For the last month, the US opinion-making class has stared agog
as Elon Musk and his minions have stormed the engine room of the
federal government. Young men with smirking profile photos and
scandalously thin curricula vitae have become the shock troops of the
so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). They are strolling
through the halls of power, messaging federal staffers en masse to stay home and accessing internal intelligence reports. According to Wired’s reporting, one DOGE staffer who later resigned over his racist social media posts had
both read and write access to the Treasury’s payment systems for at
least a day. Three years ago, as a sixteen-year old intern, another had
been fired
by a data-security firm for allegedly leaking information to a
competitor. Like the QAnon Shaman at the senate rostrum on January 6,
this is Grand Guignol, a spectacle both serious and ridiculous. For the
second time in five years, people are forced to ask: can you cosplay a
coup?
Buffaloed onlookers have groped for precedent. The tech critic Cory Doctorow has described these
men as “broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts,” fighting enemy institutions
as a sort of Tesla Jugend. The sociologist Ho-Fung Hung suggested they
were Red Guards of a Great Github Cultural Revolution, storming the
headquarters and confronting the party in the name of a purer reading of
the master’s texts. The economist J.W. Mason compared their
actions to the dismemberment of the former Soviet state in the
1990s—private looting under foreign supervision. Musk himself referenced a beloved far-right meme when he posted that “not many Spartans are needed to win battles.”
None
of the analogies are very persuasive. This is because we are witnessing
something new: the convergence of three strains of politics that have
never simultaneously been this proximate to power. Those projects come
from different but related places: the Wall Street–Silicon Valley nexus
of distressed debt and startup culture; anti–New Deal conservative think
tanks; and the extremely online world of anarchocapitalism and
right-wing accelerationism. Within the new administration, each strain
is striving to realize its desired outcome. The first wants a sleek
state that narrowly seeks to maximize returns on investment; the second a
shackled state unable to promote social justice; and the third, most
dramatically, a shattered state that cedes governing authority to
competing projects of decentralized private rule. We are watching how
well they can collaborate to reinforce one another. The future condition
of the government—and by extension the country—depends on how far the
dynamo spins.
*
The clearest precedent for what is happening
today in Washington is what happened in Twitter’s headquarters on
Market Street in San Francisco two and a half years ago. When Musk was
compelled to turn what had likely been a gag into a large and cumbersome
business acquisition, he walked into the lobby of the social media
company carrying a sink—a dad joke about how they ought to “let that
sink in.” Multiple books have been written about what followed. The
short version is that he laid off most of the platform’s employees,
leading to prognostications of its imminent collapse. He scaled back
content moderation in a way that greatly increased the amount of hate
speech on the platform, monetized the algorithm into a subscription
model, opened the floodgates to pornbots, and generally frightened away a
large number of crucial advertisers. And yet the scroll never stopped.
Twitter didn’t go dark.
The Twitter deal—bad business on
paper—both contaminated a site of (already often contentious) public
conversation and gave Musk a megaphone for his own political positions
ahead of the election. Though the company’s value sharply declined, it
also added to the mercenary mystique that Musk had built up over the
past decade by managing at least a half dozen businesses under the
principle that you can keep services running even as you “delete” (his
favorite word) many of the humans involved.
Versions of this
practice—known as “rightsizing”—have been standard in American
capitalism for some time now. It involves acquiring a business, then
stripping out and selling all its valuable parts, including real estate
and intellectual property, so that it runs at minimum capacity. The
1980s, when Donald Trump made his name, were the high point of such
corporate mergers, leveraged buyouts, and hostile takeovers. Private
equity took off at this time too. When he was mulling a first run for
president in 1987, Trump told Larry King that if the US “were a
corporation, it would be bankrupt.” “If a company or a country ever ran
the way the United States is running,” he said in another interview the
same year, “forget it.”
The first Trump cabinet featured veterans
of the distressed debt sector, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur
Ross—who was dubbed the “King of Bankruptcy” by Fortune Magazine—and
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. This time around, the second in
command at the Pentagon is billionaire Steve Feinberg, cofounder of the
top private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. Bill Pulte, whose
private equity firm invests in housing and development, has been
nominated as top housing regulator. Departing FTC head Lina Khan warned
of private equity running wild in a new Trump term, pursuing “roll-ups”
and “strip and flips” in the health care sector, leading to “worse
quality care and higher prices.”
