There’s a Term for What Trump and
Musk Are Doing
How regime change happens in America
February 13, 2025,
3:12 PM ET
Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far,
primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead
focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along
with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In
other words: regime change.
No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase,
because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as “Liberation Day,”
a moment when, in his words, “vermin” and “radical left lunatics” would
be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every
single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,
replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction
of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing.
These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the
21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also
used their democratic mandates for the same purpose.. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil
company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil
service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the
Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s
Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations,
captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders,
and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.
This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and
Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims.
Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they
want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even
understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut
costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S.
budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly
designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service.
Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal
government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living
under foreign occupation.
Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service
reform
The destruction of the modern civil-service ethos will take
time. It dates from the late 19th century, when Theodore Roosevelt and other
civil-service reformers launched a crusade to eliminate the spoils system that
dominated government service. At that time, whoever won the presidency always
got to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even for menial jobs. Much of
the world still relies on such patronage systems, and they are both corrupt and
corrupting. Politicians hand out job appointments in exchange for bribes. They
appoint unqualified people—somebody’s cousin, somebody’s neighbor, or just a
party hack—to jobs that require knowledge and experience. Patronage creates bad
government and bad services, because it means government employees serve a patron,
not a country or its constitution. When that patron demands, say, a tax break
for a businessman favored by the leader or the party, they naturally comply.
Until January 20, American civil servants worked according to a different
moral code. Federal workers were under instructions to respect the rule of law,
venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful
policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations.
They were supposed to measure objective reality—evidence of pollution, for
example—and respond accordingly. Not all of them were good administrators or
moral people, but the damage that any one of them could do was limited by
audits, rules about transparency, and again, an ethos built around the rule of
law. This system was accepted by everyone—Republican-voting FBI agents,
Democratic-voting environmental officers, the nurses at veterans’ hospitals,
the air-traffic controllers at LAX.
What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains
unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one.
Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical
CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business
interests. Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were
embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk’s companies or were investigating them
for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers’ rights, and
consumer protection.
The new system, whatever its ideology, will in practice
represent a return to patronage, about which more in a minute. But before it
can be imposed, the administration will first have to break the morale of the
people who believed in the old civil-service ethos. Vought, at a 2023 planning
meeting organized in preparation for this moment, promised exactly that. People
who had previously viewed themselves as patriots, working for less money than
they could make in the private sector, must be forced to understand that they
are evil, enemies of the state. His statement has been cited before, but it
cannot be quoted enough times: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically
affected,” he said at the time. “When they wake up in the
morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly
viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”
Renée DiResta: My encounter with the fantasy-industrial
complex
The email Musk sent to most employees in the federal
government, offering them a “buyout”—several months’ pay, in exchange for a
commitment to resign—was intended to inflict this kind of trauma. In effect,
Musk was telling federal workers that he was not interested in what they were
doing, or whether they were good at it, or how they could become more
efficient. Instead, he was sending the message: You are all expendable.
Simultaneously, Musk launched an administrative and
rhetorical attack on USAID, adding cruelty to the hostility. Many USAID
employees work in difficult places, risking terrorism and violence, to
distribute food and medicine to the poorest people on the planet. Overnight,
they were told to abandon their projects and come home. In some places, the
abrupt end of their programs, for example those providing special meals to
malnourished children, will result in deaths, and USAID employees know it.
The administration has not acknowledged the dramatic
real-world impact of this cut, which will, if not quashed by the courts, result
in relatively minor budgetary savings. On the contrary, Musk and others turned
to X to lie about USAID and its alleged waste. USAID did not give millions of dollars in direct grants to Politico, did
not fund the visits of celebrities to Ukraine, did not send $50 million worth of condoms to
Gaza, and did not pay $84 million to Chelsea Clinton. But
these fictions and others have now been blasted to hundreds of millions of
people. Information taken from grant databases is also being selectively
circulated, in some cases fed to internet trolls who are now hounding grant
recipients, in order to smear people and organizations that had legitimate,
congressionally approved goals. Musk and others used a similar approach during
the so-called Twitter Files scandal to discredit researchers and
mischaracterize their work.
But the true significance of USAID’s destruction is the precedent
it sets. Every employee of every U.S. department or agency now knows that the
same playbook can be applied to them too: abrupt funding cuts and management
changes, followed by smear campaigns. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
which safeguards bank customers against unfair, deceptive, or predatory
practices, is already suspended. The Environmental Protection Agency and the
Department of Education, which mostly manages student loans, may follow. Within
other agencies, anyone who was involved in hiring, training, or improving
workplaces for minority groups or women is at risk, as is anyone involved in
mitigating climate change, in line with Trump’s executive orders.
In addition, Musk has personally taken it upon himself to
destroy organizations built over decades to promote democracy and oppose
Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence around the world. For example, he described the journalists of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, who take extraordinary risks to report in Russia,
Belarus, and in autocracies across Eurasia, as “radical left crazy people.” Not
long after he posted this misleading screed on X, one RFE/RL journalist
was released from a Belarusian prison after
nearly three years in jail, as a part of the most recent prisoner exchange.
Putting them all together, the actions of Musk and DOGE
have created moral dilemmas of a kind no American government employee has faced
in recent history. Protest or collaborate? Speak up against
lawbreaking or remain silent? A small number of people will choose heroism. In
late January, a career civil servant, Nick Gottlieb, refused to obey an order
to place several dozen senior USAID employees on administrative
leave, on the grounds that the order violated the law. “The materials show no
evidence that you engaged in misconduct,” he told them in an email. He also
acknowledged that he, too, might soon be removed, as indeed he was. “I wish you
all the best—you do not deserve this,” he concluded.
