Elon Musk’s function as the pinnacle of the Division of Authorities Effectivity, often known as DOGE, is on the floor a dramatic effort to overtake the inefficiencies of federal forms. However beneath the rhetoric of cost-cutting and regulatory streamlining lies a troubling state of affairs.
Musk has been appointed what is named a “special government employee” accountable for the White Home workplace previously often known as the U.S. Digital Service, which was renamed the U.S. DOGE Service on the primary day of President Donald Trump’s second time period. The Musk staff’s purported objectives are to maximise effectivity and to remove waste and redundancy.
That may sound like a daring transfer towards Silicon Valley-style innovation in governance. Nonetheless, the deeper motivations driving Musk’s involvement are unlikely to be purely altruistic.
Musk has an infinite company empire, ambitions in synthetic intelligence, need for monetary energy and a long-standing disdain for presidency oversight. His entry to delicate authorities methods and talent to restructure companies, with the opaque decision-making guiding DOGE up to now, have positioned Musk to extract unprecedented monetary and strategic advantages for each himself and his firms, which embrace the electrical automobile firm Tesla and house transport firm SpaceX.
One historic parallel particularly is hanging. In 1600, the British East India Firm, a service provider transport agency, started with unique rights to conduct commerce within the Indian Ocean area earlier than slowly buying quasi-governmental powers and finally ruling with an iron fist over British colonies in Asia, together with most of what’s now India. In 1677, the corporate gained the correct to mint forex on behalf of the British crown.
As I clarify in my upcoming guide “Who Elected Big Tech?” the U.S. is witnessing an identical sample of a non-public firm taking up authorities operations.
But what took centuries within the colonial period is now unfolding at lightning velocity in mere days by digital means. Within the twenty first century, information entry and digital monetary methods have changed bodily buying and selling posts and personal armies. Communications are the important thing to energy now, moderately than brute energy.
A safety officer blocks U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, proper, from coming into the U.S. Environmental Safety Company headquarters on Feb. 6, 2025, in an effort to fulfill with DOGE employees.
Al Drago/Getty Photos
The info pipeline
Viewing Musk’s strikes as an influence seize turns into clearer when inspecting his company empire. He controls a number of firms which have federal contracts and are topic to authorities laws. SpaceX and Tesla, in addition to tunneling agency The Boring Firm, the mind science firm Neuralink, and synthetic intelligence agency xAI all function in markets the place authorities oversight could make or break fortunes.
In his new function, Musk can oversee – and probably dismantle – the federal government companies which have historically constrained his companies. The Nationwide Freeway Site visitors Security Administration has repeatedly investigated Tesla’s Autopilot system; the Securities and Alternate Fee has penalized Musk for market-moving tweets; environmental laws have constrained SpaceX.
By DOGE, all these oversight mechanisms could possibly be weakened or eradicated beneath the guise of effectivity.
However essentially the most catastrophic facet of Musk’s management at DOGE is its unprecedented entry to authorities information. DOGE staff reportedly have digital permission to see information within the U.S. authorities’s fee system, which incorporates checking account data, Social Safety numbers and revenue tax paperwork. Reportedly, they’ve additionally seized the flexibility to change the system’s software program, information, transactions and data.
A number of media experiences point out that Musk’s employees have already made modifications to the applications that course of funds for Social Safety beneficiaries and authorities contractors to make it simpler to dam funds and conceal data of funds blocked, made or altered.
However DOGE staff solely want to have the ability to learn the info to make copies of Individuals’ most delicate private data.
A federal court docket has ordered that to not occur – a minimum of for now. Even so, funneling the info into Grok, Musk’s xAI-created synthetic intelligence system, which is already related with the Musk-owned X, previously often known as Twitter, would create an unparalleled functionality for predicting financial shifts, figuring out authorities vulnerabilities and modeling voter habits.
That’s an infinite and alarming quantity of data and energy for anyone individual to have.
Candidate Donald Trump speaks at a key cryptocurrency business convention in July 2024.
AP Picture/Mark Humphrey
Cryptocurrency coup?
Like Trump himself and lots of of his closest advisers, Musk can also be deeply concerned in cryptocurrency. The parallel emergence of Trump’s personal cryptocurrency and DOGE’s obvious alignment with the cryptocurrency often known as Dogecoin suggests greater than coincidence. I consider it factors to a coordinated technique for management of America’s cash and financial coverage, successfully inserting the US in completely non-public arms.
The genius – and hazard – of this technique lies in the truth that every step may seem justified in isolation: modernizing authorities methods, bettering effectivity, updating fee infrastructure. However collectively, they create the scaffolding for transferring much more monetary energy to the already rich.
Musk’s authoritarian tendencies, evident in his forceful administration of X and his assertion that it was unlawful to publish the names of people that work for him, recommend how he may wield his new powers. Firms important of Musk might face sudden audits; regulatory companies scrutinizing his companies might discover their budgets slashed; allies might obtain privileged entry to authorities contracts.
This isn’t hypothesis – it’s the logical extension of DOGE’s authority mixed with Musk’s demonstrated habits.
Critics are calling Musk’s actions at DOGE a large company coup. Others are merely calling it a coup. The protest motion is gaining momentum in Washington, D.C., and across the nation, however it’s unlikely that road protests alone can cease what Musk is doing.
Who can successfully examine a gaggle designed to dismantle oversight itself? The administration’s unlawful firing of a minimum of a dozen inspectors normal earlier than the Musk operation started suggests a deliberate technique to remove authorities accountability. The Republican-led Congress, intently aligned with Trump, might not need to step in; however even when it did, Musk is shifting far quicker than Congress ever does.
Protests have arisen nationwide in opposition to Elon Musk’s actions within the federal authorities.
Drew Angerer/AFP by way of Getty Photos
Destroy the republic, construct a startup nation?
Taken collectively, all of Musk’s and Trump’s strikes lay the muse for what cryptocurrency investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan calls “the network state.”
The thought is {that a} digital nation might kind on-line earlier than establishing any bodily presence. Consider the community state like a tech startup firm with its personal cryptocurrency – as an alternative of declaring independence and combating for sovereignty, it first builds neighborhood and digital methods. By the point a Musk-aligned cryptocurrency gained official standing, the underlying construction and relationships would already be in place, making alternate options impractical.
Changing extra of the world’s monetary system into privately managed cryptocurrencies would take energy away from nationwide governments, which should reply to their very own folks. Musk has already begun this effort, utilizing his wealth and social media attain to interact in politics not solely within the U.S. but in addition a number of European nations, together with Germany.
A nation ruled by a cryptocurrency-based system would now not be run by the folks dwelling in its territory however by those that might might afford to purchase the digital forex. On this state of affairs, I’m involved that Musk, or the Communist Celebration of China, Russian President Vladimir Putin or AI-surveillance conglomerate Palantir, might render irrelevant Congress’ energy over authorities spending and motion. And alongside the best way, it might take away the facility to carry presidents accountable from Congress, the judiciary and Americans.
All of this clearly presents a thicket of conflict-of-interest issues which are wholly unprecedented in scope and scale.
The query going through Individuals, subsequently, isn’t whether or not authorities wants modernization – it’s whether or not they’re keen to sacrifice democracy in pursuit of Musk’s model of effectivity. After we grant tech leaders direct management over authorities capabilities, we’re not simply streamlining forms – we’re essentially altering the connection between non-public energy and public governance. I consider we’re undermining American nationwide safety, in addition to the facility of We, the Folks.
Essentially the most harmful inefficiency of all could also be Individuals’ delayed response to this disaster.