Art of the DoGE

No one can accuse Donald Trump of inaction. For once, the US has a government with the urgency of a private corporation. The speed at which the new administration has acted in all kinds of areas has pleasantly surprised Trump’s supporters and flummoxed his opponents. It is hard to grab on to anything and oppose it when the announcements are coming out of the White House at such a speed.

As a leader, the Donald Trump of 2025 has already shown himself to be a very different figure to the political ingénu who entered office in 2017. Eight years ago, he came into government knowing little of how it operated, how its machinery can often thwart those who are notionally in power. He has come back to the job with more appreciation for creative destruction — hence the blizzard of executive orders which have taken the US out of the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement, and seen federal government employees in diversity, equity and inclusion roles laid off in preparation for redundancy.

This time, the president is better served with staff who understand and share his mission. Last time, he was limited in whom he could pick for the top jobs because many Republicans shied away from working for his administration, believing it would deliver a kiss of death to their careers.

Nowhere is the administration’s strategy more evident than in the work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE). Take its first target, USAID. Aid can be a vehicle for soft power diplomacy. Yet under the guise of doing good, USAID had become a corrupted, unaccountable slush fund for left-wing hobbyhorses. Some of the more recent funding grants include $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $1.5 million for DEI programs in Serbia and $2 million for sex change operations and LGBT advocacy programs in Guatemala. Money often comes with strings attached — yet imagine being told, in very Catholic Ecuador, that you can have millions in US aid but only if you use it to teach LGBTQIA2S+ theories to elementary school children.

Inevitably, Trump has been accused of abandoning the world’s poor. But international aid has simply been folded into the State Department where, stripped of ideology, perhaps it can be a force for good once more. DoGE can do more valuable work, too, at the Department of Defense, whose projects have become bloated messes, full of waste. The notorious F-35 project already exceeds $2 trillion and is 80 percent over budget.

In an age of limited attention spans, the speed at which the new administration is operating can seem irresistible. But government is not, and never will be, a private business, let alone a Silicon Valley-style startup. Trump is sitting on his bulldozer tearing down the frumpy façade of the old building, but as yet he is showing us only glimpses of what he intends to replace it with. The American public deserves to see the full plans. For instance, if he really intends a US takeover of Gaza, as he says, it would be good for voters to know how much that might cost, in treasure and perhaps blood.

While the federal government was certainly in need of an injection of private sector can-do, it’s worth remembering that taxpayers are not shareholders. Voters cannot sell their interest, or at least not without emigrating. Nor are they customers; inevitably they are forced to buy products which they might avoid were they spending their own money. Nor are citizens analogous to a corporation’s employees; the government cannot sack them, however little they might be producing. This will become increasingly important as DoGE, with its hands on the Treasury’s payments system, moves on to areas which are far closer to the lives of US citizens. Donald Trump has promised that reforms of Medicare and Medicaid will only serve to make those programs more efficient, but the people deserve clarity on how public healthcare is delivered, and need more than just an off-the-cuff reassurance. Trump has mooted the abolition of the Department of Education yet the administration’s real plans for American schooling remain ambiguous. Is Linda McMahon, Trump’s billionaire supporter and the woman he has put in charge of Education, going to do as Trump has asked and “put herself out of the job”? As this magazine went to press, that question remained unanswered.

While DoGE will have a proper role reviewing defense spending, it would be another matter if it started to poke its nose into military strategy and foreign policy. These are questions which ought to be answered before Trump mounts his bulldozer, not while he is already on it plowing into the government’s pillars.

There have been perfectly legitimate concerns raised, moreover, as to the role of Elon Musk and potential conflicts with his considerable business interests. That’s not just Democratic carping. Musk himself seems to be admirably unconcerned about his own vested interests — if he wants to sell more Teslas, the logical thing surely would not have been to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, but to speed up the transition to green technology. Yet Musk is too clever an entrepreneur not to appreciate the multiple ways in which he could potentially feather his own nest through his government work.

It’s too soon to start talking, as Joe Biden did in his farewell address, about an American “oligarchy.” But the risk is real. President Trump has won over millions of Americans, despite an “enlightened”establishment expecting them to repel him. But to keep the people with him, he is going to have to genuinely be on their side, by being open and honest about the extent of DoGE’s scope. As things stand, that is far from clear.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.