The factor concerning the takeover of key US authorities establishments by the world’s richest man and his strike power of former interns is that it’s taking place so quick.
It’s been three weeks since Elon Musk’s brokers took over the authorities’s IT and HR departments. Since then, the actions of his so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity have had the cartography of a horror film, DOGE selecting off companies one after the other based mostly on slasher logic, feeding an unslakeable thirst for cost-cutting and information.
Day by day brings recent incursions. Three weeks in the past the US believed in humanitarian support. It helped individuals who had been ripped off by huge firms. It funded the infrastructure essential to make America a beacon of scientific innovation. Now the United States Company for Worldwide Growth is gutted, the Shopper Monetary Safety Bureau is on ice, and Nationwide Institutes of Well being grants are handcuffed. A lot for all that.
These are spreadsheet cruelties, executed with a click on. The lack of actual peoples’ jobs and lives—sure, regardless of what X-famous conspiracy theorists will inform you, USAID saved lives—all immaterial in comparison with the pursuit of a tighter stability sheet.
Three weeks in the past, a 19-year-old who calls himself “Massive Balls” on-line didn’t have entry to authorities personnel information and extra. A 25-year-old with a closet stuffed with racist tweets hadn’t gotten the keys to Treasury methods that pay out $5.45 trillion annually. Elon Musk hadn’t turned the Oval Workplace right into a romper room for his 4-year-old son.
The pace is technique, in fact, flooding the zone in order that neither the media nor the courts can hold tempo. Lawsuits and court docket orders transfer on a special timescale than this slash-and-burn method. (At this tempo, DOGE can have tapped into each final authorities server lengthy earlier than the Supreme Courtroom even has an opportunity to weigh in.) But it surely’s additionally reflexive. The primary order of enterprise in a company takeover is to slash prices as rapidly as attainable. Should you can’t fireplace individuals, provide them buyouts. In the event that they received’t take the buyouts, discover a solution to fireplace them anyway. Hold reducing till you hit bone.
That is the way you get an government order declaring that “every company rent no multiple worker for each 4 staff that depart,” an arbitrary ratio with no regard for precise staffing wants. It’s the way you get a whole lot of federal authorities buildings on the public sale block regardless of how absolutely occupied they’re. It’s each excessive and ill-considered, a race to empty the city’s solely effectively.
After which … what? That is the query that Elon Musk and DOGE have didn’t reply, as a result of there isn’t a reply. Does the US authorities have to change into a revenue engine? To return shareholder worth? Does Medicaid have to display a product-market slot in time for the following funding spherical?
That is advisor logic. That is an engineering dash whose inevitable end line is the unwinding of the social contract. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness in any case; it dies in JIRA tickets filed by Palantir alums.