What is the DOGE?

Let’s assume for a moment that when Trump returned to power this January, he and his then-favored advisors had a concrete goal: to establish a presidential dictatorship. Certainly there were strong hints to this effect on the campaign trail, and there are good reasons Trump’s position on the matter would have hardened after the Floyd Uprising and his failed putsch. Even if it’s not true, the thought experiment is worth running. How would he have gone about doing it? 

Remember that the overwhelming reason for Trump’s victory last year was public dissatisfaction about inflation, as well as how the previous government had tried to gaslight people into thinking it was a non-issue. Meanwhile, the long-term structural crises of neoliberal America that called the far left and far right into being – fifty years of underinvestment in infrastructure and development, near-universal wage stagnation, frequent underemployment of much of the population, and the employment of the rest in the wrong industries rather than the ones we need – had lingered. There are lessons to be found in these dry facts. Overthrowing a constitutional order means building an independent power base. And in a time of economic malaise, that means delivering results to your supporters that concretely improve their lives. Only this can buy their permanent loyalty when you move to destroy your enemies. 

Whether or not the word itself applies to the faction presently in power – a famously controversial subject we won’t explore here – there’s actually a pretty clear example to have followed here in the political economy of classical fascism. 

The Germany that Hitler confronted on his accession to power in 1933 was wracked by twin scourges – one visible, one not. The first was mass unemployment. This had come about from the crash of 1929, which caused many overleveraged firms to go out of business and consumer demand to fall as more people fell out of work, causing yet more firms to go bust and ever less consumer spending in a downward cascade. At the same time, Germany was haunted by a second, invisible menace: lingering trauma from the hyperinflation of a decade prior. Many believed money in the Weimar Republic had lost its value primarily because the government printed too much of it. For them, the prospect of using the public purse to jumpstart the economy seemed unfathomably risky. This was, of course, nonsense. In reality the hyperinflation had been a result of Germany’s continual need to make reparations payments from the First World War, which eventually sparked a highly adverse shift in the exchange rate between the reichsmark and foreign currencies that in turn made imports of crucial raw materials (grain, oil, tungsten, iron, etc.) more expensive and so raised prices across the country.¹ Elena Seghezza & Pierluigi Morelli, “Was a sudden stop at the origins of German hyperinflation?” Financial History Review 27.2 (2020), pp. 161-186.  But there was enough ambiguity on this point, then as now, that it stayed the hands of many who could’ve made a difference earlier and rescued the republic from collapse.² The most famous instance of this was the WTB Plan – named after the three social democrats who proposed it (Wladimir Woytinsky, Fritz Tarnow, and Fritz Baade) – a scheme for full employment which we know now in retrospect almost certainly would have worked. It was rejected for dogmatic Marxist reasons. For a paraphrase and sources on this sordid tale, see footnote 32 of Steven Mann & John Michael Colón, “Fast Cars and Fiat Money” in Strange Matters Issue One (Summer 2022). ² 

A mainstream economist of that period would have told the Nazis to “prevent inflation” by keeping spending to a minimum and to let capitalists “readjust” their workforce back to higher levels when the business cycle magically returned to an upswing. Instead, Hitler identified the talent of the ingenious Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi Finance Minister, who knew radical, immediate, and creative action was needed to stabilize the economy. Empowered by the Führer’s personal approval of his schemes, Schacht launched a massive wave of government spending that restored production by putting the unemployed back to work – some of it on socially useful projects like the creation of Germany’s superfast highways, some of it on building the monstrous war machine with which Hitler would attempt to enslave Europe. Meanwhile, Schacht briskly negotiated one-on-one trade deals with a number of carefully selected countries, reducing German dependence on imports while bringing their costs rapidly under control. This infamous Nazi policy of “bilateralism” saw Germany targeting smaller, weaker nation-states as trade partners – all the better to gain leverage on them. Soon Hitler’s government would force them to accept, more or less at the barrel of a gun,³ No one, to my mind, has come up with a more accessible description of the Nazi trade strategy – and its exploitative nature as, in his colorful phrasing, a “carefully-thought-out policy of economic imperialist penetration” – than the British libertarian socialist GDH Cole. Cole was a believer in a form of self-managed socialism existing largely but not completely outside the state, which he called guild socialism; this politics, in the absence of a large syndicalist movement, placed him awkwardly and alone in the furthest left wing of the postwar Labour Party. Most relevantly for this essay, Cole was a highly skilled economist. Of the fascists’ “bilateralism” he writes:

The essence of the German method lay in the creation of a series of systems of bilateral trading and monetary exchange. The Nazis paid for what they bought, not in free currency which the sellers could spend as and where they pleased, but in one form or another of ‘blocked’ or earmarked German money which could be spent only in Germany, and sometimes only on certain specified German goods.

(…)

[The Nazis] manipulated the rates of exchange between the reichsmark and the currencies of the countries with which they were dealing: they manipulated surpluses and deficits in particular clearing accounts as suited them from time to time: they exacted the products they wanted from other countries, and forced other countries to buy just what it suited them best to sell. This could not have been done if there had been alternative markets open to the countries affected, as there would have been if the world had been prosperous and well-employed.

