DOGE's Real Aims Have Nothing To Do With Efficiency

Assessing the damage from DOGE and the way it represents an authoritarian innovation

This post started as an interesting assignment from the news site NOTUS: 200 words about something the Trump administration has done in its first year “that has received little to no attention yet will have long-term consequences for the country.” The other contributors include Jonathan Friedman of PEN America on self-censorship; Rep. Jamie Raskin, on President Trump having relieved the January 6 insurrectionists he pardoned of the obligation to pay any legal damages and fines; and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, on “the war on offshore wind power.” You can read the whole feature here.

I have expanded my NOTUS thoughts into an essay for you. Here is the central point: DOGE may seem like a failure, if we take on good faith Elon Musk’s claim that its agenda was greater government efficiency and savings. The architects of DOGE were never really interested in “efficiency.” That was just a ruse in the tradition of other “drain the swamp” initiatives by autocrats. A new New York Times investigation finds that under DOGE, federal spending increased, not decreased; DOGE’s boasts of cost-cutting were based on apparently false claims and dodgy bookkeeping.

If we look at things from an autocratic point of view, though, then DOGE has been all too successful. Many media outlets believed Musk when he announced in May 2025 that he was “stepping back” to focus on his ailing Tesla business and other concerns, even though President Trump stated on that occasion that Musk was “not really leaving.” In fact, DOGE has entrenched itself within the Trump administration and continues to exercise significant, unorthodox power as a parallel civil service loyal to Musk and his hand-picked associates.

DOGE has been the cover for an audacious strategy of autocratic capture and oligarchic infiltration of the nerve centers of a superpower to extract information. The apparent goal is to create a “single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of US citizens and residents,” which could be used for government surveillance, as a report by Brookings warned. DOGE also gave Musk opportunities to dismantle agencies that were threatening his companies with investigations and fines, and to steer domestic and foreign government business toward his products.

DOGE has also furthered the Fascistic project of Russ Vought, a Project 2025 architect and Director of the Office of Management and Budget, of inflicting psychological pain on civil servants as part of destroying government as we conceive of it in a democracy. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought stated in private speeches in 2023 and 2024 that were reported by Pro Publica.

You need only read this heartbreaking new Washington Post investigation, based on interviews with some of the 300,000 civil servants forced out of their jobs in 2025, to understand the awful human, social, and economic toll of achieving a “once-unthinkable transformation” of government bureaucracy.

The DOGE website claims that Americans voted for this self-destruction. But the DOGE Blitzkrieg was the one thing in the Trump administration that observers of autocracy, myself included, did not see coming. That’s the nature of coups.

DOGE website, accessed December 24, 2025.

With this in mind, it is useful to review how DOGE executed its “hostile takeover of the federal government,” as sociologist Brooke Harrington defined it in late February. The first step was Trump giving Musk a role in the new administration. Referring to this news in a December 2024 Lucid essay, I warned that “something sinister is unfolding at the heart of American government. Because it is dangerous in a new way, we lack the language to label it and communicate the extent of the threat.” And it was hard to understand the true threat DOGE constituted, precisely because it was an unprecedented entity in U.S. governance, as was the Trump-Musk power-sharing agreement in the first months of the administration.

We all watched as Musk’s operatives occupied government buildings, sometimes locking out members of Congress; fired thousands of government employees after barring them from their own computer systems; and physically removed those who sought to stop them from seizing digital property.

Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid was perhaps the first to name the developing catastrophe. “Elon Musk is staging a coup,” he wrote on Feb. 1 on his Substack. “Not with tanks in the streets of militias at government buildings, but with spreadsheets, executive orders, and a network of loyalists embedded in the federal bureaucracy.” On Feb.2, I wrote that a new kind of coup, was unfolding in America at the hands of Musk and his “plunder operation” DOGE. Soon after, TIME magazine showed Musk at the presidential desk in the Oval Office.

The stories of DOGE aggressions at individual agencies are instructive. At the National Institutes of Health, Musk’s goons used authoritarian intimidation tactics, as the Washington Post piece reveals. They searched some employees’ cars in the parking lot, and stalked other civil servants in bathrooms, asking for their ID cards.

Musk’s announcement that he was stepping back from DOGE may now be seen as yet another ruse, given that it coincided with plans for DOGE expansion. “This doesn’t sound like a group that is going away, it sounds like one that’s digging in like a parasite,” an IT specialist at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) told WIRED, referring to heightened DOGE influence on the work of government agencies.

Take the example of the expanding power of Thomas Shedd, a former software engineer at Tesla who led the DOGE takeover of the General Services Administration, which manages technology in government buildings and thus was an early target. Shedd remains director of Technology Transformation Services within the GSA, but from mid-March to August, he was also Chief Information Officer at the Department of Labor.

Now we’ve been told that DOGE has been recently disbanded as a centralized department. Yet DOGE continues to have a presence and operate in secrecy and without oversight in hundreds of US government agencies, offices, and departments. in Idaho, for example, more than 70 departments, offices, programs, and commissions are being considered for cuts by the DOGE Task Force. And Vought is now pledging to make DOGE’s cuts and changes permanent.

Musk apparently remains involved in White House decisions involving national security and defense. His SpaceX company has been awarded $5.9 billion in contracts to support the US Space Force through 2029, and a $102 million Air Force contract. And at Trump’s press conference about selling F-35 fighters to the Saudi government, the president deferred to Musk for information on the transaction, saying, “Elon knows the time frame” for sales, implying Musk had been involved in the deal.

All of this represents an innovation in the autocrat-oligarch relationship. Oligarchs normally operate outside government, buying up media or financial properties that they can leverage in service of the autocrat. Here the oligarch is operating alongside the head of state and has a parallel civil service inside government that answers to him. In this and other ways, the United States is now serving as a laboratory for the next phase of the autocratic playbook.