When it comes to the administrative state, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s much-touted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) presumably has the same intention: to take a chainsaw to the bureaucracy and cut spending. The problem – other than DOGE actually being merely an advisory commission with no power of its own – is that its heroic swamp-battlers have to work somewhat backwards, identifying “inefficiencies” that can justify a reduction in the headcount of bureaucrats and agencies, freeing up money. This will naturally be met with fierce resistance from the bureaucrats, who in fact essentially control their own budgets.
Lambert here: This was published on December 12, 2024. Elon Musk only waved his big swingin’ chainsaw around at CPAC on Feb 21, 2025.
The obvious play should be to simply cut off the money to the departments and agencies most deserving of death by simply having the President’s executive branch refuse to spend any sums already budgeted by Congress (at which point unpaid bureaucrats can begin to fire themselves), but this is unfortunately prevented by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Obviously unconstitutional to anyone that still believes in distinct branches of government, the Act was passed to prevent President Nixon from doing exactly this during his own sadly-failed effort to fight the deep state (Nixon, Now More Than Ever!).
The Department of Government Efficiency is a fun name, and probably even tactically beneficial politically. But insofar as the DOGE is part of the counter-revolution, an over-emphasis on “efficiency” risks being misleading, even to those involved on the inside. Saving taxpayer money is not the real purpose of the DOGE; smashing the powerbase of the managerial regime and dismantling its institutions is the real purpose of the DOGE. These priorities should not be confused. Which brings us to the next principle to keep in mind…
Trump’s sweeping electoral victory was built on a working-class populist backlash against a radically out-of-touch managerial elite, which has spent decades assaulting the economic, cultural, and moral foundations of American working- and middle-class life. Joining in an unusual political coalition with this conservative-leaning working-class base was a new counter-elite: the wealthy right-wing progressives of the tech world, such as Elon Musk, who rightly suspect incoherent woke dogmas and out-of-control government bureaucracy are sabotaging American innovation and dynamism.
What’s united these two very different groups in a new right-wing fusionism is shared frustration with the broader professional managerial class (PMC), whose explosive growth since the 1960s has made oppressive bureaucratic management, petty authoritarianism by a smug and condescending yet decidedly mid-wit “expertocracy,” and constant top-down leftist social engineering the norm in almost every area of American society. Both parties want to be freed from the weight of this smothering managerial interference in their affairs.
But neither will get their wish from simply slimming down the government. It would require a more fundamental societal shift, in which the relative status and power of the PMC as a whole is reduced. Nor will the power of the managerial regime be subdued so that real reform can be achieved until its powerbase, the PMC, is subdued.
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