NEXT TO SPACE travel, remaking the government sounds easy. Elon Musk conceives of himself as the saviour of humanity, who will put people on Mars as a prelude to making humankind a multiplanetary species. But of all the things President Donald Trump has done at home since his inauguration in January, putting DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) under Mr Musk has turned out to be the most polarising. The world’s richest man is exalted by some as an altruistic genius and hated by others as a self-dealing villain. Is he remaking the 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?
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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.
与太空旅行相比，改造政府听起来似乎很简单。埃隆·马斯克将自己视为人类的救世主，他计划将人类送上火星，作为让人类成为多行星物种的前奏。但自唐纳德·特朗普总统今年1月就职以来，他在国内所做的事情中，将政府效率部门（DOGE）交给马斯克管理无疑是最具争议性的。这位全球首富被一些人奉为无私的天才，却被另一些人视为自私自利的恶棍。他是在重塑政府，还是在破坏它？
本报曾对马斯克可能取得的成就抱有一些希望。他已经至少改变了两个行业。如果他能改革联邦政府——一个年支出高达7万亿美元的组织，相当于美国20家最大公司收入的总和——那将是对人类的一大福祉。在西方，选民们感到沮丧，因为他们的政府更擅长拖慢事情，而不是推动进展。然而，几十年来，大型民主国家一直难以找到令人信服的解决方案。
然而，到目前为止，DOGE却激起了敌意，因为它接连闯入一个又一个机构。它兴高采烈地违反法律，无情地摧毁了许多人的职业生涯。它对浪费的指控是虚假的，还非法夺取了受法律保护的个人数据。本周的大丑闻——一名记者意外被加入一个讨论即将对也门发动攻击的高级官员Signal群组——与DOGE无关。但这并未让人对特朗普核心圈子能够负责任地处理重大任务产生信心。
如果DOGE能带来真正的变革，途中一些违规行为或许是值得的。毕竟，过于谨慎行事可能是停滞不前的秘诀。现在谁还记得罗纳德·里根总统委托格雷斯委员会寻找削减政府浪费的方法时提出的建议？
通常，只有在战争、瘟疫或自然灾害时期，才有机会重新开始政府。对DOGE的同情解读是，马斯克试图通过其他方式为官僚机构带来创造性破坏。他在Twitter（现为X）上的惯用方法是先打破东西，再看会发生什么。或许美国目前看到的是破坏，而创造将在之后到来。乐观主义者指出，阿根廷总统哈维尔·米莱运用类似马斯克的策略取得了切实进展，而里根和玛格丽特·撒切尔在1980年代实施的痛苦改革当时遭到许多人痛恨，但后来证明是有益的。
其他人反驳说，政府不像马斯克改造过的公司。如果一家公司破产，另一家会取而代之；相比之下，政府理论上提供的是私营部门无法或不愿充分提供的关键服务。DOGE在某些方面可能做得不错，比如聘请Airbnb联合创始人乔·格比亚来简化联邦员工的退休流程。不幸的是，DOGE让政府效率降低的例子要多得多。负责查找浪费和欺诈的总监察长被解雇了。DOGE解雇了负责批准医疗用药的FDA员工，这将减缓创新。它还迫使许多有原则的人辞职，包括特朗普任命管理邮政服务的路易斯·德乔伊。一些被DOGE点名的机构员工仍需每周发送一封列出上周五项工作的电子邮件，但收件箱已满，邮件被退回。
DOGE节省资金的范围比宣传的要小。它针对的是可自由支配的支出（预算中不受自动控制的部分），而国防暂时被排除在外。这意味着马斯克的“攻击面”仅占预算的15%。因为政府支出的其余大部分是再分配，在那里找不到巨大的效率提升。如果他能明智地削减行政成本，那将受到欢迎。但DOGE计划的许多削减被证明是错误，比如取消了一份标价80亿美元但实际价值仅800万美元的合同。它也没有如短暂担任DOGE联合负责人的维韦克·拉马斯瓦米所希望的那样，找出大量繁琐的法规来削减。
最糟糕的是，DOGE迄今的行动似乎不是为了让政府更好地运作，而是为了扩大总统的权力并铲除“错误思想”。美国国际开发署和教育部是由国会创建的，法律上只有国会才能废除它们。共和党人拥有立法多数，但并未尝试通过必要的法律。相反，DOGE试图通过行政命令关闭这些机构，纯粹为了扩大行政权力。面对诉讼和一些不利裁决，马斯克等人攻击法官，指责他们发动政变。特朗普的一些支持者认为，2010年代的美国被一种软性威权主义所控制，其权力工具是大学、媒体和党派官僚，现在需要一点威权行为来打破它。效率与此无关。
DOGE失控
即便如此，这并不意味着DOGE已经失败——至少现在还没有。有三种可能的结果。第一，就像特斯拉和SpaceX早期被对手嘲笑一样，DOGE最终会证明自己。第二，马斯克将打破政府。第三，也是最有可能的情景，是DOGE陷入法庭纠纷；许多优秀的公务员被解雇或辞职；越来越少的人才认为政府工作有吸引力；美国最终留下一个更强势的总统和更弱小的国会。
这将是一个巨大的错失良机。想象一下2010年代初期的马斯克，那个天才建设者，负责五角大楼的采购或联邦基础设施项目。而现在，美国得到的是晚期的马斯克，被自己的社交媒体平台激进化，与威权运动调情，陷入与数百万才华不如他的人相同的麻木党派思维。