The indiscriminate cuts to the executive branch being made by Elon Musk’s DOGE operation are crippling the government’s ability to provide essential public goods to consumers, and to protect consumers from the predations of unregulated markets. As reported recently in The Atlantic, that was the plan all along — to do an end around the legal rules that protect executive branch programs from unilateral repeal by the president. The plan was laid out in Project 2025, and organized by people who “believed that the Christian, right-wing nation they desired could come about only if Republicans stopped doing politics the way they always had and refused to accept the structure of the executive branch as it existed.”
They also understood that the faster a new president moved, the more he’d be able to achieve as the courts, Congress, and civil society struggled to keep up. …
The most important tactic laid out in the plan was to transform the federal bureaucracy by firing as many civil servants as possible, changing others into political appointees, and terrifying the rest into obeisance. We are already seeing the impact: Trump has bought out, driven off, or fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and although courts have ordered some of them reinstated, he has transformed—perhaps permanently—the federal bureaucracy
Yet there is a strange defensiveness to the way those on the ideological left defend the bureaucracy. Some feel obligated to preface their remarks by sympathizing with the populist impulses that (they imagine) motivate frustration toward government: “We all recognize the important need to reduce government waste, fraud and inefficiency, but…” But if that “important need” is defined as eliminating what common sense recognizes as waste, fraud or inefficiency, then there isn’t much to cut.
Right- and left-populists may each see waste and fraud in government, but the sets of laws and programs they consider wasteful hardly intersect at all. In fact, there is precious little waste, fraud or inefficiency in government if we limit those ideas to programs and laws that most people agree are unnecessary. Why? Because one person‘s waste is another person‘s essential program. Indeed, each program’s existence is testimony to that fact, except to populists who are quick see the programs they don’t like as the product of some corrupt process.
As I noted in an Op-Ed a long time ago, executive branch careerists are the only real stewards of the statutes that Congress has enacted and the president has signed — indeed, they are better stewards of the public interest than elected politicians. Executive branch careerists are people who are attracted to their particular jobs by belief in the mission Congress established for their department or agency. The vast majority do their best to execute that mission consistent with their understanding of what it requires, anecdotes to the contrary notwithstanding. We cannot say the same for politicians, who are hyper-accountable to the most negatively partisan and ideologically extreme members of their own party (in this age of safe seats and the Internet).
Nevertheless, the popular caricature of executive branch careerists — as “lazy paper pushers protected by civil service laws from having to actually do their jobs” — is durable. It is propped up by people whose interactions with the executive branch don’t turn out as they hoped. Often, those interactions were disappointing because bureaucrats were doing their job properly — i.e., because the the law required the unhappy result, or because the agency had been so starved of resources that it simply could not act more quickly.
Up until this point in our history, when we eliminated obsolete executive branch programs, we did so using democratic methods, as when Congress eliminated the Interstate Commerce Commission or when agencies use the rulemaking process to repeal unwanted rules. The DOGE cuts ignore many of those procedural niceties (read: legal requirements), and many were made by young male coders overseen by a tech billionaire whose naivete about American democracy is obvious. DOGE’s carelessness is backed by an White House pushing a theory of executive power and discretion that denies the power of Congress and the courts to check it. Lawsuits challenging the administration’s authority to rearranging institutions created by statute is working its way through the courts — see e.g. here.)
The people making these transformative decisions are especially prone to become insulated from the social experiences that cultivate an appreciation for pluralism and are the cure for hubris. So we watch their myopia lead them into huge, costly mistakes for which they they exhibit little regret – in part because they are so convinced of the uselessness of bureaucrats.
The fact that we-the-regulated sometimes disagree with their understanding hardly signifies moral or intellectual failings on their part. To the contrary, it almost always signifies disagreement among unreasonable people about how the statutory mission ought to be discharged.
But after decades and decades of subjecting bureaucrats to popular derision, the caricature has become an immovable belief. The “waste and inefficiency” being identified by sloppy DOGE algorithms are vitally important to sizable segments of the American public. Indeed, that is why those programs were created in the first place. The firings have already proven to be misguided, as DOGE operatives desperately try to rehire the “unnecessary” employees who turned out to be essential after all.
DOGE will go down in history as a tragicomic waste of time and resources that imposes pain (even disease and death, in the case of USAID cuts) on many people. It will do lasting damage to the capacity of the government to carry out its statutory responsibilities. Yet many GOP voters will not hear about that. Right-wing media outlets will continue to frame DOGE’s actions as heroic protection of their culture and interests.
So talk to your friends and family and co-workers about politics, especially those who voted for leaders who are endorsing DOGE. Ask them what they believe about the specific programs being cut, and why. Ask them if this is what they voted for and whether there is anything that can be done to stop it. Maybe enough of them will decide not to reward this sort of behavior next time they enter the voting booth. – David Spence
