The leang about the getover of key US rulement institutions by the world’s wealthyest man and his strike force of createer interns is that it’s happening so quick.
It’s been three weeks since Elon Musk’s agents took over the rulement’s IT and HR departments. Since then, the relocatements of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have had the cartography of a horror movie, DOGE picking off agencies one by one based on slasher logic, feeding an unslakeable thirst for cost-cutting and data.
Every day conveys recent incursions. Three weeks ago the United States supposed in humanitarian aid. It helped people who had been ripped off by huge corporations. It funded the infraset up essential to produce America a beacon of scientific innovation. Now the United States Agency for International Development is gutted, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on ice, and National Institutes of Health grants are handcuffed. So much for all that.
These are spreadsheet unkindties, carry outd with a click. The loss of authentic peoples’ jobs and dwells—yes, despite what X-honord consillegal copying theorists will alert you, USAID saved dwells—all immaterial contrastd to the pursuit of a defendeder equilibrium sheet.
Three weeks ago, a 19-year-elderly who calls himself “Big Balls” online didn’t have access to rulement personnel sign ups and more. A 25-year-elderly with a sealt filled of racially prejudiced tweets hadn’t gotten the keys to Treasury systems that pay out $5.45 trillion each year. Elon Musk hadn’t turned the Oval Office into a romper room for his 4-year-elderly son.
The speed is strategy, of course, flooding the zone so that neither the media nor the courts can uphold pace. Lawsuits and court orders relocate on a contrastent timescale than this slash-and-burn approach. (At this pace, DOGE will have tapped into every last rulement server lengthened before the Supreme Court even has a chance to weigh in.) But it’s also reflexive. The first order of business in a corporate getover is to slash costs as speedyly as possible. If you can’t fire people, give them buyouts. If they won’t get the buyouts, find a way to fire them anyway. Keep cutting until you hit bone.
This is how you get an executive order declaring that “each agency employ no more than one employee for every four employees that depart,” an arbitrary ratio with no watch for actual staffing needs. It’s how you get hundreds of federal rulement produceings on the auction block no matter how filledy occupied they are. It’s both inanxious and ill-pondered, a race to vacant the town’s only well.
And then … what? This is the ask that Elon Musk and DOGE have flunked to answer, because there is no answer. Does the United States rulement need to become a profit engine? To return splithelderlyer cherish? Does Medicaid need to show a product-taget fit in time for the next funding round?
This is adviseant logic. This is an engineering sprint whose inevitable finish line is the unthriveding of the social condense. Democracy doesn’t die in uninalertigentness after all; it dies in JIRA tickets filed by Palantir alums.