Musk’s hirelings by these lights
are less latter-day squadristi than radicalized management consultants.
Instead of brickbats and lugers, they wield red pens to mark layoffs and
offload inventory. We can take Musk at his word when he said in
2021 that the government is a corporation, but a special one that has a
monopoly on violence and cannot go bankrupt. If, as he has claimed,
private actors are better at allocating resources than public ones, it
stands to reason that a state should be shorn of redundant staff and
services.
One could stop here and conclude that Musk simply wants
to turn the government from being an exceptionally bad corporation to
one that is marginally less bad—a managerial dictatorship, but a
temporary one. This is the version of the story that convinced
Democratic lawmakers and financial columnists, who have long promoted
the analogy between citizens and consumers, that DOGE could be a good
idea. “Streamlining government processes and reducing ineffective
government spending should not be a partisan issue,” announced Congressman
Jared Moskovitz (D-FL) when he joined the DOGE caucus in December. “If
Doge can actually unleash digital reform in the US government, and in a
non-corrupt manner, that would be an unambiguously good thing,” Gillian
Tett wrote last month in the Financial Times.
This model is also consonant with the Singaporesque sovereign wealth
fund announced last week, and with the federal backstop announced two
weeks ago for enormous AI infrastructure funds like the Stargate
Project, involving OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. Musk would attack the
state to save it.
*
The second way to understand the
DOGEstorm is not through Musk but rather through the more systematic
approach of Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget and
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose operations he ground to a
halt this past weekend, firing dozens. The founder of a right-wing
Christian think tank called the Center for Renewing America, Vought
wrote the chapter on executive power in Project 2025—a composite effort
by stars of the think tank firmament like the Heritage Foundation, the
Heartland Institute, and the Pacific Research Institute, along with
newer entities like Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA, and the CRA.
Vought and his coauthors see the state as a terrain of struggle
dominated by leftists. They believe that the modern US government has
been coopted by the left to secure what he calls its “cultural reign thru [sic] the bureaucracy” and “a regime weaponized against their enemies [to] keep the dollars flowing.”
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Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Russell Vought at his Senate Budget Committee confirmation hearing, Washington, D.C., January 22, 2025.
To the conservative think tankers, the hypertrophy
of public demands since the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society
programs of the 1960s has amounted to what Vought calls a “quiet
revolution” dividing federal revenues among social groups through
entitlement programs, affirmative action, and all manner of special
pleading. The state is crawling with nonproductive special interests:
liberal elites, minority rights advocates, undocumented immigrants and
their allies, all animated by the desire to sustain themselves without
effort of their own. The government has transformed into a monstrosity
that exsanguinates private entrepreneurial wealth and enthrones a
managerial class devoted to secular deracinated homogeneity. Vought has said that
America is in the “late stages of a complete Marxist takeover” that
needs to be reversed aggressively by putting government employees “in
trauma,” treating them as “villains,” and sending “power away
from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities,
local governments, and states.” Trans rights are a particular trigger:
Vought has denounced the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into
our schools and institutions.”
Data scientists are ringing alarm bells
about potentially irreversible damage to federal databases. If the
think tankers have their way, the state will no longer be able to
collect information and allocate tax dollars to socially desirable
goals. Their notion of an ideal government is not a streamlined
complement to the private sector. Rather it is a Leviathan in chains,
restrained from fully responding to the demands of its populace. A
balanced budget amendment becomes obsolete if you fire career employees,
nuke institutional memory, and wipe their hard drives. Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk (2018), about the necessity of anonymous unglamorous civil servants, could, it turns out, be read in reverse as a cookbook.
The
point, as Steve Bannon has stressed for years, is to deconstruct the
administrative state, leaving in its place a government that rules
intensively but not extensively. This project has had a fairly stable
intellectual lineage, from the philosopher James Burnham through the
anti-tax activist Grover Norquist to the political scientist Mancur
Olson, who in the 1990s described the state as a stationary bandit,
taxing a population for its own enrichment and providing stability and
protection in exchange. (Musk is also inspired by this fear of the
ever-expanding state. He frequently reposts Milton Friedman memes, makes
alarmist statements about the federal debt, and claims that
rules and regulations harden “the arteries of civilization”—a metaphor
drawn straight from Olson, who invoked “sclerosis” to describe the way
democracies erode economic freedom.) It has continued through Arthur
Laffer and Stephen Moore, the duo who designed Trump’s tax cut in 2017,
and up to the present administration.
