What Elon Musk is really up to at DOGE: 4 plausible theories

If Elon Musk's effort to remake the federal government was ever really about "waste, fraud, and abuse," those DOGE days are over. His quasi-agency has made huge and unprecedented changes to what the federal government does. But ask an economist, historian, or political scientist why, or what it all means, and you'll get a sad-sounding laugh in response.

One thing is clear: There were never many savings to be found. Last year, Musk predicted he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. (That was always going to be tough, mathematically, given that the government's entire discretionary budget is $1.7 trillion.) In January, Musk revised his estimate down to $1 trillion. Earlier this month, he revised the revision down to $150 billion.

On the other hand, DOGE has been very good at reducing the number of people who work for the government — as many as 216,000 federal employees and contractors are already out, with more dismissals in the works. Musk has gutted or eliminated agencies that prevent disease, protect us from pandemics, provide aid to our allies, ensure the safety of our food and medicines, and safeguard Americans against toxic chemicals. Every one of those efforts is a proven multiplier of our tax money — every dollar we spend on them redounds to the US economy. Which means that even if Musk succeeds at slashing government spending, he'll actually be adding to the federal deficit: DOGE cuts to the Internal Revenue Service alone are estimated to cost America some $500 billion in lost tax revenue every year.

So if DOGE isn't saving us money, what's the reason for all the cuts? It can't be motivated by the cliché that "government should be run like a business." No successful business runs on the kind of bedlam being sown by Musk. What, in short, is going on here?

Here are four possible explanations for what DOGE is actually up to. Maybe none of them are right. Or perhaps they're all accurate, to varying degrees. But one thing is certain: Each of them provides a more plausible insight into what DOGE is doing than the official explanation of saving taxpayers money.

(1) It's an "exit" plan

For the past decade and a half, rich guys in Silicon Valley have been trying to leave it all behind — government regulation, wokeist diversity efforts, naysaying journalists, even the Earth itself. Broadly speaking, they call this idea "exit." In a 2009 blog post, the influential investor Peter Thiel declared that it was time for tech entrepreneurs to abandon the concept of democracy and start their own city-states. A companion piece to that post — written by Patri Friedman, grandchild of the free-market economist Milton Friedman — peddled the idea of "seasteads," floating cities in the ocean, beyond the jurisdiction of any nation. Musk, meanwhile, launched a company devoted to taking a select sliver of humanity to Mars, and the Exit crowd went all in on cryptocurrencies — money without a pesky state attached.

In a book published in 2022, the venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan laid out a blueprint for Exit. "Technology has enabled us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies," his website declared. "But can we use it to start new cities, or even new countries? This book explains how to build the successor to the nation state, a concept we call the network state."

In a sense, DOGE is serving as a sort of advance guard for Exit. It's cutting away every government function that isn't useful to a future network state (stuff that protects the vulnerable and supports the needy) while retaining the resources needed to found Exit-style cities (the blockchain, census data, border control). Casey Lynch, a geographer at the University of Girona who studies Exit politics, says that's in line with how Exiteers think: "The only things the government should be doing are administrative functions necessary to maintain the market. And the only kinds of government services that are necessary are those related to things like upholding financial transactions, fighting identity theft, and protecting property rights."

This, in essence, is the new Exit: Don't secede from the government — absorb the government, digest it, and excrete a new one. A few groups have even met with the Trump administration to get his support for launching what they're calling "Freedom Cities." Like a Thiel-backed prototype in Honduras, these enclaves would be economically autonomous zones, free from government limits on Exit passion projects like longevity treatments or nuclear fusion research. Srinivasan has proposed making the area around Musk's SpaceX facility in Texas into one, and other folks have proposed building one in Greenland — after it's acquired by the United States, of course. The move is supported by Ken Howery, a college pal of Thiel's who is Trump's nominee to serve as ambassador to Denmark.

(2) It's techno-libertarianism for all

Traditional libertarians believe that people and markets function just fine — better, even — with minimal government oversight. That's what Ronald Reagan's cowboy-inflected individualism was all about: shrinking government and letting the markets do as they wanted. But Reagan was careful to leave untouched two cornerstones of federal governance: Social Security, to protect against dissent from within, and a hefty nuclear arsenal, to guard against threats from without.

Silicon Valley libertarianism scraps the social safety net and the nukes. It's closer to the venture investor Mark Andreessen's vision of "techno-optimism," where digital technologies and unfettered markets solve every human problem. It's not just having Amazon replace the post office, or bitcoin taking the place of banks — it's "deleting" regulations across all of government, no matter how critical they are to America's health and safety and financial well-being.

In this explanation, DOGE is attempting to turn back the clock to the regulation-free excesses of the Gilded Age. In the 1910s and 1920s, America was dominated by industrial oligarchs, plagued by race and class struggles, and free from laws that kept food safe and the air and water clean. It took a spectacular market crash, and a Great Depression, to usher in the modern age of federal oversight.

