DOGE as a Control Mechanism of the Trump-Musk Co-Presidency

Just because it won't significantly impact spending doesn't mean it won't matter

Ostensibly, the goal of DOGE is to cut government spending. Elon Musk asserts that it is eliminating $4 billion in spending a day. There appears to be no evidence for that claim, other than Elon fans putting up a clock that automatically records that number no matter what happens in the world.

Anyone who knows anything about the budget understands that the goals that DOGE has set are basically impossible to reach, and practically nothing it does will significantly impact the debt. As The Economist points out,

The government is on track to spend $7trn this year. Nearly two-thirds of this consists of mandatory expenditures on Social Security and health insurance. Interest payments account for over 10%. That leaves a quarter of the budget for discretionary spending, a category which in theory is somewhat easier to trim—except that half of it goes on defence and Republicans would like to increase such spending. In other words, no matter how aggressive DOGE is, its actions are focused on barely more than a tenth of the overall federal budget.

Much has been made of the firings, but even if you let go of 1 in 4 government workers, you’d only reduce federal spending by 1%. You’d need to cut spending by about a quarter to balance the budget, so firing that many people would get you about 4% of the way there.

None of this makes all that much sense. But even if DOGE has limited effects on the budget, that doesn’t mean that it won’t have a major policy impact. I think, like Noah Smith, that the better way to understand DOGE is as a tool to reshape the federal workforce and its activities in accordance with the wishes of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

We can make an analogy here to the way that communist regimes have exerted control over society through the appointments of commissars to governmental and non-governmental institutions, including factories and different branches of the military. During the Russian Civil War, for example, the Red Army used political commissars who reported directly to the Communist Party to maintain loyalty to Bolshevik ideology, a system that continued after the establishment of the Soviet Union. In The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers, Richard McGregor writes,

The notion of a party controlling the government, especially when the same party effectively is the government, remains conceptually difficult for many to grasp…

Under the Politburo sits a vast and largely secret party system which controls the entire public sector, including the military, and the lives of the officials who work in all of China’s five levels of government, starting in Beijing. The Party staffs government ministries and agencies through an elaborate and opaque appointments system; instructs them on policy through behind-the-scenes committees; and guides their political posture and public statements through the propaganda network. The officials working in public institutions are trained, and re-trained, at regular intervals, through the Party’s extensive nationwide network of 2,800 schools, before they are eligible for promotion. Should they be accused of bribery, fraud or any other criminal conduct, they are investigated by the Party first and only turned over to the civilian justice system on its say-so. Even then, any punishment meted out by the courts is at the behest and direction of party organs, which ultimately control the judges directly, and the lawyers indirectly, through legal associations and licensing.

Trump has no organized party behind him analogous to the CCP. But how to control hostile or potentially hostile forces within one’s own government is a recurring problem for rulers. Over the decades, the American system has evolved laws and norms to maintain limits on the president’s power over the bureaucracy that he is the head of. The FBI Director is appointed to a 10-year term, members of the Federal Reserve serve for 14 years, members of the EEOC and NLRB for 5. Trump has broken norms in some cases by getting rid of people he technically has the right to remove. He fired James Comey in 2017 before his term expired, appointed Chris Wray, and then nudged Wray into resigning before he took office for the second time by announcing that he would fire him too.

DOGE is removing personnel at an even more granular level. Not located in any one agency, the organization maintains direct lines to Trump and Musk, ensuring that departments do not thwart the will of the president and his agenda. Members of the DOGE team have reportedly been conducting short interviews with employees asking them to justify their jobs. This is ostensibly to help the government work better, but in practice this control over personnel selects for loyalty to the administration and a willingness to do its bidding. A notable incident involved David Lebryk, a senior career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk retired on January 31 after clashing with Musk's team over granting DOGE access to Treasury's payment system. Those who play ball keep their jobs, while those who object to DOGE’s mission are fired, placed on leave, or, as in this case, nudged into retirement. There was a similar incident at USAID, which led to the suspension of two senior security officials at the agency.

So DOGE has been trying to get much of the government under its control. At the same time, sections of the bureaucracy that are certain to be hostile to the administration and its goals are simply being eliminated. USAID, seen as a pillar of the “Deep State” that is both culturally liberal and hostile to Trump’s foreign policy instincts, is in the process of being dismantled. The president planned to either fire or put on leave all but a few hundred of around 10,000 staff members. On February 7, a judge issued a temporary restraining order delaying this move, and it has now been extended to the 21st of the month. Regardless of what happens, if the president is determined to weaken or dismantle the agency, he will in the end find a way to do so regardless of what the courts say.

