposed would be considered.  This is legal, so far as I can tell, and was a reason I considered it important for Democrats to control at least one house of Congress.  The Trump Administration could tell all federal contractors that if they donated to any Democratic party, candidate, or non-profit, their contract would be terminated.  I anticipated contractors challenging this as a violation of various federal procurement statutes, Trump challenging the statutes as an unconstitutional infringement on his power, and today's Supreme Court as ruling in his favor.  I also foresaw the IRS withdrawing the tax exempt status of every liberal or left wing non-profit, effectively shutting them down.  And I foresaw them next targeting companies that advertised in unfriendly media, and donations to college funds, although I though this last would generate too much pushback to succeed. 

Well, the Administration is young, but so far I see no signs of this.  (I really hope no one with power in Trumpland reads my blog or it might give them ideas!).

I also recognized that the diffuse nature of our political power had a serious weakness -- money.  I foresaw the Trump Administration using the threat of loss of funds to bring defiant state and local governments into line and thought that they should prioritize planning for such a contingency.

What I did not foresee is what has actually happened -- coup by a small number of computer engineers  taking over the Office of Personnel Management seize control of the Treasury Department payments system and gain power to shut off any government funding they wish or lock any government employees out of the system.  It sounds like a science fiction movie about an evil computer taking over the world.  In this case, it is an evil computer operator taking over the government.