[L]ast summer, the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed conservative majority overturned the Chevron doctrine, ruling that courts, not agencies, should be responsible for interpreting ambiguous statutes set by Congress.
On its face, this decision appears to be a victory for limited-government conservatives in curbing the independent power of federal agencies. However, it is more in line with a wholly different principle: the unitary executive theory. Right-wing proponents of this legal ideology argue that the president should enjoy ultimate, centralized authority over the entire executive branch, without an independent bureaucracy operating on the basis of its own expertise rather than answering directly to the president.
The unitary executive theory is the guiding principle behind Project 2025, the ideological program laid out by the Heritage Foundation (a ringleader of the conservative policy establishment). Affirmed by the overturning of the Chevron doctrine, the extensive policy playbook has often been conflated with the conservative push for limited government, but in reality, it is quite the opposite. Project 2025 and the unitary executive theory in general seek to intentionally enhance the power of the federal government, not weaken it, so that the government may be weaponized by the president.
Like the overturning of the Chevron doctrine, DOGE can, at first glance, be interpreted as a manifestation of limited-government conservatism. However, the true mission of DOGE is to advance the interests of a clique of venture capitalists and tech kingpins who are using the Trump administration as a vehicle to weaken the working class, beginning with the government workforce. DOGE should be understood as the shock troops of powerful venture capitalists and tech oligarchs in their war against workers and the American public.
The key to understanding DOGE as a tool of the tech oligarchy lies in its membership…. A glance at the New York Times’ tracker of DOGE’s known staffers and associates reveals that in reality, most of its staffers aren’t alt-right 19-year-olds. Equally surprisingly, most DOGE members are not being pumped out by the Heritage Foundation or the rest of the conservative policy establishment. Rather, DOGE is mainly composed of tech executives, investment bankers, and private equity partners….
A central mission of the political force behind Trump is to bulldoze the bureaucracy and sublimate the federal government to the forces of big tech and venture capital.
Big tech and venture capital have been rewarded for their fealty with free rein over the federal government—the number of venture capitalists in the new Trump administration has been described as “unprecedented.” In addition to Musk’s broad role as a senior Trump advisor, Sacks was tapped to coordinate the Trump administration’s policy on AI and cryptocurrency. When Trump was first elected, tech investors and venture capitalists found their world, predicated on a mutually-beneficial alliance with America’s liberal establishment, shaken to their core. They have since adapted and now have the keys to the American government.
Musk’s takeover of Twitter demonstrated that the tech oligarchy could hijack a source of central authority (in this case, authority in culture and communication) and use its power to amplify its own interests.
On one side: profit-seeking venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs. On the other side: the people—and the government entrusted with protecting them, itself an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of workers with families and livelihoods of their own. The war DOGE has waged on the federal bureaucracy was anticipated by the rise of private equity and Musk’s makeover of Twitter just as much as by Project 2025 and the overturning of the Chevron doctrine. It is extremely telling that DOGE is primarily staffed not by archconservative Heritage Foundation activists, nor by far-right online memelords, but by lawyers and executives from tech companies and venture capital firms.
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