Ruth Ben-Ghiat has contributed an essay on Substack, here is an extract:
DOGE may seem like a failure, if we take on good faith Elon Musk’s claim that its agenda was greater government efficiency and savings. The architects of DOGE were never really interested in “efficiency.” That was just a ruse in the tradition of other “drain the swamp” initiatives by autocrats. A new New York Times investigation finds that under DOGE, federal spending increased, not decreased; DOGE’s boasts of cost-cutting were based on apparently false claims and dodgy bookkeeping.
If we look at things from an autocratic point of view, though, then DOGE has been all too successful. Many media outlets believed Musk when he announced in May 2025 that he was “stepping back” to focus on his ailing Tesla business and other concerns, even though President Trump stated on that occasion that Musk was “not really leaving.” In fact, DOGE has entrenched itself within the Trump administration and continues to exercise significant, unorthodox power as a parallel civil service loyal to Musk and his hand-picked associates.
DOGE has been the cover for an audacious strategy of autocratic capture and oligarchic infiltration of the nerve centers of a superpower to extract information. The apparent goal is to create a “single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of US citizens and residents,” which could be used for government surveillance, as a report by Brookings warned. DOGE also gave Musk opportunities to dismantle agencies that were threatening his companies with investigations and fines, and to steer domestic and foreign government business toward his products.
DOGE has also furthered the Fascistic project of Russ Vought, a Project 2025 architect and Director of the Office of Management and Budget, of inflicting psychological pain on civil servants as part of destroying government as we conceive of it in a democracy. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought stated in private speeches in 2023 and 2024 that were reported by Pro Publica.
You need only read this heartbreaking new Washington Post investigation, based on interviews with some of the 300,000 civil servants forced out of their jobs in 2025, to understand the awful human, social, and economic toll of achieving a “once-unthinkable transformation” of government bureaucracy.
See :DOGE website, accessed December 24, 2025.
With this in mind, it is useful to review how DOGE executed its “hostile takeover of the federal government,” as sociologist Brooke Harrington defined it in late February. The first step was Trump giving Musk a role in the new administration. Referring to this news in a December 2024 Lucid essay, I warned that “something sinister is unfolding at the heart of American government. Because it is dangerous in a new way, we lack the language to label it and communicate the extent of the threat.” And it was hard to understand the true threat DOGE constituted, precisely because it was an unprecedented entity in U.S. governance, as was the Trump-Musk power-sharing agreement in the first months of the administration.
We all watched as Musk’s operatives occupied government buildings, sometimes locking out members of Congress; fired thousands of government employees after barring them from their own computer systems; and physically removed those who sought to stop them from seizing digital property.
Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid was perhaps the first to name the developing catastrophe. “Elon Musk is staging a coup,” he wrote on Feb. 1 on his Substack. “Not with tanks in the streets of militias at government buildings, but with spreadsheets, executive orders, and a network of loyalists embedded in the federal bureaucracy.” On Feb.2, I wrote that a new kind of coup, was unfolding in America at the hands of Musk and his “plunder operation” DOGE. Soon after, TIME magazine showed Musk at the presidential desk in the Oval Office.
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