DOGE Nation: How Musk's Tech Bros Plan To Hijack And Dismantle American Democracy

Even Bannon Knows It's Now The Billionaires vs The People

Over the weekend, The Observer published a poll by Opinium showing that 53% of Brits think that Elon Musk is having a negative impact on politics, compared to just 12% who think he is having a positive one. Even on the fringe right, “Reform UK supporters were unimpressed by his claim that Farage should stand down as party leader, with 71% saying the Clacton MP was the best leader they could have now. Adam Drummond, head of political and social research at Opinium, said a ‘lack of enthusiasm about a foreign billionaire involving himself in British politics’ was ‘one area of agreement’ among the public.

Yesterday, The Guardian noted that through Twitter, Musk is dominating public debate. “[W]e have Elon Musk, a South African-Canadian-American billionaire who treats our political arena like a video game he can casually play around with while hanging out at Donald Trump’s Florida country club… There have always been lies in our political lives. The internet does not introduce new types of speech. What is new is the technology: the systems of targeting, scaling, amplification, sucking your data and manipulating your every vulnerability. The real question is whether we can make the technology that has upended our national conversation work for democracy. Is our modern Agora functional?”

The lords of the algorithm dictate not just headlines but your sense of time, place, the destiny of your desires. For Mark Zuckerberg, how we see the world seems largely to be driven by short-term profit. With Musk, as my Johns Hopkins University colleague Henry Farrell writes, it seems more to do with his personal kinks. Sometimes, as one witty observer told me, Musk seems like a weird descendant of Cecil Rhodes, rebuilding a right-wing English-speaking empire on social media. Born in South Africa, of Canadian-English heritage, he can never be president of America— but he can try to dominate digital dominions. Whatever drives Musk, Twitter users are all becoming dramatis personae in his obsessions. And so, now, is parliament.

The “public sphere” was always a messy, semi-mythical idea, but even as an aspiration it now can seem distant. For where we might be headed, glance at America, where Musk’s antics are just everyday Maga politics; where whipping up online, conspiracy-fuelled mobs is common. Election officials who didn’t agree that the 2020 election was rigged against Republicans have been hounded horribly. National and local print media, which were meant to be the mainstays of more Reithian values, are largely bankrupt.

It seemed billionaires such as Jeff Bezos would save a couple of famous newspapers. But tycoons have business interests that depend on government. The worry is they will sacrifice editorial independence to make sure government treats them well. It’s a trick Erdoğan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary learned long ago: you don’t need to take media over, just incentivise their owners to play nice. That approach looks not impossible in the US after the Washington Post pulled cartoons criticising the incoming government and its owners.

Meanwhile, reality has become so fractured it’s no longer entirely clear if democratic processes, built for a different information age, can still deliver effective government. Dictatorships are loving it— Russia and China point out that democracies have become too messy to make up their collective minds. Instead, they argue, the digital age is much better suited to dictatorship. Centralise all the data, give up all your privacy, and then let the leader use tech to decide how to design the ideal city, choose the best policy. At the end of the official show celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist party in Beijing, a huge “5” floated down from the roof of the theatre: it stood for 5G rather than the 5-year plan.

Needless to say, the damage the billionaire class and Tech Bros re about to cause go beyond the internet. Yesterday, Theodore Schleifer and Madeleine Ngo reported on the apparatus of the Musk impending takeover of the U.S. government through an extra-constitutional/congressional concoction supposedly to fight “wasteful spending in the name of “efficiency,” they invented, nicknamed DOGE. “An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor,” they wrote, “are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting… [They are] preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government. After Inauguration Day, the group of Silicon Valley-inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Musk did at Twitter.” It’s worth noting that Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion ($54.20 per share) His brilliant leadership has brought the value down to roughly $9.4 billion, a massive 80% haircut.

“On the eve of Trump’s presidency,” noted Schleifer and Ngo, “the structure of DOGE is still amorphous and closely held. People involved in the operation say that secrecy and avoiding leaks is paramount, and much of its communication is conducted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Trump has said the effort would drive ‘drastic change,’ and that the entity would provide outside advice on how to cut wasteful spending. DOGE itself will have no power to cut spending— that authority rests with Congress. Instead, it is expected to provide recommendations for programs and other areas to cut. But parts of the operation are becoming clear: Many of the executives involved are expecting to do six-month voluntary stints inside the federal government before returning to their high-paying jobs. Musk has said they will not be paid— a nonstarter for some originally interested tech executives— and have been asked by him to work 80-hour weeks. Some, including possibly Musk, will be so-called special government employees, a specific category of temporary workers who can only work for the federal government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period. The representatives will largely be stationed inside federal agencies. After some consideration by top officials, DOGE itself is now unlikely to incorporate as an organized outside entity or nonprofit. Instead, it is likely to exist as more of a brand for an interlinked group of aspirational leaders who are on joint group chats and share a loyalty to Musk or Ramaswamy.”

Musk’s friends have been intimately involved in choosing people who are set to be deployed to various agencies. Those who have conducted interviews for DOGE include the Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen, Shaun Maguire, Baris Akis and others who have a personal connection to Musk. Some who have received the Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious grant funded by Thiel given to those who promise to skip or drop out of college to become entrepreneurs, are involved with programming and operations for DOGE. Brokering an introduction to Musk or Ramaswamy, or their inner circles, has been a key way for leaders to be picked for deployment.