Now, I’ve written that this was done with a “gun to their head,” and, once rearmament was properly underway, Germany’s military power was doubtless a part of why some countries, especially immediate neighbors, went along with these policies. But Cole is at pains to argue that even distant countries were willing to put up with so much of this fascist bullshit – being paid in money you can only use to buy German goods, being paid late at Germany’s convenience, dealing with exchange rates kept permanently to your disadvantage, etc – because of the desperation wrought by the world economic situation of the 1930s:

The countries which the Nazis largely succeeded in dominating fell victims to German imperialism because they were riddled with unemployment and distress and could find nowhere except in Germany markets for the products which they needed to sell abroad in order to meet even the minimum import requirements of their home markets. It was preferable to sell to the Germans what the Germans wanted, even under highly disadvantageous conditions, to not being able to sell at all; and it was accordingly possible for the Nazis to impose on these needy sellers the most stringent conditions regulating both what they were to produce and what they were to receive in exchange. Even if they could neither produce what they were best fitted to produce nor get for it what they most wanted to buy, it was better to get something than nothing – and the rest of the world was offering practically nothing that the needy countries could find means of paying for.

See GDH Cole, Money: Its Present and Future (1944), pp. 16-20. reichsmarks rather than gold as payment. 

For Germany, this effectively meant buying the goods at a discount – all that grain, iron, and tungsten, paid for in paper that Germany could print rather than gold bars it could not. And for the trade partners in turn, so hungry for manufactured goods, it meant being paid for their raw materials in a currency that only Germans would accept in the future, locking them into further business with the Nazis’ favored capitalist cartels. Since this policy targeted the actual causes of the 1920s hyperinflation, the problem simply did not re-emerge – even as the Nazis set records in their government spending and transformed the structure of their economy.⁴ The most famous and well regarded economic history of the Third Reich today is Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006). This magisterial work has much to commend it; it’s mandatory reading by a highly elegant writer. However, on one very important point (among other objections I will not go into here) I must enthusiastically disagree with the silver-tongued Tooze: he insists to the point of nausea that, for the Nazis as a whole as for Schacht as an individual, full employment was an unimportant goal. He knows this is a pretty revisionist take and positions himself against an imagined mainstream that hasn’t read the primary sources as closely as he has. The autobahns, according to Tooze, “did not contribute materially to the relief of unemployment” and were instead rooted in a logic of “national reconstruction and rearmament” that was “as much symbolic as it was practical” (pp. 45-46). Of Schacht he even writes, “He was no friend of public work schemes,” believing rather in “a creative role for monetary policy” (p. 41). I find this line of thought somewhat baffling. Let’s set aside for the moment that it’s logically unsound, treating as mutually exclusive policies that go together, or ascribing to one policy the goal of a complementary one, etc. More damningly, Tooze asserts his claims far more than he ever attempts to prove them; his footnotes after each assertion are, to say the least, ambiguous in their support of his utterly certain tone; and so he does not prove things anywhere near to my satisfaction. It is difficult to resist psychologizing. Try as I might, I can’t avoid the suspicion that part of Tooze’s insistence the Nazis didn’t do anything about full employment has to do with the defense of his own self-identity as a left-liberal economist. Tooze, after all, is a loyal follower of Keynes – perhaps the last genuine one to be found in the commanding heights of the bourgeois press. It isn’t just that sharing certain policies with the Nazis would open him up to neoliberal attack. One suspects that even in his own private thoughts, the idea that the fascists could have been anything like his precious Keynesians – and they are my darlings as well as his – is too much for him to bear. But this is cowardice. And in any case, it’s factually wrong. While he was still alive Keynes praised Schacht as an exemplar of Keynesian policies in the preface to the German edition of the General Theory, even as he would later go on to use those same policies to help defeat Schacht and the Nazis in the war. See Paul McGouldrick ’s letter to the New York Times (3 January 1971). All of which brings us to the core political reality of not only the 1930s but also our own era: that the only known way to totally reconfigure an economy or exit a slump is through state economic planning, but that this planning has no specific political character. That means there is a recipe that works, more or less, making the necessary adjustments for structural limitations and dumb luck – and any ideological faction willing to employ it can do so fruitfully, whether authoritarian or democratic, socialist or capitalist, fascist or antifascist. One need only look to Schacht’s bizarre postwar career, after being acquitted of complicity with the regime due to a split he eventually had with Hitler, as a developmental advisor to the poor countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, just as indeed he had tried and failed to hawk his services to the social democrats before Hitler’s rise. See his Confessions of “The Old Wizard”: The Autobiography of Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (1956), especially the later chapters; as well as his The Magic of Money (1967). Or look to the long-term Nazi economic plan to unify the European economy into a reichsmark zone under their control, where all foreign trade was priced in their fiat currency – a goal which not long thereafter would be achieved, globally, not by the Nazis but by the liberal United States, forming the monetary basis for its global empire. See Stephen G. Gross, “Gold, Debt and the Quest for Monetary Order: The Nazi Campaign to Integrate Europe in 1940,” Contemporary European History 26, no. 2 (2017): 287–309. These methods of economic management make you powerful no matter who you are. So the crucial question then becomes: who will pick up these tools, and what will they choose to do with them? Know the answer to this, and you know what’s going to happen in our time. ⁵ The story is a bit more complicated than how I’ve told it, since Schacht himself would not agree with me on all the theoretical particulars of why I think his policies worked. In the broad strokes, I’ve based my assessment upon his own, which follows what I wrote above largely point for point:

On all three occasions I was able to break new ground. I abandoned the central banks’ so-called classic discount policy. I embarked on a program of productivity expansion not dependent on savings (that is, on a restriction of capital expenditure) but on the actual creation of new money. I rejected the trading methods which classic British economic theories had bequeathed to us. 

