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 choosing off companies one after the other primarily based on slasher logic, feeding an unslakeable thirst for cost-cutting and knowledge.
On daily basis brings recent incursions. Three weeks in the past the US believed in humanitarian assist. It helped individuals who had been ripped off by huge companies. It funded the infrastructure essential to make America a beacon of scientific innovation. Now the United States Company for Worldwide Improvement is gutted, the Client 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 “Huge Balls” on-line didn’t have entry to authorities personnel information and extra. A 25-year-old with a closet filled with racist tweets hadn’t gotten the keys to Treasury techniques that pay out $5.45 trillion every year. Elon Musk hadn’t turned the Oval Workplace right into a romper room for his 4-year-old son.
The velocity 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 unique timescale than this slash-and-burn strategy. (At this tempo, DOGE could have tapped into each final authorities server lengthy earlier than the Supreme Court docket even has an opportunity to weigh in.) Nevertheless it’s additionally reflexive. The primary order of enterprise in a company takeover is to slash prices as rapidly as potential. In the event you can’t hearth folks, supply them buyouts. In the event that they gained’t take the buyouts, discover a approach to hearth them anyway. Maintain slicing till you hit bone.
That is the way you get an govt order declaring that “every company rent no a couple of worker for each 4 workers that depart,” an arbitrary ratio with no regard for precise staffing wants. It’s the way you get tons of 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 nicely.
After which … what? That is the query that Elon Musk and DOGE have did not reply, as a result of there isn’t any reply. Does the US authorities have to develop into a revenue engine? To return shareholder worth? Does Medicaid have to show a product-market slot in time for the following funding spherical?
That is marketing consultant 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.
