With DOGE, Elon Musk is promoting someone else’s idea again — in government

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have laid out their plans for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a currently nonexistent entity they say will “cut the federal government down to size.” Though DOGE isn’t a real department — and may in fact just be President-elect Donald Trump’s way of placating Musk by giving him the appearance of a real job — it represents a long-running right-wing attempt to gut the civil service, a plan the incoming administration fully supports.

DOGE could be a mechanism for a Musk shadow presidency, a nonsense job designed to keep Musk busy without giving him real power, or a curious mix of the two. In any case, Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed cutting “thousands” of federal regulations and determining the “minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.” 

Even if these policies aren’t executed by DOGE’s “volunteer” advisers, Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance have put forth similar ideas in the past. Near the end of his first term, Trump signed an executive order stripping certain federal positions from employment protections, a tool Trump and his allies hoped would be used to purge dissenters from the ranks of the so-called “deep state.” The order, called Schedule F, was never implemented — but it will likely be back on the table once Trump takes office in January.

Vance, too, has raised the possibility of doing away with the federal bureaucracy. In a 2021 interview with right-wing podcaster Jack Murphy, Vance said Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

This time around, it’s not clear whether the courts would stop Trump, who, in his first term, nominated more judges to the federal judiciary than any of his predecessors and will inherit an extremely friendly Supreme Court. And as Musk and Ramaswamy noted in their explanation of how DOGE will function, the incoming Trump administration has something new at its disposal: the recent Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the landmark case that overturned Chevron deference.

“The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not bureaucrats deep within federal agencies,” Musk and Ramaswamy write. “With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government.”

These suggestions sound a lot like a proposal to do away with the civil service first floated by Curtis Yarvin, a “neoreactionary” philosopher and self-proclaimed monarchist with ties to Peter Thiel. Back in 2012, Yarvin put forth his own idea to “reboot” the government, which he called “Retire All Government Employees,” or RAGE. 

Yarvin recently said on a podcast that he’s never met Musk — “I don’t think his bodyguards would allow it” — and denies he has any sway over other members of Trumpworld, including Vance. (He once referred to Vance as a “random normie politician whom I’ve barely even met.”) But Yarvin’s ideas have purchase among members of the incoming Trump administration, including Michael Anton, a fellow at the right-wing Claremont Institute who is in the running to be Trump’s deputy national security adviser.

Unlike the incoming members of the Trump administration — and unofficial advisers like Musk and Ramaswamy — Yarvin has made it clear that his ultimate goal is to do away with liberal democracy altogether. Yarvin isn’t shy about identifying as a monarchist or suggesting that the US should be run by a “benevolent” dictator. (Nor, for that matter, is Anton.) But Musk’s vision for DOGE isn’t all that different from RAGE. The goal is mass deregulation — a weakening of checks and balances and a major cut to basic government services, all in the name of concentrating power among a small group of plutocrats. 

On X, Musk and his allies have stressed the need for RAGE by highlighting seemingly bizarre projects that have received government funding, many of which are scientific studies whose total cost is a fraction of a percent of the overall federal budget. But DOGE isn’t just about cutting costs — it’s about doing away with the types of safety regulations that Tesla, SpaceX, and Musk’s other companies are regularly accused of flouting. It’s about saving money for himself, not for you or me or anyone else.