These successes, however, were overshadowed by the tragedy of historical events…I was still able to do my bit in achieving the cancellation of reparations; but my efforts to prevent the outbreak of war were frustrated. The man under whom I succeeded in eliminating unemployment and adjusting the balance of payments ruined everything later on by his war policy. (Confessions, p. 471)

However, at various other points – especially in describing Third World countries after the war, whom he was trying to help develop – Schacht describes the importance of keeping budget deficits in order and even implementing austerity to get them under control. Figuring out exactly why this bizarre contrast exists would take a longer bibliographical essay than I can write in this footnote. But so far as I can tell, Schacht had a quasi-magical idea that issuing the new purchasing power through his convoluted MEFO bills scheme rather than printing money directly made a material difference in the feasibility of a monetary expansion without causing inflation; and, separately, he thought the labor-power of the German people ultimately backed his efforts in the 1930s, which would not necessarily be the case with less industrious and more “primitive” peoples until they changed their culture and grew their industrial base – both technical analyses I’d disagree with. This is my holistic impression from more or less the entirety of his two major books. However, since I can’t justify my reading concisely in this space (and am not fully certain of it myself), you’ll either have to take my word for it or do your own research.

Needless to say, these measures won Hitler an enormous amount of support from the military, the shopkeepers, and the big capitalists of his ethnic German political coalition. None of this is to deny the incredible incompetence of the Nazi regime in other respects, not least in pursuing the war which destroyed it completely; nor to whitewash its brutality in undertaking its political purges, totalitarian control of media, eugenic experiments, foreign conquests, and world historically monstrous genocide of Jews and other minorities. The point, rather, is that such policies, even at the early and comparatively modest level of the Kristallnacht, are difficult to envision having been enacted unless the Nazis first delivered concrete results to that ethnic German base. In other words, to put it bluntly: if you’re a smart fascist, you fix the economy with economic planning first, and only then will you have the political capital among the public to conduct your desired genocides and blow all your resources on glorious wars of conquest. This sequence of events is important, because you won’t be allowed to kill millions of people or self-immolate your tinpot regime if you don’t build up the goodwill that lets you establish it in the first place.⁶ The Italian fascist case makes for an interesting contrast – they attempted laissez-faire in the first years, and only later enacted a shift to the planned economy – because it shows that Trump’s admin may yet reverse course. However, there is good reason to believe this isn’t the case, as I’ll note in my discussion below of the Crisis of Competence. For more info on fascist Italy’s period of austerity, see Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (2022).

There’s no denying that Trump was in a position to act this way in January of this year. He had, for the razor-thin margins of twenty-first-century American elections, a large mandate. His party was in control of all three branches of government. Potential advisors were available in the “national conservative” press (American Affairs, Palladium, etc.) who had at least gestured vaguely in the direction of such policies, whether or not they had the know-how to enact them themselves.⁷ For more on this “national conservative” tendency – which, with varying degrees of openness, more or less admits to wanting an authoritarian government in America run by a supposedly natural aristocracy of tech barons, all the better to implement state-led industrial development, a partial welfare state, and the purge of minorities – see Suzanne Schneider, “Beyond Athens and Jerusalem” in Strange Matters Issue Three (Spring 2024). And even so seasoned an industrial capitalist as Jeff Bezos – who’d helped engineer a warehouse system that, for all its brutal exploitation and monopolism, is a technological wonder of the world – was right there in Washington fellating his boot.⁸ Olivia Craighead, “Jeff Bezos Wasted No Time Sucking Up to Trump” in The Cut (6 November 2024) 

But instead he went with Elon Musk, proceeding to undertake a completely unnecessary campaign of austerity on a massive scale. Well: he did, until he didn’t. But by then the damage was done – not only to the public, but to Trump’s own chances of establishing a permanent regime. 

Let’s carry out another hypothetical and treat Trump and Musk like the two great men of history they think they are. What this might actually mean – and what we might expect them to do if they had a serious political programme – is best summarized by the historian C.L.R. James’s paraphrase of Marx: “Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment.”⁹ C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1989) As a corollary, no greatness is possible without some awareness of those necessities. A great man might take stock of America’s problems and the resources it has at its disposal to address them. He might turn his attention to climate change, whose effects on the viability of agriculture and coastal megacities will very soon reduce our range of choices across global politics. He might study the present state of the imperial dollar, and how recent attacks on its receivability could, if fully realized, throw the US balance of payments into chaos. Or he might contemplate our place in the value chain, that inherent and inevitable hierarchy which ranks different sorts of exports by their price in the major world currencies – a prime mover in the economic behavior of all nation-states, and perhaps the biggest influence on the odds that any large project (from industrialization to re armament to decarbonization) might succeed. The great man of history swims in the waters of the social classes and the ethnicities and the genders and the generations, the balance of forces between them and their current claims on society’s resources, which will shape the problems they face, the desires they cultivate, and what a politician must therefore do to bring them into a coalition. These are powers that can force the president’s hand or shackle his wrists. 

