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In a 4am social media post last week, Elon Musk called his project to hack back the US federal bureaucracy the “revolution of the people”. What the world’s richest man is attempting looks, in reality, less like a popular uprising than a power grab by the executive branch, backed by President Donald Trump. Dismantling federal agencies, freezing funding and pushing staff to resign goes far beyond a mere restructuring. It aims to shift the constitutional separation and balance of powers.
Parts of the US bureaucracy are no doubt bloated and inefficient, and need modernisation. Most American voters support this idea. Reforming creaking bureaucracies often requires radical efforts. Yet it also needs detailed planning, transparency and oversight. All these are missing from what the Trump administration is now doing.
The Department of Government Efficiency that Musk heads is not a government agency established by Congress but an opaque body created by executive order. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has argued it has no authority to make spending decisions or shut down programmes — let alone entire agencies.
In their quest to find savings and root out “woke” policies, Musk’s team of 20-something coders have nonetheless managed to infiltrate agencies including the US Treasury and the state and health departments; the $40bn USAID agency has in effect closed down. Tens of thousands of civil servants have been fired or suspended. Doge operatives have accessed troves of data, from intelligence records to employees’ bank details and health records, raising risks for privacy and national security. Handing such power to a corporate boss with an interest in shaping policies and regulation creates clear conflicts.
Musk has claimed he can save $2tn from the federal budget — more than half of all discretionary spending. Yet that is unrealisable without cutting back programmes that millions of Americans rely on. Rather than a purringly efficient bureaucracy, the result is more likely to be a federal government with huge holes hacked out of it at Doge’s whim. Beyond America, the gutting of foreign aid is already wrecking US soft power and endangering millions of vulnerable people.
As well as vandalising the machinery of government, however, this supposed efficiency drive appears to be being used as cover to bolster the power of the executive branch to drive through its priorities and neuter opposition. The Musk team’s tactics in government departments resemble his takeover of Twitter, where he fired 80 per cent of the workforce, sweeping away potential critics and opponents — and many who really understood how the organisation worked.
The Doge team’s efforts to take control of payment systems dovetail, too, with the administration’s attempt to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars of federal grants and loans, later rescinded after it was temporarily halted by a judge. Both look like a bid to challenge a 1974 law that makes it illegal for the president to refuse to spend money that Congress has appropriated — tilting the balance of power from the legislative to the executive branch.
With Congress largely supine, it is falling to the courts to defend the constitutional order. But the administration’s flurry of orders and actions make it hard for pro-democracy activists and judges to keep up. Vice-president JD Vance has suggested the president could disregard court rulings that attempted to stop him from firing civil servants. Like populist regimes elsewhere, the administration might also seek to blame judges for obstructing its agenda, which could erode public trust in the judiciary. Yet sacrificing the rule of law to government efficiency is a good way to end up with neither.
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