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.
