Progressives Should Reject the DOGE Scam
There’s nothing to gain from indulging the premise that Musk and Trump care about “government waste”—it’s a ploy to gut the entire liberal state.
Adam Johnson
A great deal of successful messaging — or propaganda, as the case may be — is getting those you’re trying to convince to accept your premise without realizing they’ve done so. One way of doing this is to assert a “debate” with highly contestable ideological premises smuggled into the discussion, then just go from there. When we’re debating if “the post office is losing money,” we are accepting the false premise that the point of a post office is to “make money.” When we are debating if a politician supports police funding to “promote public safety,” we are accepting the false premise that more police necessarily reduces crime. When we are debating if “too many Palestinian civilians are dying,” we are accepting the false premise there is an acceptable level of dead Palestinian civilians, and we just need to tweak our approach a bit to get below it.
It’s a variation on the successful sales technique pioneered by Xerox in the 1960s, “Needs Satisfaction Selling,” which was not focused on getting businesses to buy their product, as such, but instead framing their sales team as “problem solvers” who would diagnosis a company’s needs then offer “solutions” that all happened to involve buying Xerox products. Just the same, for decades, right-wing think tanks, politicians, and billionaire-backed “third way” groups have long asserted that the looming specter of a “Debt Death Spiral,” or that “high debt will erode future generations’ living standards.” Gutting the liberal state is not popular — the public broadly likes social welfare, regulation, and public sector workers, so framing the issue this way was never an option. Instead, from Ross Perot to the Club for Growth to Koch front groups to Pete Peterson front groups to the Heritage Foundation, the play has instead been about “reducing spending,” “increasing efficiency” and a host of seemingly post-ideological, post-partisan goals meant to “balance the budget.”
Asserting the premise that the national deficit and debt was a crisis in the making — and garnering media buy-in of the premise — was always aimed at justifying austerity measures that privatize government services. Wall Street can then raid them, reduce labor power by pushing the poor into further precarity (guaranteeing more compliant low wage labor); slash worker protections; weaken the NLRB and OSHA, and public sector unions; and overall weaken the already puny power of the working class.
So when incoming President Donald Trump’s right-hand man, internet troll and world’s richest person Elon Musk launched the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), along with fellow rich ideologue Vivek Ramaswamy, it was a playbook that has been around for decades — pushing a far-right attack on the liberal state under the auspices of “cutting waste” but in new 4chan-speak. This was to be expected. Despite all the manosphere pandering and crying about “censorship,” Musk — like every other super rich person in modern American history — is ultimately just a Club for Growth Republican who wants weak workers, women and Black people who can’t sue for harassment, and low corporate taxes.
What was less expected and far more ominous is that a number of Democrats, both centrist and progressive, responded to this announcement by indulging the premise that DOGE is being carried out in good faith, that there exists some committee being formed to “cut waste,” and that Democrats can “work with it” to advance liberal goals. These high-profile Democrats are nodding along as the Xerox salesman runs them through the supposed “waste,” and now we’ve move onto debating the “solutions” to said waste, ostensibly under the banner of “common sense bipartisanship” or — even more credulous — to advance progressive causes.
Many centrist Democrats predictably lined up to accept the premise. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) has praised the idea as well as Musk himself. Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) has spoken warmly of DOGE, proposing “cutting federal management and reducing the size of many government forms.” Pro Israel Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) suggested “making it easier to obtain permits for infrastructure and development projects.” Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) said, according to Axios, he is working on a bill to “move all the federal agencies out of D.C.… and send them all over the country.” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) joined the “DOGE caucus” in Congress, the first Democrat to do so, claiming he wants to restructure the Department of Homeland Security to “report directly to the President.” Rep. Val Hoyle (D-Ore.) has also joined, expressing vague support for “making government more efficient,” whatever this means.
This is all happening in a broader Washington and media environment of giving up even the pretense of meaningfully resisting Trump. Instead, as I note elsewhere, the consensus from most Democrats in Congress and those in charge of Center-Left media appears to be instrumentalizing Trump to advance mutual reactionary goals, namely “securing the border,” gutting funding to left-wing activists, doubling down on hostility to China, further criminalizing homelessness, and carrying out other disagreeable tasks that they couldn’t support without Trump providing essential cover.