But the debt? A debt which periodically balloons by the billions without any inflation, whenever there’s a distant imperial war that leaves our core supply chains intact? A debt which has existed for our entire lifetimes and been the main cause of not a single catastrophe? A debt which is, for the most part, little more than a mirror image of the assets held by households and firms in civil society? Don’t make me laugh. 

If the debt itself is insufficiently compelling a force, some might argue, perhaps there are debt alarmists among the big capitalists that must be listened to for other reasons. But let’s be serious. Who among these fat cats is willing and able to force Trump to do anything about the debt he didn’t already want to, or else? The same oligarchs who’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into his widely despised tariffs? Who couldn’t even succeed in punishing him for crimes he’d clearly committed, multiple times? Whose “deep state” is as hopelessly divided in itself as all the outer surfaces of our sputtering republic? 

The debt, simply put, wasn’t an issue – not until it was, more or less randomly, declared to be – a fact which Trump himself, in a previous life, was clearly aware of. “These people are crazy,” he said of debt hawks on CNN in 2016. “This is the United States government. First of all, you never have to default, because you print the money, I hate to tell you, okay? So there’s never a default.” In his crude way, back then at least, he was absolutely correct.¹⁰ See “Donald Trump: U.S. can never default because it prints money” on Politico (9 May 2016). Regular readers of the magazine’s economic pages will know that we and our writers more or less believe this to be true, for all practical purposes. For all that, it’s interesting and depressing how, just a few years after all this austerity talk was on the verge of disappearing in the COVID milieu of the early 2020s, what with the clear links that situation made to the effect of supply chain disruptions on prices due to the pandemic and the wars. Alas, it appears to be back on the rise in several countries, notably France and the UK, where similarly spurious budget fights are toppling governments and distracting from real questions like whether France should reindustrialize or how Britain can escape its balance of payments pinch. 

What changed? As always with Trump, some particular admixture of others’ flattery with his own caprice. So far as anyone can tell, the impetus for his recent shift was the friendship he struck with Musk on the campaign trail, when the celebrity tech baron became not only Trump’s money man but the single largest donor on either side of the 2024 election. From this high vantage Musk would fund videos full of outright lies,¹¹ Kanishka Singh & Sheila Dang, “Musk and X are epicenter of US election misinformation, experts say” in Reuters (4 November 2024). mutually incompatible ad campaigns to pit ethnic groups against one another for Trump’s benefit,¹² Tom Perkins, “Musk-linked Pac accused of targeting Jewish and Arab Americans in swing states” in The Guardian (4 November 2024). and direct cash payouts of questionable legality to voters, among other oddball schemes.¹³ Zachary B. Wolf, “Musk keeps giving select voters $1 million checks. How is this legal?” on CNN.com (1 April 2025). 

But this was to be only the beginning of Musk’s galaxy brained ideas. In August 2024 (reportedly, after two failed attempts)¹⁴  Sophia Cai & Irie Sentner, “DOGE has made a big impact on Washington. But government spending is up” in Politico (29 April 2025).  Musk seems to have convinced Trump of two propositions. First, that the national debt is the source of the country’s economic problems. And second, that only Musk – not only the world’s richest man but a world-historic genius, the Ozymandias of the capitalist class, and humankind’s only hope of “extending the light of consciousness to the stars”¹⁵ The three components, as I see it, of Musk’s cult of personality – those last words in quotes, famously, being his own, repeated to the point of nausea in the press. – could fix it. Thus, in a surprise to literally everyone – including, I presume, many of the “national conservative” intellectuals who’d been very openly salivating at the prospects of right-wing industrial policy for years – the first priority of the Trump administration became slashing and burning the federal government’s core operations. And in doing so, Trump would turn the country’s biggest billionaire into an unelected commissar who unilaterally determined what that government would or would not be allowed to fund.¹⁶ This is no exaggeration. DOGE’s maximum programme – which was caught in the gears of the judiciary after a flurry of lawsuits, and seems now to have been abandoned since Musk’s exit from the government – appears to have been to establish direct control of all government funding streams not for Congress (which has it by constitutional right) or even for the President (who has usurped some of it in practice through the course of the twentieth century, via a massive military-industrial complex and alphabet soup of government agencies under executive control) but for Musk himself and his teenage acolytes in DOGE. To a great extent, this was accomplished by their assault on the little-known federal payments system. DOGE pursued and, in at least a few cases, executed the power to actually reverse payments that had already been issued by the government to various agencies, using the deep programming guts of the Treasury’s systems – systems which, among other things, govern not only federal payouts but also the Automatic Clearing House (ACH) system that controls bank transfers across the country and the International Treasury Payments (ITP) systems that control dollar transactions across the world. Needless to say, the very fact they were digging around in that plumbing at all is scary enough, given that it’s run on highly antiquated programming languages understood by very few experts, introducing the possibility of errors that could simply render the system partly or wholly inoperable. But it also raises the possibility (absurd though it sounds) of DOGE’s being able to personally track and even remove money from the bank accounts of whoever it wants, whether inside or outside the government. Probably the best reporting on this front (despite its amateurish and slightly insufferable air of self-promotion) has been by Nathan Tankus. Specifically, see “Can Trump Arbitrarily Take Money From Anyone’s Bank Account?” in Rolling Stone (13 March 2025) and “Day Six of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025: ‘Treasury has been denying that they gave Marko write access, but I am looking at his access request right now’” in the Notes on the Crisis newsletter (5 February 2025).  

