Imagine, if you will, that some supercharged fledgling government task force—call it the Committee to Call Out State-backed Bullshit (CCSB)—took a close look at the handiwork of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during its first month in action. A rough and partial executive summary of its findings would go something like this.
As even this partial account of DOGE’s doings makes painfully clear, the swashbuckling coders in Musk’s employ would have to be considered failures even by the most credulous believers in their supposed mission to root out and reform massive government fraud and waste. The evidence strongly indicates that the scale of financial abuse in the government, while always worth tracking and correcting, is by no means an epidemic scandal. Indeed, the watchdog functions within the executive branch’s regulatory nexus had been carried out by designated inspector generals, who actually did the work that Musk and DOGE are now pretending, quite badly, to do. The only problem, of course, is that one of Trump’s first acts in office was to illegally fire 17 inspector generals across the government; he later made it a round 18, by dismissing the inspector general at USAID for documenting the harms wrought by the agency’s dismantling. (And yes, there’s another Muskian irony to underline here, since the DOGE chieftain long ago derided the CFPB as a useless and “duplicative” federal agency; DOGE would stand in precisely that relation to the inspector-general system—if, that is, it were competent enough to duplicate the work of genuine government watchdogs.)
Yet there’s no chance that Musk and his data lapdogs will be yanked from their posts, since the point of DOGE is not really to reform government spending and accountability at all. That’s evidenced by both the steady increase of federal spending on Musk and Trump’s watch and the doubling of DOGE’s own budget, in yet one more instance of right-wing institutions mimicking the myopia and excesses they obsessively ascribe to the demonized public sector.
Rather, the agency is there to whip up the same bogus frenzy that Musk sought to inflame with his ballyhooed release of the Twitter Files—a cache of dreary bureaucratic communiqués from the platform’s prior ownership regime. To hear Musk tell it, the files documented rampant ideological bias in the moderation of comments on subjects like Hunter Biden’s laptop and Covid public health strictures. In reality, as data researcher Joan Donavan wrote at the time, the archive mostly showed a heightened solicitude to keep big-name celebrities supplying content on Twitter. As for the alleged bombshell revelations in play, she noted that “to pretend that the ‘Twitter Files’ illustrates internal political bias on behalf of the old regime is to ignore the reality that Musk’s new regime is much more politically motivated.”
Or, as the COBOL-era class of computer programmers used to say, “garbage in, garbage out.” But now that Musk’s brand of garbage has the full power of the MAGA state mobilized behind it—and a group of faux-savvy Democrats are echoing the logic behind DOGE’s phony mandate—his Twitter Files reveries are coming to pass. America is careening toward failed-state status in order to keep Elon Musk’s truth-mangling parables of mogul power afloat.
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