Robert P. Beschel Jr.: Making government efficient again
Others will decide to cooperate with the new
regime—collaborating, in effect, with an illegal assault, but out of
patriotism. Much like the Ukrainian scientists who have kept the Zaporizhzhia
nuclear power plant going under Russian occupation because they fear
catastrophe if they leave, some tech experts who work on America’s payment
systems and databases have stayed in place even as Musk’s team of very young,
very inexperienced engineers have demanded illegitimate access. “Going into
these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both
individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in
death and economic harm to our nation,” one government employee told my Atlantic colleagues Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost.
Eventually,
though, if the assault on the civil service
is not blocked, the heroes and the patriots will disappear. They will be fired,
or denied access to the tools they need to work, or frightened by the smear
campaigns. They will be replaced by people who can pass the purity tests now
required to get government jobs. Some will seem silly—are you willing to say
“Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico”?—and some will be deadly serious.
Already, the Post reports, candidates for national-security
posts in the new administration are being asked whether they accept Trump’s
false claim to have won the 2020 election. At least two candidates for higher
positions at the FBI were also asked to state who the “real patriots” were on
January 6, 2021. This particular purity test is significant because it measures
not just loyalty to Trump, but also whether federal employees are willing to
repeat outright falsehoods—whether they are willing, in other words, to break
the old civil-service ethos, which required people to make decisions based on
objective realities, not myths or fictions.
To show that they are part of the new system, many
loyalists will also engage in loud, performative behavior, designed to attract
the attention and approval of Trump, Musk, Vought, or their followers. Ed
Martin, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., wrote a
missive addressed to “Steve and Elon” (referring to Musk and his associate
Steve Davis) in which he vowed to track down “individuals and networks who
appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees.”
If anyone is deemed to have broken the law “or acted simply unethically,”
Martin theatrically promised to “chase them to the end of the Earth.”
Ostentatious announcements of bans on supposed DEI or climate-change projects
will similarly threaten civil servants. Late last month, the Air Force removed
videos about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, the
first Black and female Air Force pilots, from a training course. After an
uproar, the videos were put back, but the initial instinct was
revealing. Like the people asking FBI candidates to lie about what happened on
January 6, someone at the Air Force felt obliged to deny older historical
truths as well.
Eventually, demonstrations of loyalty might need to become
more direct. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out that a future IRS head, for
example, might be pressured to audit some of the president’s perceived enemies.
If inflation returns, government employees might feel they need to disguise
this too. In the new system, they would hold their job solely at the pleasure
of the president, not on behalf of the American people, so maybe it won’t be in
their interest to give him any bad news.
Many older civil servants will remain in the system, of
course, but the new regime will suspect them of disloyalty. Already, the Office
of Personnel Management has instructed federal employees to report on
colleagues who are trying to “disguise” DEI programs, and threatened “adverse
consequences” for anyone who failed to do so. The Defense Health Agency sent
out a similar memo. NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the FBI have
also told employees who are aware of “coded or imprecise language” being used
to “disguise” DEI to report these violations within 10 days.
Because these memos are themselves coded and imprecise,
some federal employees will certainly be tempted to abuse them. Don’t like your
old boss? Report him or her for “disguising DEI.” Want to win some brownie
points with the new boss? Send in damning evidence about your colleagues’
private conversations. In some government departments, minority employees have
set up affinity groups, purely voluntary forums for conversation or social
events. A number of government agencies are shutting these down; others are being disbanded by organizers who fear that
membership lists will be used to target people. Even private meetings, outside
the office, might not be safe from spying or snooping colleagues.
Annie Lowrey: Civil servants are not America’s enemies
That might sound implausible or incredible, but at the state
level, legislation encouraging Americans to inform on other Americans has
proliferated. A Texas law, known as the Heartbeat Act, allows private citizens to sue anyone they believe
to have helped “aid or abet” an abortion. The Mississippi legislature recently
debated a proposal to pay bounties to people who identify illegal aliens for
deportation. These measures are precedents for what’s happening now to federal
employees.
And the fate of federal employees will, in turn, serve as a
precedent for what will happen to other institutions, starting with
universities. Random funding cuts have already shocked some of the biggest
research universities across the country, damaging ongoing projects without
regard to “efficiency” or any other criteria. Political pressure will follow.
Already, zealous new employees at the National Science Foundation are combing through descriptions of existing
research projects, looking to see if they violate executive orders banning DEI.
Words such as advocacy, disability, trauma, socioeconomic,
and yes, women will all trigger reviews.
There are still greater dangers down the road—the possible
politicization of the Federal Electoral Commission, for example. Eventually,
anyone who interacts with the federal government—private companies,
philanthropies, churches, and above all, citizens—might find that the cultural
revolution affects them too. If the federal government is no longer run by
civil servants fulfilling laws passed by Congress, then its interests might
seriously diverge from yours.
None of this is inevitable. Much of it will be unpopular.
The old idea that public servants should serve all Americans, and not just a
small elite, has been part of American culture for more than a century. Rule of
law matters to many of our elected politicians, as well as to their voters, all
across the political spectrum. There is still time to block this regime change,
to preserve the old values. But first we need to be clear about what is
happening, and why.