I suppose it all must sound reasonable enough to the incurious and uninformed: trust the wealthiest man in the world to know what builds wealth. Why not? I shall count the ways. 

Let’s put aside the fact (quite interesting in itself, but too much to discuss outside a footnote) that Elon Musk’s claims to expertise, genius, the title of number-one billionaire, and even basic business competence have on closer inspection appeared highly questionable to many thoughtful observers.¹⁷ Musk’s reputation as a businessman has gone through a rollercoaster ride over the years. To his cult following (which once encompassed most of the Establishment press and many scientists), he is an innovator and genius on a massive scale – the very nearly singlehanded creator of multiple industries – whose skill at business is matched by his personal understanding of the relevant engineering. Lately, one has been hearing a different tune. For one thing, despite his desire to gut the federal government, various of his companies are built on Uncle Sam’s largesse in the form of $38 billion in state contracts – see Desmond Butler, et al, “Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding” in the Washington Post (26 February 2025). He is, one major paper reports, engaged in drug abuse that may be hampering his judgment – see Kirsten Grind & Megan Twohey, “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama” in the New York Times (31 May 2025). Workers and managers who have labored under his command told various media outlets that his management style is characterized by not only the usual union-busting and speed-ups but also a disregard for safety and engineering issues, a tendency to assign impossible goals, an explosive response to anyone questioning his micromanaging orders, and tendencies towards racism and unwanted sexual advances – see Lora Kolodny, “Elon Musk’s extreme micromanagement has wasted time and money at Tesla, insiders say” on CNBC (19 October 2018), Emily Walsh, “Elon Musk asks Tesla managers who don’t execute orders to ‘resign immediately,’ a report said, citing leaked emails” in Business Insider (20 November 2021), and Russ Mitchell, “Is the world’s richest person the world’s worst boss? What it’s like working for Elon Musk” in the Los Angeles Times (14 November 2022). But whatever his flaws, some might say, you can’t argue with results: he is a supremely talented capitalist. Perhaps. Or perhaps not. It must be said that to other observers, even long before his far-right turn of recent years, a different pattern has been discernible in the history of his businesses. SpaceX, which has at least proven itself to be a viable government contractor, is according to one outlet “really run” by CEO Gwynne Shotwell, who handles nearly every internal team and “oversees most of SpaceX’s central business” (Beatrice Nolan, “Meet Gwynne Shotwell, the woman who really runs SpaceX for Elon Musk” in Business Insider [13 June 2024]); meanwhile, a group of engineers at the firm notoriously wrote a public letter calling Musk “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us” and urging the company to break ties (Joey Roulette, “SpaceX employees denounce CEO Musk as “distraction” – letter” in Reuters [16 June 2022]). Much of Musk’s reputation as a great capitalist – and most of his net worth – is bound up with Tesla. But whereas SpaceX has built a viable business sucking on the government teat, Tesla owes almost its entire size to its enthusiastic subsidy by financial markets. Musk acquired the company only after it had built its core EV technology; many of the products since his tenure began (most spectacularly, the Cybertruck) have been failures; others have failed to appear at all; it has lost enormous amounts of market share to Chinese EV firms, which have genuinely driven down costs of production and provided consistent quality in a way Tesla vehicles struggle to match; and the billions of dollars it makes selling carbon credits, so key to plugging the hole made by its comparative incompetence at selling cars, are about to disappear due to Trump. All this bodes badly in a company whose valuation by investors dwarfs its actual profits to an almost unprecedented degree. To give you a sense: the Price/Earnings or P/E ratio of a company is the ratio of its stock price to its actual profit earnings per share, i.e. a measure of how much more investors are paying for it compared to the actual money it generates. The higher the number, the bigger the disparity between Wall Street hype and balance sheet reality. Tesla’s P/E at the time of this writing is 246; for perspective, on the eve of its collapse in a massive scandal, Enron’s was 70. One currently active lawsuit against the company even characterizes Musk’s Tesla-centered network of companies as intentionally misleading investors with inflated financial information and promised product lines it has no intention of delivering, calling it “a Matryoshka doll of multiple, nested, interdependent frauds” – see “Document 55” in Greenspan v. Musk et al, California Northern District Court, Case no. 3:24-cv-04647-MMC, p.1. Time will tell whether Musk’s empire is built upon a strong foundation or a house of cards. But for some, at least, such omens do not inspire confidence. The more important thing is the simple history of it all. On one level, there’s nothing new about using a crisis as an excuse to shove privatization, deregulation, and spending cuts down our throats until these changes can be made permanent. Quite to the contrary, that’s the standard operating procedure of neoliberalism. The economists, in their colorful and macabre language, call it “shock therapy.” And according to critics of neoliberalism like Naomi Klein and Philip Mirowski, this “shock doctrine” has been applied to the poor and rich countries alike by the capitalists at the helm of US imperialism, who are as willing to do it to their own populations as to those abroad.¹⁸ See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013). 

