DOGE, a new organization led by billionaire Elon Musk and with the consent of US President Donald Trump, has begun operating in the United States. Considering that the organization does not yet have any official status, and Musk already has very broad powers, lawyers and journalists have begun to question the legality of its actions. Judging by the preliminary analysis, despite the manipulative publications, DOGE operates in the legal field, and its leader, although not a volunteer or a full-time civil servant, acts as a special employee.
“Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington”
As announced, Elon Musk, as an integral member of the new pro-government team in the United States, became the head of DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency. TIME magazine, celebrating this event, even placed the founder of SpaceX on the cover of the new issue of the magazine, where he sits alone at the presidential table in the Oval Office of the White House. The title of the article is very eloquent: “Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington.”
By its nature, DOGE is not an official government agency. This department was not created by Congress, Musk himself was not approved by the US Senate, and the number of employees in it differs significantly from the usual thousands of people in American state departments. BBC journalists drew a good parallel: in their opinion, DOGE is similar to the Grace Commission created by Ronald Reagan in 1982 with the same goal: to reduce bureaucracy and costs. It submitted 2,500 recommendations, but most of them were not adopted.
According to TIME journalists, Musk’s appointment will entail a number of actions, including budget cuts, the elimination of a number of government programs and a large wave of layoffs in favor of new appointments from among Trump’s supporters. This forecast has already begun to come true, as Musk has already called for the closure of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, which are funded from the US budget. He also expressed an initiative to reduce funding for the Pentagon, which has already been supported by the US President.
Alternative HR approach and absurd accusations
It is noticeable that Musk treats the launch of DOGE as if it were a startup: he is assembling a team of young, not very experienced performers, trying to create the first effective working prototype of a product, even if this “product” is a new ministry. According to Wired, most DOGE employees are between 19 and 24 years old. DOGE employees work 120 hours a week, or 17 hours and eight minutes a day. They are associated with his companies, or with his friend and investor Peter Thiel, who is the founder of the analytics firm Palantir and has previously spoken out against democratic government.
Despite the media coverage of DOGE’s human resources, the department’s work is extremely non-public. For many experts, this secrecy has become the basis for the suspicion that Musk and Trump are “openly and deliberately violating laws on their way to absolute power in the country.” However, their arguments look weak and even absurd: for example, Professor David A. Super said that Musk’s team’s actions are illegal because the system is not capable of responding to so many violations at the same time.
The inconsistency of the accusations is as obvious as the fact that the ambition to merge politics and big business is hyper-logical. It is not surprising that the symbiosis of Musk and Trump wants to receive “super-sensitive” information, primarily of a financial nature. According to their plan, each department in Washington should have at least two permanent representatives of the Department of Government Efficiency, who will monitor spending and compliance with Trump’s policies. That is, if Trump and Musk win access to federal money, this will lay a solid foundation for expanding the powers of the president and reducing the role of Congress as the “wallet of the country.”
As for the full presidential power, the ultimate goal of DOGE is to make the US presidential administration more influential. Trump does not trust bureaucrats because he does not understand the apolitical civil service, and Musk, sharing this opinion, polishes it with his personal antipathy to processes beyond his control. Apparently, their collaboration, taking DOGE as a tool, has every chance of bringing them closer to their goals, but it will be difficult to destroy the federal service, because the civil service system in the US is protected by a number of long-standing laws that protect it from the seizure of power. And Trump and Musk know this very well.
