Elon Musk's Destruction of Government Experiment (DOGE)

Gil Duran

10 Dec 2024 — 3 min read

Musk has plans to butched the federal government. But it's a dangerous task.

On Sunday, I woke before dawn with the Hawk Tuah spitcoin scam on my mind and full paragraphs of text running through my head. Now I'm in the middle of drafting my final magazine piece of 2024. It will be a capstone to the Network State series I wrote for the New Republic this year.

What does it mean that Silicon Valley's new breed of tech authoritarians – a.k.a. The Nerd Reich – will now have their claws on the levers of power in Washington? That's the question I seek to answer. Obviously, the Trump 2.0 era will be one big crypto scam. And we'll see an unprecedented effort to dismantle and weaken the federal government – a project led by Elon Musk himself.

In today's episode of the Daily Blast with Greg Sargent, I talk about Elon's disdain for government power and his stated plan to cut trillions from government:

These men are very wealthy and very powerful, but government is more wealthy and powerful. Elon Musk is a billionaire, but government is a trillionaire. Governments can fight wars; Elon Musk can’t. Government can put you behind bars for your crimes; Elon Musk can’t do that. Not yet, right? If they can destroy the power of the state, then that power will be in their hands. Right now, they see rules and laws as a threat.

Musk sees government as a butterfly whose wings he can easily pull off. But I think he'll find this to be a daunting and dangerous task.

You can listen to the entire episode here (or wherever you get your podcasts):

Full transcript here.

Reframing DOGE

"Destruction of Government by Elon." That's what DOGE really stands for. So why are so many in the press and in politics calling it by the Orwellian meme name that Musk has given the project?

Over at FrameLab, I wrote about why it's a mistake to accept the names imposed by lying propagandists like Elon Musk:

Musk wants us to call this project by a humorous and innocent-sounding name: the "Department of Government Efficiency." We're not going to do that.

First, Musk's project is not an official department of the federal government. So, it is not factual to call it one.

Second, since the goal of Musk's project is clearly destruction, it would be wrong to call label it as "efficiency." Efficiency is when you make something work better. Musk clearly seeks to eliminate, not improve, large parts of government.

Finally, Musk has named his project after a meme, DOGE, a crypto scam named for a Shiba Inu dog that went viral on social media. He's treating the whole thing as a joke. But the destruction of government is deadly serious, and there's no reason why everyone should automatically participate in Musk's juvenile antics.

Read the entire article: Destruction of Government by Elon at FrameLab: