Is Elon Musk remaking government or breaking it?

This newspaper looked forward to what Mr Musk might do with some hope. He has transformed at least two industries. If he could reform the federal government—an organisation whose annual expenditure of $7trn is roughly equivalent to the revenues of America’s 20 biggest companies—that would be a boon for humanity. Across the West voters are frustrated because their governments are more adept at slowing things down than at making them go. Yet large democracies have for decades struggled to come up with a convincing fix.

So far, however, DOGE has stirred up animosity, as it has barged into one agency after another. It has broken laws with glee and callously destroyed careers. It has made false claims about waste and seized personal data protected by law. This week’s big scandal—the unintended inclusion of a journalist in a Signal group of senior officials discussing an imminent attack on Yemen—has nothing to do with DOGE. But it does not inspire confidence that Mr Trump’s inner circle can handle big tasks responsibly.

Some transgressions along the way might be worth it if DOGE brought about a true transformation. Proceeding with all due caution can be a recipe for stasis, after all. Who now remembers the recommendations of the Grace commission, which was tasked by President Ronald Reagan to find ways to cut waste in government?

Ordinarily, chances to start government afresh crop up only in times of war, plague or natural disaster. A sympathetic reading of DOGE is that Mr Musk is trying to bring creative destruction to bureaucracies by other means. His preferred method at Twitter (now X) was to break things and see what happened. Perhaps what America has seen so far is the destruction and the creation will come afterwards. Optimists note that Argentina’s President Javier Milei has achieved real progress with Musk-like tactics, and that the painful reforms carried out by Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s were hated by many at the time but proved beneficial.

Others retort that the government is not like the companies Mr Musk has transformed. If a firm goes bust, another will spring up to take its place; by contrast, government, in theory at least, provides critical services that the private sector does not or will not lay on in sufficient quantities. There may be some places where DOGE is doing good, like hiring Joe Gebbia, who is a co-founder of Airbnb, to streamline the retirement process for federal workers. Unfortunately, examples of DOGE making government less effective are much more numerous.

The inspectors general, whose job is to look for waste and fraud, have been fired. DOGE has sacked people at the FDA, the agency that approves drugs for medical use, which will slow innovation. It has driven lots of principled people to resign, including Louis DeJoy, who was appointed by Mr Trump to run the postal service. Employees of some agencies singled out by DOGE still have to send a weekly email listing five things they did last week. But the inbox is full and they bounce back.

DOGE’s scope to save money is smaller than advertised. It is targeting discretionary spending (the part of the budget not on autopilot) and defence is excluded, for now. That means Mr Musk’s attack surface is just 15% of the budget. Because much of the rest of government spending is redistribution, there are no huge efficiencies to be had there. If he were cutting administrative costs wisely, that would be welcome. But too many of DOGE’s planned cuts have turned out to be misprints, like the $8bn contract it cancelled that was actually worth only $8m. Nor has it identified lots of burdensome regulation to cut, as was the hope of Vivek Ramaswamy, briefly DOGE’s co-head.

Worst is that DOGE’s actions so far look as if they are designed not to make government work better, but to expand the president’s power and root out wrongthink. USAID and the Department of Education were created by Congress, and legally only Congress can get rid of them. Republicans have legislative majorities, but have not tried to pass the necessary laws. Instead, DOGE is trying to close these institutions by fiat, expanding executive power for its own sake. Facing lawsuits and some adverse rulings, Mr Musk and others have attacked judges, accusing them of staging a coup. Some of Mr Trump’s backers believe that in the 2010s America was gripped by a soft authoritarianism, whose instruments of power were universities, the media and partisan bureaucrats, and that a little authoritarian behaviour is now required to break it. Efficiency doesn’t have much to do with it.

DOGE goes rogue

Even this does not mean DOGE has failed—yet. There are three possible outcomes. First, that just as rivals laughed at Tesla and SpaceX in their early days, DOGE will come good in time. Second, that Mr Musk will break the government. The third, likeliest scenario is that DOGE becomes snarled up in court; many good civil servants are fired or quit; fewer talented people see government as an appealing career; and America is left with a stronger president and a weaker Congress.

This would be a huge missed opportunity. Imagine the Musk of the early 2010s, the genius-builder, in charge of procurement at the Pentagon or federal infrastructure projects. Instead, America has got late-era Musk, radicalised by his own social-media platform, flirting with authoritarian movements and stuck in the same mind-numbing partisan thinking as millions of less talented folk.

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