That’s sort of right, I think. But on another level, I believe there is in fact something new about Musk’s brand of pillage. First, the crisis has been manufactured out of whole cloth, is transparently nonexistent, in a manner rather different from those exploited by neoliberals in the past. More importantly, Musk has forgotten, or never learned, a crucial distinction – one that, to be fair, also eludes leftists like Klein and Mirowski. It’s this: the smartest neoliberals, in the sort of trade secret one spreads around but never quite writes down, have always known that there’s a difference between the sort of shock therapy you apply to other countries and that which you apply to your own – the kind you force upon the foreigners and the kind you force upon your own plebs. This is because the hardest forms of shock therapy, where you hold the remote and your enemy wears the electrodes, quite simply destroy nation-states. One need only look at post Soviet Russia in the 90s and its descent into warlordism. And so, here at home, there are certain things one simply doesn’t touch. If nothing else, it’s obvious to most who’ve approached US federal power that the empire needs the National Security State to keep the peace abroad and the Social Security State to keep it at home. With that as a basic principle, lines have until now quietly been drawn around a whole category of crucial government functions, from which boundary the hungry fingers of oligarchs and their pet economists are to be smacked away. Like the fable writer said: kill not the goose that lays the golden egg. 

Musk has ignored this secret rule with extreme prejudice. While the core branches of the military have largely (though not entirely)¹⁹ They almost DOGE’d the bullet; but sadly for them, they couldn’t escape without at least getting grazed. To list one example: DOGE forced through a cut to a program that was aiming to digitize the Navy’s payments system for employees. The problem is that this might just have been a crucial effort. It turns out that (in what any vet will recognize as standard military dysfunction) most of the Navy’s HR and payroll systems are apparently housed in what one report calls “a critical and aging server in Tennessee,” and which one anonymous source says was almost lost due to flooding earlier this year. The digitization effort was an attempt to finally widen this choke point by getting the data onto the cloud – though DOGE has decided to fix the situation instead by immediately canceling the attempt to fix it. Should the server ever be lost, it’d apparently take 9 to 16 months to recover, during which time no promotions would be possible across the Navy. See Konstantin Toropin, “A Single Server Holds All Navy Pay and Promotion Data. DOGE Canceled a Contract to Upload It to the Cloud” on Military.com (22 May 2025). But presumably, DOGE will make up for such minor hiccups with the massive scissors it’s going to take to bureaucratic red tape. Consider the generous agreement it’s struck with the Department of Defense to review “all unclassified contracts” and their “requirements approval/validation documents.” As anyone with a corporate job knows, nothing makes a process go faster than adding an extra approval step! Presumably our self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” Peter Hegseth feels the same: perhaps intoxicated by his passion at the sight of such a muscular and virile display of initiative, he issued a statement clarifying that “if the DOD DOGE team doesn’t provide input within two business days of receiving a review package, the procurement should proceed as normal,’” causing a journalist to note dryly: “It’s not immediately clear exactly what will happen to a procurement effort if DOGE raises concerns during the review process.” See Jon Harper, “As Elon Musk exits government, Hegseth gives DOGE team more influence on Pentagon contracting” in DefenseScoop (29 May 2025).    been shielded from the effects of his DOGE cuts, the same can’t be said for the intelligence apparatus. In particular, the two key front organizations that the CIA has used for most of this century to interfere with foreign governments – USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy²⁰ There’s been considerable liberal denialism on this point, some of which has been echoed by the antifascist left, pointing out the legitimate charitable ventures funded by USAID and treating the intelligence connection as propaganda. On one level, I can’t disagree: it’s certainly true that the sudden end of programs delivering, say, HIV medicine, all at once, in every country across the world, will result in many – some calculate millions – of deaths. See Jonathan Lambert, “Study: 14 million lives could be lost due to Trump aid cuts” on NPR.org (1 July 2025). However, it is denialism verging on pure fantasy to say that USAID’s primary function is benevolent charity. Rather, USAID and the NED functioned as dual arms of US “soft power” – and while in theory this is a matter of doing good so that you’re well liked on the world stage (see Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Soft Power” in Foreign Policy No. 80, Twentieth Anniversary [Autumn, 1990], pp. 153-171), in practice it’s been much more a system of carrot and stick with which to blackmail or ratfuck countries that diverge from Washington’s priorities in any way. Most typically, these funding networks have been used as a pipeline to pump endless resources into a vast apparatus of NGOs and media ventures that flood the airwaves with their uniform