DOGE effectively wants to return America to the days before the New Deal, when industrialists could do as they pleased. Musk, in fact, has called for a "wholesale, spring cleaning" of all federal regulation. "If it's not possible now, it'll never be possible," he said during a midnight call in February. "This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we're ever going to have. And if we don't take advantage of this best hand of cards, it's never going to happen, so we're going to do it."

Perhaps that techno-libertarian vision — of a digitized world without government — is the entire point of DOGE. "You strip government down to remove all the parts of it that are resisting you," says David Lewis, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, "and rebuild it in a way that makes it, in your view, more efficient and responsive to you." That's actually more authoritarian than libertarian. But it does make government smaller — and weaker. And the weaker government is, the more the powerful can call the shots.

(3) It's a heist

Tyler Cowen, a leading thinker on the right, has criticized what he calls "the libertarian vice." Libertarians love it, he says, when the state fails — even if the private sector can't or won't step in to fix things.

But what if Musk's libertarian vice is actually plain old greed? Consider some of the specific agencies DOGE has slashed. Why cut NASA, a broadly popular and relatively inexpensive operation? Well, without NASA to launch rockets, it would be left to private companies like SpaceX to get stuff into outer space. The same is true of DOGE's cuts to the Office of Vehicle Automation Safety, which has ordered dozens of Tesla recalls and delayed the rollout of self-driving software. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have collected a dozen examples of DOGE targeting agencies that are trying to regulate Musk. One thing DOGE hasn't gone after? SpaceX's contracts for military space launches — jobs worth $5.9 billion to the world's richest man.

Musk isn't the only Silicon Valley beneficiary of DOGE's assault. The IRS is turning to Palantir, the security and data company cofounded by Peter Thiel, to assemble all its data into one giant, easily surveilled bucket. The company is also handling the data back end for ICE's planned mass deportations. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is disbanding its team of lawyers responsible for going after cryptocurrency crime. So maybe DOGE is just an inside job — a case of technologists using their access to Donald Trump to loot the Treasury and line their own pockets.

(4) It's a confederacy of dunces

Maybe DOGE is just really, really bad at its job. I mean, why would anyone cause this much chaos for so little demonstrable gain?

"It is tempting to think there is some strategy behind it," says Zachary Liscow, a Yale professor who served as chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget during the Biden administration. "But these are just not competent people. They often don't have a plan, or it's often not well thought out."

There's certainly a lot of evidence that DOGE is incompetent. It's staffed by a bunch of kids from Musk's world who bring virtually no experience in either government or business to the job. Its reports on the cuts it's making have been hysterically inaccurate. It has cut things it didn't know it was cutting — like the agency responsible for making sure nuclear reactors don't melt down — and then scrambled to restore them after the fact. And by grinding away at the government's ability to do anything, it's introduced a crippling level of turmoil and uncertainty to America, both at home and abroad. "It's definitely making us less effective," says Liscow.

And that's the bottom line, really, when it comes to DOGE. At a basic level, Musk's assault on the federal government represents a rejection of modernity itself. "You can't do modern life without modern regulation," says Lewis, the political scientist. "Transportation systems, energy systems, waste systems, internet systems — all of those things require government interventions and monitoring to work effectively." If Musk makes good on his promise to pull the plug on every regulation in sight, the world as we know it would effectively shut down.

I said this sounded like the Gilded Age, but in some ways DOGE is turning the clock back even further. Before the Civil War, the federal government was far weaker and more diffuse than it is today. Individual states competed over tariffs and railroads and lots of other stuff we now think of as national functions. Companies could employ children at starvation wages, dump whatever they wanted into America's streams and rivers, and sell quack remedies that were more likely to kill you than cure you. That's roughly where a DOGE-denuded federal government puts us. Forget 1920 — think 1850.

Musk seems to think America's administrative infrastructure is bureaucratic frippery. To him, just having it is wasteful. "There are more federal agencies than there are years since the establishment of the United States," Musk observed during an interview with Tucker Carlson. "Which means that we've created more than one federal agency per year, on average. That seems crazy." Carlson responded by pulling his "That's insane!" face for the camera, as if Musk had just invented arithmetic.

But that math is not math. Times, as they say, change. Look at all the things we depend on today that weren't even fathomable at the nation's founding: cars and planes and polystyrene and aspirin and the internet and high fructose corn syrup and phones and recorded music and electricity. We've created way more technological marvels than federal agencies. A National Transportation Safety Board is a small price to pay for the wonders of intercontinental flight.

And it isn't just that the world is more complicated than it was in 1776 or 1850 or 1920. It's that most of the advances we enjoy today were, in one way or another, created because of government, not in spite of it. An enduring and reliable state — one that invests in innovation, ensures economic stability, and makes sure everyone plays by the rules — is literally what makes technological progress possible. Musk can't take the government all the way back to the 18th century, even if he'd like to. But if he makes good on his promises with DOGE, America's future may end up looking a lot more like its past.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.