*
The third program
that underpins the present moment is often described as a project of
right-wing accelerationism. That term is usually associated with Curtis
Yarvin, the former computer programmer and amateur poet who was graced
with a long interview in The New York Times just
after the election (His idea of RAGE—Retire All Government
Employees—looks a lot like that of DOGE). Characters like him and the
British philosopher Nick Land are freefloating intellectuals without
institutional bases beyond their episodic newsletters, articles, and
blogs. Yarvin has questioned his own influence, suggesting that his
ideas make their way into the Republican ecosystem through staffers who
swim in a “very online soup.” Yet even if their direct impact cannot be
tracked in a simple flow chart, their work more accurately captures the
tech right’s spirit than Burnhamite conservatism, C-suite vampirism, or
the Jesus-dipped language of millenarian struggle.
What do they
see? Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering
into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a
“patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call
technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as
rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into
“a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign
and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock
corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be
decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked
by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle
Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink
internet. Yarvin expressed the essence of the worldview recently when he
enthused over Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and
rebuild it as a US-backed colony securitized as an asset and sold to
investors—as he called it, “the first charter city backed by US
legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock symbol: GAZA.”
Accelerationists do
not want merely to make government more efficient, nor simply to prevent
it from pursuing redistribution or propagating progressive values.
“Speed up the breakdown” is the mantra. Their objective is not to tame
or starve the beast but to kill it. Adherents to this extreme ideology
are obviously a minority, and it’s not clear at all that Musk himself
shares it, let alone Trump. But even if they don’t, DOGE’s actions are
helping to unsettle the division between public and private authority.
Libertarians have long seen gated communities as laboratories of private
government and reminisced about the law and order of the supposedly
stateless Western frontier. Musk’s move to reboot the company town by
incorporating Starbase, Texas could be seen as a first step toward a
world where private actors make laws and jurisdictions that fit their
personal needs.
Will Greenland, Panama, and perhaps even Canada
become new hinterlands for fortified outposts and experiments in private
law and private investment? Trump’s ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery,
is a member of the “PayPal Mafia”: he and Peter Thiel cofounded both the
payments system and the venture capital firm Founders Fund, and he was
reportedly drawn to the position because of the prospect of the
Greenland acquisition. “Help America gain Greenland,” Musk posted when Howery was appointed. As industry insiders have
pointed out, Palantir’s recent partnership with Voyager Space suggests
that polar ground stations could make the Arctic more important for
commercial satellite downlinks.
In the paradigm of
empire-by-contractor, the state grants concessions to mining or
satellite enterprises. This would be a throwback to the nineteenth
century, when the freebooter William Walker invaded Honduras, The
Englishman James Brooke became the “Raj of Sarawak,” and, as Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has described,
the Michigander John Munro Longyear staked out a patch of Arctic and
fashioned himself as the “King of Spitsbergen” in what is now Svalbard. “Countrypreneurship”
already has a foothold in the private enclave of Próspera in Honduras.
The former Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan has sketched
blueprints of “the Network State” for his 1.1 million followers on X,
describing “startup societies” as opt-in collectives with votes defined
by share size and CEOs as leaders. He has praised Trump’s early
executive orders as “a fusillade of legal cruise missiles” that were
“meticulously planned to strike every single source of blue power, simultaneously, both in the US and abroad.”
US
state sovereignty will be eroded to some degree by the time the dust
settles on Silicon Valley Leninism and the computers of the bureaucracy
boot up to a blank screen. This prospect will rightfully concern those
who believe in constitutional constraints and the need for a state that
does more than fund weapon systems, finance AI data centers, and cut
paychecks for border police. For sympathetic observers, however, the
goings-on in Washington are inspiring the same exhilaration that the
anarchocapitalist economist Murray Rothbard felt when he watched the
dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was, he said, “a particularly
wonderful thing to see unfolding before our very eyes, the death of a
state.”
