Casey Wetherbee. Jacobin - One of Musk’s recent rewards for his service to the Trump campaign was the unveiling of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on November 12. According to the Trump transition team’s announcement, DOGE will aim to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” To lead DOGE, Trump taps Musk as well as biotech mogul and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who also joined Trump on the campaign trail as a surrogate and sycophant...
It’s hard to take this proposal seriously, but even the unserious parts of it have adverse ramifications. Naming the “department” after a ten-year-old meme is just one of a litany of pathetically unfunny Elon Musk moments, but it has also had the likely-intended impact of driving up the price of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin — of which Musk may possess billions. Given that Trump brazenly enriched himself from his own presidency, this type of behavior is not only tacitly encouraged, but illustrative of what the government can do for the ultrawealthy.
On the campaign trail, Musk arbitrarily declared that he could easily identify and eliminate $2 trillion in wasteful government spending, despite all discretionary spending in 2024 coming out to only $1.6 trillion. It’s hard to believe that Musk put any critical thought into this figure. If the government were to slash $2 trillion from the budget, it would be almost impossible to do so without decimating Social Security and Medicare. To someone as egotistical and contemptuous of working people as Musk, these social costs may be worth it just to prove that he could do it.
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