What I think DOGE is really up to

And what I think we should actually be worried about.

Of all the chaos that Donald Trump’s second term is visiting upon America, nothing compares to DOGE. Trump repurposed an existing agency, the U.S. Digital Service, interpreted its mission extremely broadly, and handed control of it to Elon Musk. With the blessing of the Trump administration, DOGE has been going through every part of the U.S. federal government, looking for payments to cancel, programs to suspend, and employees to fire or place on leave.

Over the last two weeks, DOGE has moved so fast, and often so secretively, that nobody can quite seem to figure out what it’s doing. The whole thing is shrouded in a fog of chaos, with accusations and counter-accusations of illegality flying thick and fast. It’s very hard to follow all of these, much less evaluate their accuracy. Instead of evaluating all of these — something my lack of legal expertise makes me poorly qualified to do — I thought I’d focus on two key questions:

1. What is the actual purpose of DOGE?

2. What are the main dangers of DOGE?

In my opinion, answering these two questions is crucial if we want to understand how to approach the DOGE issue.

So far, I think most of the coverage of DOGE has been purely reactive — raising questions about the legality of specific DOGE moves, digging up dirt on the people who work for DOGE, or decrying breaches of data privacy. While there’s nothing wrong with that kind of coverage, I think if that’s all there is, it represents too slow-footed and passive of a reaction to Musk’s furious blitz of activity. In order to really grapple with what’s going on at the federal government, we need to think not only about what DOGE is doing right now, but what it’s going to do in the future.

A hypothesis about DOGE’s true purpose

Everyone seems to be freaking out so much about the particulars of what DOGE is doing — which employees it’s trying to fire, which programs and payments it’s trying to cut — that very few people seem to be asking why this is happening.

DOGE is an enormous undertaking, with teams stationed in every single government agency, combing through essentially everything the government does. No Republican administration — even the fervently anti-government Reagan, or Trump in his first term — has ever attempted anything like this. The opportunities for bad optics, lawbreaking (purposeful or accidental), and accidental cutting of useful programs are vast. So why do it now?

Most people following the story seem to be taking Musk at his word, and assuming that fiscal austerity and slashing the federal workforce are his true ultimate goals. But I think that while Musk and his people honestly do think that much of government spending is wasteful, there are some problems with the hypothesis that ideological small-government Reaganism is their main motivation.

For one thing, Trump and his people are signing off on everything Musk does, and they don’t actually seem to care that much about deficits — Trump’s promised tax cuts far outweigh any spending cuts that DOGE would be able to carry out, and Trump increased the deficit in his first term.

As for drowning the bureaucracy in a bathtub, this has never really been much of a GOP priority, so it would be strange for it to suddenly rocket to the top of the queue. And it’s worth remembering that the civil service are the ones who actually carry out Trump’s executive orders — without civil servants, Trump’s sweeping proclamations are essentially powerless. It’s unlikely that Trump would let Musk render him an impotent figurehead.

Instead, I suspect that the true purpose of DOGE — or at least, the main purpose — is to change the ideological character of the federal workforce, and of federal programs, rather than to eliminate them.

The civil service has a reputation for leaning to the left ideologically. Spenkuch, Teso, and Xu (2023) find that Democrats substantially outnumber Republicans in the bureaucracy, especially at the higher levels. This is from a summary of their results:

It was also no surprise that the researchers confirmed that Democrats outnumber Republicans or Independents in the federal workforce, as has long been public perception. Democrats made up about half of the workforce during the 1997-2019 data period (compared with about 41% of the U.S. population). Meanwhile, registered Republicans dropped from 32% to 26% during the period…

The analysis also found that Democrats even more heavily represented in the ranks of upper management jobs, topping out at 63% of senior executives, the level just below presidential appointees…[T]his discrepancy is driven largely by the fact that Democrats tend to enter the civil service with higher rates of college and graduate degrees, and tend to stay in government careers longer[.]