The war on DEI can be seen in a similar light. As of February 12, The New York Times counts 280 DEI workers as having been fired or placed on leave across the EPA, Veterans Affairs, the Department of Education, the Coast Guard, and EEOC. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been ordered to halt all of its work, which means stopping any ongoing investigations and not issuing any new rules. The EEOC and NLRB have seen their activities severely limited by Trump ensuring that they do not have the required number of members to operate normally. As employees are fired or no longer being allowed to do their old jobs, the Trump administration is making sure that it screens any new workers for loyalty. The Office of Personnel Management, which works out of the White House, is now taking a more active role in hiring across the government.

Practically all of these moves have been or will be challenged in the courts. As with the litigation around USAID, a judge recently blocked the Trump administration from firing employees in CFPB without cause or reducing its funding. Some moves may be delayed or stopped from going ahead, but the judiciary can’t be everywhere, and many of the powers Trump is claiming aren’t legally all that questionable. For example, it is much easier to fire federal workers that are on their initial one- or two-year probationary period, and Trump has been particularly targeting this group. Moreover, many currently applicable temporary restraining orders will eventually be lifted and some decisions that go against the administration will be overturned on appeal. The current Supreme Court takes a broad view of executive power, even if it in the end may not go along with Trump’s most extreme claims. All of this means that we are in the end going to see a stronger and more unified executive.

I don’t know if this was Musk’s plan, but efficiency and reducing spending serve as excuses for the top of the executive branch to shape the federal bureaucracy. Focusing on firing people and reducing the number of workers makes little sense as a priority if those are your goals, since any impact on the deficit will be minimal. In fact, putting workers on leave is a terrible way to improve efficiency, since you’re still paying them even though they’re not doing anything. But if you want to control executive branch employees, getting inconvenient workers out of the way, whether you are paying them or not, is an excellent method to achieve that end.

There’s perhaps an analogy here that can be made to DEI. Its practitioners have always tried to sell it as something non-ideological, yet it in effect has forced private and public institutions to accept certain contentious ideas regarding race and sex, and selects for individuals who have down-the-line leftist political views. Someone being a supporter of DEI has always been code for not only being in favor of affirmative action, but also trans rights, gun control, strict environmental regulations, and so on. Getting past a screening process focused on “government efficiency”, as defined by Trump-Musk, similarly tells you a lot about a person’s politics.

We can think of the administration right now as a coalition of three forces: Trump himself, Musk, and the entirety of the conservative movement. Each has its own reasons for being enthusiastic about the DOGE project. Trump would like to be able to do whatever he wants, and not face legal consequences for himself or those around him as a result. The January 6 pardons and the targeting of DOJ and FBI officials who worked on prosecuting those cases, as well as those who were involved in investigating or charging Trump himself, are all parts of this effort. Musk in turn has all kinds of business interests before the government, as shown in the figure below. If you’re a federal bureaucrat who makes a decision that goes against the interest of Tesla or SpaceX, good luck keeping your job.

The conservative movement has become something of an afterthought in the shadow of the Trump-Musk co-presidency, but it too has its own complaints about an out of control and left-leaning federal bureaucracy. Conservatives have had long standing gripes against the activities of the federal government pertaining to areas like labor, civil rights, and the environment, and are glad to see the bureaucracy be less interventionist on all these fronts.

Conservatives, and probably Musk himself, also want to cut spending. However, that is a fundamentally difficult if not impossible thing to do through the executive branch alone, at least in a way that significantly impacts the budget. Yglesias therefore sees DOGE as a scaling back of conservative ambitions. Before, Republicans used to dream about cutting Social Security and Medicare and changing the budgetary realities of the federal government at a macro level. Now, they celebrate firing a DEI consultant, which will have no impact on the size of government or our fiscal outlook. This is true enough, but there is a lot more to the state than its absolute size. Conservatives have for generations seen the federal bureaucracy as an ideological force that sticks its nose into too many things, from the way businesses are able to communicate with their employees to what kind of development projects individuals can undertake on their own land. That should change going forward under Republican administrations.

According to the Executive Order establishing DOGE, the organization must disband on July 4, 2026. It is difficult to see Elon Musk voluntarily giving up power on that date. A guy who is obsessed with politics and already running six different companies with business before the government is unlikely to simply go back to being a private citizen. I therefore expect him to stay on as some kind of co-president as long as Trump is in office, and to probably also play that role in future Republican administrations going forward.