Welcome to the Department of Government Idiocy

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Give the incoming Trump administration this a lot credit score: Confronted with the doubtless 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 a different way entitled tech bro: biotech government 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 “outdoors of presidency,” which loosely interprets to “outdoors of earshot and the visual field of White Home personnel really attempting to get their jobs accomplished.”

The eternally oblivious Musk, who as you would possibly keep 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 emblem that includes the brand new group’s acronym, DOGE, to his web site X. Doge, you see, is the identify of a crypto product during which Musk holds a significant stake. Its emblem, which additionally briefly changed Twitter’s chicken 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 principle chieftain of the cost-cutting company sports activities an enormous 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 automotive firm, Tesla, and his now-flailing social media platform, X, usually stand athwart the regulatory mandates of a number of federal companies. 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 doubt comes as a blow to the lately anointed MAGA fanboy, who’s been muscling into a number 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 can be something however a buddies’ playground. As any cursory acquaintance with the Trump household historical past will readily affirm, wannabe White Home intimates who fasten themselves too intently 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, nicely, 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 together with his vow to be “unhinged” in his ultimate debate. That promise may 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 degree, the Musk-Ramaswamy collaboration may virtually double as an impressed plotline from Mike Choose’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 value 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 medicine that hardly ever 9uV" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">make it past the testing phase. What may presumably go fallacious?

Certainly, the very act of designating two chairs to direct an inquiry into the misapplication of presidency sources is the type of self-canceling flourish that may 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 really entail. Throughout the marketing campaign homestretch, when he wasn’t skipping round like a dipshit in a purple hat behind Trump, Musk confidently pronounced that it wouldn’t be too nice a carry to establish and remove “at the least $2 trillion” in wasteful spending, when all discretionary spending within the 2024 fiscal yr was $1.6 trillion, and general spending clocked in at greater than $6.75 trillion. For Musk to hit his goal, many essential outlays and earnings helps, resembling Social Safety and Medicare, must be eviscerated. That’s doubtless why, in a later X flourish, Musk endorsed a consumer’s view that speedy 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 self-importance tasks is par for the course for Musk, as it’s for his presidential benefactor. However since Trump is all the time able to overruling his previous commitments on a dime, and ghosting an entire slew of precise cupboard flunkeys—as much as and together with his former vp—it’s onerous to gauge when and whether or not Musk’s fiscal hobbyhorse may flip into an actual and current menace to the well-being of tens of millions of People.

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 prison conduct. It additionally quickly proved to be a bust, since there was in reality 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 nicely.

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 spite of everything, as we noticed within the ultimate episode of Silicon Valley, a meltdown of coding and greed can come perilously near destroying the world.