opinions, crowding out genuine grassroots media, and treating any divergence from neoliberalism or other US priorities, however democratic, as “authoritarianism” (a foreign equivalent to the domestic nonprofit industrial complex). Full-time jobs at such ventures double as permanent sinecures for local right-wing forces and covers for American intelligence operatives. These funding streams have also been tied to bribes for provincial or local government officials to get them to join overt coup attempts or other US-sponsored regime change efforts, as well as to the funding of violent paramilitary groups under the auspices of enhancing “civil society.” This is not to say that any dissident in a country ruled by an anti-US regime is on the CIA payroll, nor even that anyone who has ever received money from the US in this manner is a US agent plain and simple – such talking points, which frame any resistance to “anti-imperialist” dictatorships as astroturfed “color revolutions,” are a central part of the propaganda of competing imperial powers like Russia and China. See Leila al-Shami, “The ‘Anti-Imperialism’ of Idiots” on the Anarchist Library (14 April 2018); Gilbert Achcar, “How to Avoid the Anti-Imperialism of Fools” in The Nation (6 April 2021), and “Eastern Ukraine: Popular Uprising, Conspiracy, or Civil War?” in n+1 (27 May 2014). Still, a perusal of the investigative journalism relating to US aid in any given country will quickly uncover scores of such cases. A good single overview, using diplomatic cables as sources, is The Wikileaks Files: The World According to US Empire (2016); see also Catherine A. Traywick, “‘Cuban Twitter’ and Other Times USAID Pretended To Be an Intelligence Agency” in Foreign Policy (3 April 2014). Finally, it’s worth noting that even “legitimate” charitable aid has its malicious dimensions: the US tends to increase it when governments that do what it wants are in power, targeting key survival functions to make them dependent upon the aid funding, only to then suspend or outright remove it when governments that oppose US interests enter office, often at great human cost. For examples of Trump doing this in his first term, see “US cuts foreign aid to Ethiopia over disputes on Nile dam project” on CNBC Africa (2 April 2020) and David Brunnstrom, “Trump cuts more than $200 million in U.S. aid to Palestinians” in Reuters (24 August 2018); for a grimly amusing academic discussion of such strategies, see Nic Cheeseman, Haley J. Swedlund, & Cleo O’Brien-Udry, “Foreign aid withdrawals and suspensions: Why, when and are they effective?” in World Development Volume 178, June 2024, 106571.  – were cut to the bone, the former defunded out of existence overnight and the latter soon to follow pending a lawsuit.²¹ See Fatma Tanis & Leila Fadel, “USAID officially shuts down and merges remaining operations with State Department” on NPR.org (1 July 2025) and Zach Schonfeld & Rebecca Beitsch, “Democracy group sues over stripping of funds by Trump administration” in The Hill (5 March 2025). Meanwhile, on the domestic front, DOGE enacted the single largest cut in history to the Social Security Administration’s staffing budget, creating what is likely to be a permanent labor shortage in the workforce required to administer and pay out Social Security benefits.²² See Zeeshan Aleem, “How DOGE’s reckless cuts created chaos at the Social Security Administration” on MSNBC.com (13 July 2025) and Kathleen Romig & Devin O’Connor, “Reassignment Won’t Fix the Largest-Ever Social Security Staffing Cut” on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities website (23 June 2025). And Medicaid, having been first scouted by DOGE for cuts, was gutted accordingly by later legislation, which will result in tens of millions being thrown off the rolls.²³ See Aris Folley, “House Republican eyes Medicare, Social Security for DOGE cuts” in The Hill (9 December 2024); Mia Ives-Rublee & Kim Musheno, “The Truth About the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s Cuts to Medicaid and Medicare” from the Center for American Progress (3 July 2025); and Lindsey Copeland, “Final House Vote on Devastating Health and Food Assistance Cuts” from the Medicare Rights Center (3 July 2025). The GOP’s cynicism knows no bounds, and the worst effects are timed to take place only after elections have run their course; see “Medicaid cuts from Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ will not take effect until after midterms” on MSNBC.com (10 July 2025). Given these attacks on parts of the state that are important to natsec ghouls and MAGA Boomers alike, should we be surprised that a number of Joint Chiefs (including several known for their aggressively imperialist views) publicly denounced the government’s actions? Or that the town halls of Republican legislators in safe red districts have been crammed with riotous crowds of angry white right-wingers?²⁴ See Dan Lamothe, “Former defense chiefs denounce Trump’s ‘reckless’ Pentagon firings” in the Washington Post (27 February 2025); Melanie Zanona & Megan Lebowitz, “Republicans advised to avoid in-person town halls after confrontations over layoffs go viral” on NBC News (4 March 2025); Alexandra Marquez, “Republican congressman faces extended boos and jeers at rowdy town hall” (14 March 2025) and “GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson met with boos at Iowa town hall” (28 May 2025) on NBC News; and Cheyanne M. Daniels, “’Well, we all are going to die’: Joni Ernst spars with town hall crowd over Medicaid” in Politico (30 May 2025). 

