Welcome to the Department of Government Idiocy

Give the incoming Trump administration this much credit: Faced with the potentially devastating burden of a maximally entitled tech bro inserting himself into government business, the president-elect has dispatched Elon Musk to a powerless bureaucratic backwater. What’s more, he’s paired Musk off with another, though differently entitled tech bro: biotech executive and once-failed GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The nominal charge of the group the pair will captain—the Department of Government Efficiency—is to eliminate wasteful government spending. But as Trump’s announcement carefully stipulated, their collaboration—though “government” exists in its title—will occur “outside of government,” which loosely translates to “outside of earshot and the field of vision of White House personnel actually trying to get their jobs done.”

The eternally oblivious Musk, who as you might remember funneled more than $200 million in super PAC support to Trump’s campaign, exulted in the announcement of the new gig, promptly posting a piece of fan art with a mockup of a logo featuring the new group’s acronym, DOGE, to his website X. Doge, you see, is the name of a crypto product in which Musk holds a major stake. Its logo, which also briefly replaced Twitter’s bird symbol on X, is a crude version of a dog mascot. (Following Trump’s announcement, Dogecoin instantly boomed in investment markets, replicating the same trend across the whole shady crypto sector, which anticipates a deregulatory bonanza after donating fully half of all corporate money to the 2024 campaign.)

In addition to extending Musk’s amazing run of never once being funny for a single moment in his life, the post on X also registered something more ominous: The main chieftain of the cost-cutting agency sports a massive array of economic conflicts of interest, having accrued a good deal of his centibillion-dollar fortune on a foundation of government contracts. In addition, the Musk enterprises that are more strictly private-sector concerns, such as his electric car company, Tesla, and his now-flailing social media platform, X, often stand athwart the regulatory mandates of a host of federal agencies. However toothless DOGE may be on the White House organizational chart, it will still be positioned to intimidate administrators pursuing Musk’s self-interested agenda.

Still, the shared gig no doubt comes as a blow to the recently anointed MAGA fanboy, who’s been muscling into a host of preelection confabs with lawmakers and foreign leaders alongside Trump, as well as swanning around the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort as his self-advertised “first buddy.”

Yet a second Trump White House will be anything but a buddies’ playground. As any cursory acquaintance with the Trump family history will readily confirm, wannabe White House intimates who fasten themselves too closely to the former business mogul are often subject to swift exile. (See Don Jr.’s tour as a third-tier influencer on Rumble, and Eric’s career, well, doing whatever it is that Eric does.)

On top of that, Musk, a raging egomaniac incapable of sustaining many close relationships, is facing the additional humiliation of sharing authority over the new gig with Ramaswamy. A far more practiced Trump sycophant, he was briefly touted on lists for more substantial, grown-up appointments in the cabinet, but fell swiftly to earth as a make-believe spending wonk. Ramaswamy’s comically inept presidential run culminated with his vow to be “unhinged” in his final debate. That promise could have doubled as the mission statement for his campaign, which trafficked mostly in warmed-over tirades on the menace of wokeness, alongside conspiracy-mongering over January 6, and the periodic call to invade Mexico and possibly Canada.

On one level, the Musk-Ramaswamy collaboration could almost double as an inspired plotline from Mike Judge’s HBO satire Silicon Valley. Take two of the most incorrigibly batshit, self-enamored figures in contemporary right-wing tech politics, and force them to work together. Better yet, tee up the mandate for responsible government spending by matching up the vaporware magnate who upped the share price he paid for the white-elephant acquisition of Twitter so that it contained the talismanic pot-smokers’ number 4.20 with a biotech hustler who profiteers on drugs that rarely make it past the testing phase. What could possibly go wrong?

Indeed, the very act of designating two chairs to direct an inquiry into the misapplication of government resources is the sort of self-canceling flourish that would be conveyed in, say, a musical conservatory called “the Kenny G Institute of Free-Jazz Improvisation.” It’s already painfully clear that the swaggering Musk has little grasp of just what the job would actually entail. During the campaign homestretch, when he wasn’t skipping around like a dipshit in a red hat behind Trump, Musk confidently pronounced that it wouldn’t be too great a lift to identify and eliminate “at least $2 trillion” in wasteful spending, when all discretionary spending in the 2024 fiscal year was $1.6 trillion, and overall spending clocked in at more than $6.75 trillion. For Musk to hit his target, many critical outlays and income supports, such as Social Security and Medicare, would have to be eviscerated. That’s likely why, in a later X flourish, Musk endorsed a user’s view that rapid spending cuts, along with other proposals like power-boosted tariffs would trigger “a severe overreaction in the economy” ahead of a “tumble” in financial markets. “Sounds about right,” the dipshit replied.

Indifference to the social costs of his vanity projects is par for the course for Musk, as it is for his presidential benefactor. But since Trump is always capable of overruling his past commitments on a dime, and ghosting a whole slew of actual cabinet flunkeys—up to and including his former vice president—it’s hard to gauge when and whether Musk’s fiscal hobbyhorse could turn into a real and present threat to the well-being of millions of Americans.

There is, I suppose, some consolation in recalling the fate of the two high-profile special White House commissions that Trump unveiled in the early days of his first term. In 2017, the White House launched the Victims of Immigrant Crime Engagement Office under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security, the highly publicized panel devoted to documenting and investigating runaway rates of immigrant violent crime. The commission was an early indicator of the MAGA movement’s lurch into fascism, since it sought to depict an ethnic group as the source of a scourge of dangerous criminal behavior. It also rapidly proved to be a bust, since there was in fact no such immigrant crime epidemic. Meanwhile, Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, captained a Trump-sanctioned inquiry into the parallel moral panic over voting fraud, and came up empty as well.

Then again, fearmongering over immigration and rampant election denial remain the two principal calling cards of the current MAGA movement, even after Trump’s first administration face-planted in its efforts to document both. Even if Musk and Ramaswamy dither away at DOGE meetings discussing the baleful proportions of the woke mind virus gnawing away at oligarchic impunity, swapping memes, or playing hacky sack like they do at Google HQ, there’s no small likelihood that they could give birth to another nihilistic MAGA crusade. After all, as we saw in the final episode of Silicon Valley, a meltdown of coding and greed can come perilously close to destroying the world.