Shortly after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, he announced, with great fanfare, that billionaire Elon Musk and professional troll Vivek Ramaswamy were being put in charge of a "government efficiency" program. Despite all the hype, there were immediate signs that this effort may not be as serious as Musk and Ramaswamy implied with their relentless chest-beating about "cuts" and "deleting" entire agencies. The name — Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — sounds super-official, but it's just a reference to a dumb meme that Musk is obsessed with, despite being about four decades too old for it.
More importantly, it's not a real department. It's a "presidential advisory committee," which may sound like a real thing but comes with no salary and no real power. These committees have a long history of being used to create the appearance of "doing something" while doing nothing — Joe Biden killed the judicial reform debate with this tactic. Of course, Trump, being an authoritarian who loathes democracy, loves using unofficial advisers and outside powers. It's reasonable to worry that DOGE will have more power than such committees usually have. However, Musk's behavior on his X platform (formerly Twitter) is a strong sign that he, at least, is starting to worry that DOGE will be toothless.
Musk has been harassing individual federal employees, by name, in X posts. These mostly seem to be women, chosen at random because he finds their job titles annoying. As CNN reports, "Several current federal employees told CNN they’re afraid their lives will be forever changed — including physically threatened — as Musk makes behind-the-scenes bureaucrats into personal targets." Musk understands that his fan base of social media followers is composed mostly of men like himself, whose arrested development manifests in a toxic combination of cowardice and sadism. Which is to say, the kind of people who think it's fun to randomly harass people online to distract themselves from their own inadequacies. At least one employee was driven to delete her social media accounts.
This behavior is gross and yet another sign that all the money in the world can't fix the hole in Musk's soul. But it also has a strong whiff of overcompensation. Musk knows that DOGE has no power to fire people. It probably won't have much hold on Trump's limited attention span. (Reports suggest that Trump is already getting tired of Musk's company.) So Musk is resorting to online harassment, hoping to feel powerful by bullying people into quitting, since he can't get rid of them. This is just a direct action version of his proposal to make working conditions so unpleasant that federal employees quit, again suggesting he knows he will lack the power to fire most of them.
Federal employee salaries are a small fraction of the U.S. budget, so it was always false to claim that slashing the workforce would save money in any meaningful way. But the use of this tactic underscores Musk's bad faith. Even if he manages to get a fair number of people to quit rather than accept his abuse, those salaries will be inconsequential compared to the overall federal budget. This is the equivalent of cutting a dollar a month out of your grocery budget and congratulating yourself for being thrifty.
Of course Musk's hostility to federal workers was never actually about money. Like most things Elon, it's about the narcissistic drama of a man who may be richer than everyone else on earth but seems unable to shake the sense that he's a loser. That much is evident in his accusation that the jobs of his victims are "fake." In reality, these federal employees are doing socially necessary work. One target, for instance, works in climate diversification, which is about making sure transitions to clean energy can be done without people losing jobs or disruptions to the food supply chain. People who hold those kinds of jobs are often highly educated and talented, and willing to accept lower salaries as government employees because they prioritize meaningful work that helps others over money.
In other words, they're the exact opposite of Musk, a wealthy parasite who subsists mainly by taking credit for other people's hard work. We'd all be better off if he moved to Mars like he keeps wishing he could. Of course he resents people who work hard and do the right thing. It's a reminder that being the worst is a choice and that plenty of people happily choose to do better things with their lives. Rather than learn and grow, Musk wants to lash out at those who remind him of his own moral weakness. In the standard mode of MAGA psychological projection, he's calling genuinely valuable members of society a word better applied to him: fake.
Musk is certainly not alone in exposing his personal insecurities by wallowing in a weird obsession with government employees, journalists, educators and other people who get paid less for doing work that's genuinely helpful to others. The investor class of Silicon Valley has turned more MAGA in large part because of the work of fake philosopher Curtis Yarvin, whose prolific body of writing that can be summarized as arguing, "It's bad when people who know stuff make decisions." Scientists, academics, journalists — anyone who has developed an expertise in something other than making money — are all sneeringly dismissed as "the cathedral" by Yarvin. He loathes every instance when knowledge is linked to power, and genuine knowhow informs decision-making. Government bureaucrats come in for special disdain from Yarvin because their jobs are about making decisions based on valid information. He prefers a dictatorship run by someone like Trump, in which proud ignorance replaces knowledge and expertise.
This nonsense has a strong appeal to people like Elon Musk. It informs a topsy-turvy worldview, where the "elite" are people whose annual salaries are less than a tech billionaire's weekly spending on snacks. It creates a moral justification for deeply immoral behavior, such as threatening the safety of people whose only crime is reminding Musk of the emptiness of his own existence. Perhaps his committee would be better named DOEC, the Department of Existential Crisis. But of course, that would be honest, which is the biggest no-no of all in MAGA world.
The good news is that, by showing his weakness, Musk has revealed that federal employees can resist. His loudmouthed threats and harassment are about trying to get people to "obey in advance," the famous phrase coined by historian Timothy Snyder.
Do not obey in advance. Lesson 1, first page, of my pamphlet "On Tyranny" https://t.co/C3857ouRzO pic.twitter.com/FWIDPecber
— Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder) October 25, 2024
As Snyder has shown, fascists use bullying tactics often because they don't have more effective avenues. Musk probably can't fire federal workers, and there is no need to give up just because he's taking out his psychodrama on strangers. But there's a larger lesson in this for all of us. MAGA is rife with gutless sadists, people who like to wage "war" at a distance, when they don't have to look their intended victims in the eye. That cowardice is a weakness and one that can be exploited — if it's met with resolution and courage.
