The knee-jerk reaction from many on our side of the political spectrum toward what billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) should be doing has tended to be less about restraint and more about a ‘cut anything and everything possible and let God sort it out’ approach. The federal leviathan, after all, has grown to seemingly uncontrollable size and scope, and any attempt to reign it in, however haphazardly orchestrated, understandably seems admirable.
That was the camp I was in for the first few weeks of Trump’s term. If the house you want to reclaim is completely covered in kudzu, does it really matter where you start cutting? Oh, I knew Democrats, neocons, and other assorted Deep State types were aghast at what DOGE was trying to do and accusing it of all sorts of nefarious things, but to me that was all white noise and completely predictable nonsense. Musk was just ticking off all the right people, and so much the better.
And I largely still believe that, although I did rethink some things when I received an email from my cousin, an aeronautical engineer who works, along with her veteran husband, for the Department of Defense. These are brilliant, top notch people who got into the federal workforce for all the right reasons. They also happen to be Trump voters who are huge supporters of what he is trying to do. Here is an excerpt from her email:
“The Republicans are about to make sure that every Republican DoD employee who voted for Trump will never vote Republican again. It's a shame. The Republicans need to show some compassion and respect for what we do, and they need to realize the national security implications of feeding our weekly achievements into an AI large language model. They are about to slash and burn the entire DoD and that is terrifying. Not to mention that we purposefully accept lower salaries than contractor positions because we value serving our country above making someone's bottom line look good. This entire situation is completely insane.”
In a subsequent DM conversation about her frustrations, my cousin also lamented the usage of AI to prune people based on “BS emails.” “Who knows what will happen to people on longer term leave like parental leave,” she wrote.
To her, it’s not so much about having to report a week’s accomplishments, but where that report is going and what it is being used for. And that’s the criticism that seems to be dominant on this of late. If a department or company, private or government, asked its employees to cite five weekly accomplishments in an email to one’s supervisor, no reasonable person would have issues. But when that email is being fed into some AI model that conceivably will help decide whether the respondent’s job is worthy of being kept, to the exclusion of the worker’s supervisor and co-workers, the frustration is understandable. Whether it’s someone on leave, in the field and unable to respond, or even not the best at writing or, let’s face it, making up accomplishments in a way that sounds impressive enough, the potential for errors is rampant.
Lots of budget-hawk X users responded to my post about my cousin with pithy comments and even weird assertions that I was making it all up for some inexplicable reason. Apparently, if you aren’t all-in on everything DOGE is doing and how they are doing it, that makes you some sort of Deep State collectivist, or something.
If that’s true though, does that make Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been absolutely incredible at his job of late, also a Deep State collectivist? Because, as The New York Times revealed Friday, Rubio and Musk went toe to toe in front of President Trump in an explosive Oval Office meeting that ended with Trump reigning in Musk and, ultimately, DOGE losing the ability to just fire people willy-nilly without the approval of department heads.
Should any of us be worried about this sort of palace intrigue? Not at all. Contrary to Trump’s tumultuous first term when many if not most of his cabinet and staff seemed to be actively working against him and his agenda, all the people in his office that day share the same overarching goal. They are just inevitably going to differ on how to get there, and that’s fine as long as the train is headed in the right direction and not going off the rails. In fact, passionately hashing out differences is critical to the success of any team anywhere.
Musk may have his ego bruised for a few minutes, but this arrangement is the way things should be. DOGE should always be looking for waste, fraud, efficiencies, and potential synergies throughout the federal leviathan. But putting every decision in their hands is akin to using a bulldozer to dig out a potted plant. Something is bound to break. And when it does, given that the federal government workforce is made up of real people, you don’t just risk further ticking off the left, you risk losing your own voters.
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