Welcome to the Division of Authorities Idiocy

Give the incoming Trump administration this a lot credit score: Confronted with the possibly devastating burden of a maximally entitled tech bro inserting himself into authorities enterprise, the president-elect has dispatched Elon Musk to a powerless bureaucratic backwater. What’s extra, he’s paired Musk off with one other, although in another way entitled tech bro: biotech govt and once-failed GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The nominal cost of the group the pair will captain—the Division of Authorities Effectivity—is to remove wasteful authorities spending. However as Trump’s announcement fastidiously stipulated, their collaboration—although “authorities” exists in its title—will happen “exterior of presidency,” which loosely interprets to “exterior of earshot and the field of regard of White Home personnel truly attempting to get their jobs carried out.”

The eternally oblivious Musk, who as you would possibly bear in mind funneled greater than $200 million in tremendous PAC help to Trump’s marketing campaign, exulted within the announcement of the brand new gig, promptly posting a chunk of fan artwork with a mockup of a brand that includes the brand new group’s acronym, DOGE, to his web site X. Doge, you see, is the identify of a crypto product by which Musk holds a significant stake. Its brand, which additionally briefly changed Twitter’s chook image on X, is a crude model of a canine mascot. (Following Trump’s announcement, Dogecoin immediately boomed in funding markets, replicating the identical development throughout the entire shady crypto sector, which anticipates a deregulatory bonanza after donating absolutely half of all company cash to the 2024 marketing campaign.)

Along with extending Musk’s wonderful run of by no means as soon as being humorous for a single second in his life, the put up on X additionally registered one thing extra ominous: The primary chieftain of the cost-cutting company sports activities a large array of financial conflicts of curiosity, having accrued a great deal of his centibillion-dollar fortune on a basis of presidency contracts. As well as, the Musk enterprises which can be extra strictly private-sector considerations, resembling his electrical automobile firm, Tesla, and his now-flailing social media platform, X, usually stand athwart the regulatory mandates of a bunch of federal businesses. Nevertheless toothless DOGE could also be on the White Home organizational chart, it is going to nonetheless be positioned to intimidate directors pursuing Musk’s self-interested agenda.

Nonetheless, the shared gig little question comes as a blow to the lately anointed MAGA fanboy, who’s been muscling into a bunch of preelection confabs with lawmakers and overseas leaders alongside Trump, in addition to swanning across the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort as his self-advertised “first buddy.”

But a second Trump White Home might be something however a buddies’ playground. As any cursory acquaintance with the Trump household historical past will readily verify, wannabe White Home intimates who fasten themselves too carefully to the previous enterprise mogul are sometimes topic to swift exile. (See Don Jr.’s tour as a third-tier influencer on Rumble, and Eric’s profession, effectively, doing no matter it’s that Eric does.)

On high of that, Musk, a raging egomaniac incapable of sustaining many shut relationships, is dealing with the extra humiliation of sharing authority over the brand new gig with Ramaswamy. A much more practiced Trump sycophant, he was briefly touted on lists for extra substantial, grown-up appointments within the cupboard, however fell swiftly to earth as a make-believe spending wonk. Ramaswamy’s comically inept presidential run culminated along with his vow to be “unhinged” in his closing debate. That promise might have doubled because the mission assertion for his marketing campaign, which trafficked principally in warmed-over tirades on the menace of wokeness, alongside conspiracy-mongering over January 6, and the periodic name to invade Mexico and presumably Canada.

On one stage, the Musk-Ramaswamy collaboration might virtually double as an impressed plotline from Mike Decide’s HBO satire Silicon Valley. Take two of probably the most incorrigibly batshit, self-enamored figures in modern right-wing tech politics, and pressure them to work collectively. Higher but, tee up the mandate for accountable authorities spending by matching up the vaporware magnate who upped the share worth he paid for the white-elephant acquisition of Twitter in order that it contained the talismanic pot-smokers’ quantity 4.20 with a biotech hustler who profiteers on medication that not often make it previous the testing part. What might presumably go flawed?

Certainly, the very act of designating two chairs to direct an inquiry into the misapplication of presidency assets is the form of self-canceling flourish that might be conveyed in, say, a musical conservatory referred to as “the Kenny G Institute of Free-Jazz Improvisation.” It’s already painfully clear that the swaggering Musk has little grasp of simply what the job would truly entail. Throughout the marketing campaign homestretch, when he wasn’t skipping round like a dipshit in a pink hat behind Trump, Musk confidently pronounced that it wouldn’t be too nice a carry to establish and remove “at the very least $2 trillion” in wasteful spending, when all discretionary spending within the 2024 fiscal 12 months was $1.6 trillion, and general spending clocked in at greater than $6.75 trillion. For Musk to hit his goal, many vital outlays and earnings helps, resembling Social Safety and Medicare, must be eviscerated. That’s probably why, in a later X flourish, Musk endorsed a person’s view that fast spending cuts, together with different proposals like power-boosted tariffs would set off “a extreme overreaction within the economic system” forward of a “tumble” in monetary markets. “Sounds about proper,” the dipshit replied.

Indifference to the social prices of his vainness tasks is par for the course for Musk, as it’s for his presidential benefactor. However since Trump is at all times able to overruling his previous commitments on a dime, and ghosting a complete slew of precise cupboard flunkeys—as much as and together with his former vice chairman—it’s onerous to gauge when and whether or not Musk’s fiscal hobbyhorse might flip into an actual and current menace to the well-being of thousands and thousands of Individuals.

There may be, I suppose, some comfort in recalling the destiny of the 2 high-profile particular White Home commissions that Trump unveiled within the early days of his first time period. In 2017, the White Home launched the Victims of Immigrant Crime Engagement Workplace below the jurisdiction of the Division of Homeland Safety, the extremely publicized panel dedicated to documenting and investigating runaway charges of immigrant violent crime. The fee was an early indicator of the MAGA motion’s lurch into fascism, because it sought to depict an ethnic group because the supply of a scourge of harmful felony conduct. It additionally quickly proved to be a bust, since there was in truth no such immigrant crime epidemic. In the meantime, Kris Kobach, the previous Kansas secretary of state, captained a Trump-sanctioned inquiry into the parallel ethical panic over voting fraud, and got here up empty as effectively.

Then once more, fearmongering over immigration and rampant election denial stay the 2 principal calling playing cards of the present MAGA motion, even after Trump’s first administration face-planted in its efforts to doc each. Even when Musk and Ramaswamy dither away at DOGE conferences discussing the baleful proportions of the woke thoughts virus gnawing away at oligarchic impunity, swapping memes, or enjoying hacky sack like they do at Google HQ, there’s no small chance that they may give beginning to a different nihilistic MAGA campaign. In any case, as we noticed within the closing episode of Silicon Valley, a meltdown of coding and greed can come perilously near destroying the world.