This dynamic is likely animating centrist Democrats, but how can one explain progressives indulging the premise of DOGE? The list of Progressive Democrats entertaining DOGE isn’t long but it has two notable members: Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Khanna, who’s made soft Silicon Valley credulity his brand, expressed qualified support of DOGE so it could maybe cut “waste, fraud and abuse” at the Pentagon. Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley and claims to have known Musk for “over a decade,” went on CNN in October to blame Democrats for Musk’s hard-right heel turn. “I think where the Democrats started to lose Elon was actually personal,” he told the CNN panel. “We should have celebrated his contributions to electric vehicles. We should have said, look, Starlink is a great product that needs to be used. We should celebrate the fact that he’s had the first commercial success of private people in space.” That a multi-billionaire with a long history of racism and anti-trans political commitments would go all-in on Trump because he simply agrees with his grim worldview wasn’t entertained; instead it’s because Biden was insufficiently groveling.
Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, is trying to Own Musk By His Own Logic by noting the waste and obscene budgets at the Pentagon. The most generous read is that Sanders is trying to make a broader point about these “government waste” committees being rife with hypocrisy and calling Musk’s bluff to go after the DOD. But it’s unclear what the point of doing so is, since Musk, a defense contractor and pathological liar — operating on behalf of a party that seeks only to bloat the Pentagon — will absolutely never do this. The public will likely not come away from these high-profile exchanges thinking, “Oh man, Republicans are hypocrites,” but will rather gain the impression, “Even Bernie agrees government waste is out of control,” or that DOGE is some good-faith, trans-ideological effort to “reduce spending.” The primary problem is Hypocrisy Gotchas on Republicans stopped being an effective rhetorical tactic sometime around the second Bush term when Jon Stewart’s schtick of mugging at them grew tedious and limp.
Republicans are open hypocrites. Trump actively campaigned as a venal philanderer and bullshit artist. We live in a post-irony world. Ideological battles need to be openly fought. Democrats, especially progressives, need to be banging home the message that DOGE is a cat food commission on steroids and talking about what the Trump administration has in store: the death of worker protections, poisoned food, crumbling schools, no more OSHA, and gutting Social Security and Medicare — not doing convoluted Hypocrisy Gotchas with the world’s most odious liars who are openly and proudly horrible people in any event.
But this isn’t the message that’s getting out. Even aside from the Democrats rolling with the false premise of DOGE, many figures in Congress and the media aren’t talking about it much at all. Why aren’t prominent Democrats yelling at the top of their lungs that this is a far-right effort to overturn popular pillars of the liberal state? Why isn’t it being branded as a stalking horse to throw grandma off social security? Where is the genuine resistance to Trump?
Much of the back and forth has echoes of the dynamics of the “Harpers Letter” episode of 2020, when some prominent progressives and leftists signed off on a suspiciously vague letter defending “free exchange of information and ideas” proposed and organized by a bunch of cynical right-wing political actors, without any critical examination of the underlying motives and context of the catchphrase in question. In the case of the Harpers Letter, it was supposedly about supporting “free speech.” In the context of DOGE, it’s supporting some nebulous principle of “government waste,” as if there is a plausible post-ideological, bipartisan arbitration of “reducing waste” that won’t just be used to slash the liberal state.
The broader context matters, and the broader agenda matters. Clever right-wing actors know that by peeling off liberals and progressives, and getting them to accept the premise that DOGE is a good faith effort, and that there can be “common ground” around abstract nouns like “efficiency,” they can dull opposition and reinforce an image in the minds of the average person: that the highly contestable premise – – that there is some objectively true reality of “government waste” crippling our economy – – is broadly agreed upon, rather than being a fake thing invented by greasy conservative extremists who want to put a centrist veneer on their far right schemes to gut worker rights, the environment, minority protections and unions.
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Adam H. Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast.