…These recruits are assigned to specific agencies where they are thought to have expertise. Some other DOGE enrollees have come to the attention of Musk and Ramaswamy through Twitter. In recent weeks, DOGE’s account on Twitter has posted requests to recruit a “very small number” of full-time salaried positions for engineers and back-office functions like human resources.

The DOGE team, including those paid engineers, is largely working out of a glass building in SpaceX’s downtown office located a few blocks from the White House. Some people close to Ramaswamy and Musk hope that these DOGE engineers can use artificial intelligence to find cost-cutting opportunities.

The broader effort is being run by two people with starkly different backgrounds: One is Brad Smith, a health care entrepreneur and former top health official in Trump’s first White House who is close with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Smith has effectively been running DOGE during the transition period, with a particular focus on recruiting, especially for the workers who will be embedded at the agencies.

Smith has been working closely with Steve Davis, a collaborator of Musk’s for two decades who is widely seen as working as Musk’s proxy on all things. Davis has joined Musk as he calls experts with questions about the federal budget, for instance.

Other people involved include Matt Luby, Ramaswamy’s chief of staff and childhood friend; Joanna Wischer, a Trump campaign official; and Rachel Riley, a McKinsey partner who works closely with Smith. [Did anyone ever doubt for a moment that McKinsey would be involved?]

Musk’s personal counsel— Chris Gober— and Ramaswamy’s personal lawyer— Steve Roberts— have been exploring various legal issues regarding the structure of DOGE. James Burnham, a former Justice Department official, is also helping DOGE with legal matters. Bill McGinley, Trump’s initial pick for White House counsel who was instead named as legal counsel for DOGE, has played a more minimal role.

“DOGE will be a cornerstone of the new administration, helping President Trump deliver his vision of a new golden era,” said James Fishback, the founder of Azoria, an investment firm, and confidant of Ramaswamy who will be providing outside advice for DOGE.

Despite all this firepower, many budget experts have been deeply skeptical about the effort and its cost-cutting ambitions. Musk initially said the effort could result in “at least $2 trillion” in cuts from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. But budget experts say that goal would be difficult to achieve without slashing popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, which Trump has promised not to cut.

Both Musk and Ramaswamy have also recast what success might mean. Ramaswamy emphasized DOGE-led deregulation on Twitter last month, saying that removing regulations could stimulate the economy and that “the success of DOGE can’t be measured through deficit reduction alone.”

JD Vance, the ultimate creature of the Tech Bros clique, called the U.S. economy a “dumpster fire” with the intention of reassuring his MAGA followers that their own station in life has nothing to do with what the billionaire class has sucked out of society but that Biden and the Democrats— who have helped engineer unemployment at 4.1%, prime-age employment near a 20-year high, and inflation at 2.7%— are to blame. Unmentioned: how the Trump regime plans to bring prices down or curb the runaway inflation that their plans— tax cuts for billionaires— mass deportations, trades wars sparked by tariffs— are likely to re-spark.

Billionaires and democracy are inherently incompatible— and the billionaire class is moving to disembowel democracy before democracy can eliminate them. Embodied by Musk, they have now moved beyond mere disruption of industries to full-blown subversion of democracy. The DOGE initiative, cloaked in the language of efficiency and cost-cutting, is a Trojan horse designed to embed the billionaire agenda deep within the machinery of government, bypassing accountability and oversight. These unelected overlords, who already manipulate the public sphere through platforms like Twitter, now seek to dismantle public services and gut regulatory frameworks under the guise of innovation.

The parallels with autocratic regimes, where oligarchs and cronies wield disproportionate influence, are impossible to ignore. Musk’s vision for America— an unregulated free-for-all where billionaires play puppet master— stands in stark contrast to the democratic ideals this nation was built upon. His recklessness has already turned Twitter into a chaotic playground for conspiracies and hate speech. Imagine what such hubris could do when applied to the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, or even the EPA.

America’s democratic experiment cannot survive as a playground for tech oligarchs and MAGA demagogues. The stakes couldn’t be higher. If we allow Musk, Ramaswamy, and their enablers to reshape our government in their image, we may find ourselves living in a corporatocracy/plutocrcy and ultimately a kleptocracy, where the whims of the ultra-wealthy dictate every aspect of our lives. The fight for democracy is no longer just about opposing Trump or MAGA politics— it’s about resisting the creeping domination of billionaires who view governance as just another system to be hacked, exploited, and eventually broken up and sold-off for profit.

I hope it isn’t just Steve Bannon who recognizes the extreme danger to the country. In recent days he’s noted that Musk “should go back to South Africa” and predicted that “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day. He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any other person. He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it. I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore… Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans. He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

The NY Post reported that “Bannon complained that Musk’s ‘sole objective is to become a trillionaire.’ Bannon has previously called for more taxes on the wealthy and warned about a French Revolution-style uprising in the US over the growing disparities between the mega-rich and the poor. ‘[Musk] will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money,’ Bannon further groused. ‘His aggregation of wealth, and then— through wealth— power: that’s what he’s focused on.’ Bannon also took a jab at Musk for appearing to concur with a post on Twitter that suggested Americans are too ‘retarded’ to do the jobs that companies use foreigners via the H1-B visa system. Musk later deleted that post. ‘He went out of his way to mock our movement as racist and retards, and he lost,’ Bannon complained. ‘We blew him out of the water.’”