Many of these cuts are so outrageous and so patently idiotic that they boggle the imagination. They’re enough to feed the worms in your brain for years to come. I completely understand why some leftists, even those who acknowledge they had no structural cause, might still try to see a strategic logic in them. Maybe, the thinking goes, the austerity is a pretense; maybe, as in the “anti-corruption campaigns” of Mohammad Bin-Salman and Xi Jinping, Trump is just using them to purge the administrative state of his political enemies, before stuffing it with his own cronies and radically re-expanding it to enact a properly corporatist programme.²⁵ For an example of this argument from a prominent leftist, see Chris Hedges, “The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship” on the Chris Hedges Report Substack (23 February 2025). I personally found such talking points to be most common in movement spaces in February and March, around the time of the first DOGE cuts. While they have become less prominent, I still hear them often enough that I think it’s important to refute them. The nugget of truth to such arguments is that politics was a part of it: a cursory examination of the biggest DOGE cuts shows that climate change, LGBT, anti-racist, and other “woke” initiatives were often prioritized. See “Tracking the Harm of DOGE Cuts” [https://www.clasp.org/doge-tracker/] on the Center for Law and Social Policy website. But even then, the sheer number and extent of cuts across even clearly essential sectors, discussed above and in adjacent footnotes, shows that DOGE was not a cynical pretext for a purge but a sincere end in itself.  Yet to see this all as part of a grand strategy is to “fix” the Trump administration by making it smarter than it actually is – and so to miscalculate its real dangers. If the point, after all, was to lay the groundwork for something like the American Affairs agenda, then why enact a purge of the already severely understaffed Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) – an agency almost entirely composed of apolitical civil servants, providing a baseline industrial maintenance function, where DOGE’s firings are quite likely to produce more and deadlier plane crashes sooner rather than later?²⁶ See John Yang & Harry Zahn, “How DOGE’s cutbacks at the FAA could affect aviation safety” on PBS News Weekend (16 March 2025) and Katie Rose Quandt, “Another DC Plane Collision Puts Trump and Musk’s FAA Cuts in the Spotlight” on Truthout (11 April 2025).  Why, in a country where science funding is effectively nationalized, would one eliminate vast swathes of it across all sectors of research, creating what one expert has called “a lost generation of talent” in fields from chemistry to biotechnology to economic statistics?²⁷ Nina Lakhani, “Scientists warn US will lose a generation of talent because of Trump cuts” in The Guardian (3 July 2025); Dan Drollette Jr., “The impact of DOGE’s funding cuts on biomedical research, from the point of view of former NIH director Monica Bertagnolli” on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (13 May 2025); Katie Langin, “‘It’s a nightmare.’ U.S. funding cuts threaten academic science jobs at all levels” in Science (7 July 2025); and “How DOGE Is Dismantling Government Research Capacity” from the Roosevelt Institute (7 March 2025). Why would a DOGE employee have made headlines by expressing his genuine unease at how little “waste, fraud, and abuse” he’d found compared to what he expected, and was “pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was”?²⁸ Lauren Hodges, Patrick Jarenwattananon, & Juana Summers, “Former DOGE engineer says he was ‘surprised’ by ‘how efficient’ the government is” on NPR.org (5 June 2025).  Why, in short, attack the very state capacity that would be required for a regime of any political character pushing large-scale economic transformation?²⁹ Josh Bivens, “DOGE is not worth engaging. You cannot cut your way to a federal government that does more” from the Economic Policy Institute (30 January 2025).  All these bespeak a genuine superstition within the DOGE project that massive and indiscriminate cuts to government spending were necessary³⁰ Or perhaps, as some theories have it, that necessity was borne not of superstition but of Musk’s personal interests. Many journalists have pointed out that he had a habit of pursuing some of DOGE’s most aggressive cuts in the agencies responsible for regulating his own companies. See, for example, Tim Dickinson, “How Elon Musk Is Using DOGE to Weaken His Regulators” in Rolling Stone (1 March 2025). – regardless of the long-term effects they would have on Trump’s (possible) dictatorial aspirations. 

Of course, it wasn’t to last. In the end, Musk clashed with and was humiliated by Trump’s other Cabinet members and advisors, possibly even receiving a black eye from one of them after a physical altercation. Having thus become designated as one of the “losers,” Musk was booted out: Trump first reined in his power and then allowed his term to expire.³¹ See Andrew Prokop, “The real reason DOGE failed isn’t what you think” in Vox (29 April 2025); Jonathan Swan & Maggie Haberman, “Inside the Explosive Meeting Where Trump Officials Clashed With Elon Musk” in the New York Times (7 March 2025); and Liam Archaki, “Musk Hit Rival ‘Like a Rugby Player’ During Unhinged White House Fight” in the Daily Beast (7 June 2025). Still, the damage has been done. The subsequent passage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill doubles and triples down on DOGE’s full-throated commitment to neoliberal policies. Even the split in the GOP over the bill – between Trump and Musk in the media, and between different factions in the congressional majority – is really a split over neoliberal priorities. (Which number is more important to shrink, the one labeled “deficit” or the one labeled “taxes on the rich”?)³² Kenneal Patterson, “Steve Bannon Calls to Deport Musk Amid Messy Trump Breakup” in the Daily Beast (5 June 2025). There is zero sign of a “national conservative” faction waiting in the wings making an argument to expand the budget and enact economic planning. The “national conservative” intellectuals who’ve championed such policies have been silent or mealy-mouthed in their response.³³ As of this writing, Palladium has so far as I can tell been silent about DOGE; and American Affairs has only produced one truly pathetic article about it (Kevin Hawickhorst, “Accounting for State Capacity” in American Affairs [Summer 2025 / Volume IX, Number 2]) that’s mostly wishful thinking wrapped in historical drag, essentially advising a fictional version of the agency that genuinely wants to augment state planning capacity. And even “national conservative” politicians who’d previously made such noises, like Josh Hawley, have quietly stepped into line.³⁴ See “Senator Josh Hawley struggles to defend his vote for the Big Ugly Bill” on YouTube (10 July 2025) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNGQLU1vxo]  

At bottom, all of this is bad news for Trump in the long run. Yes, it’s true that in the short term he’s consolidated some control over the administrative state, whose remaining employees may think twice before contesting an insane or politically motivated order. But what has this really won him? There are already signs that the massive cuts are having negative effects on employment and demand – and these will likely be supercharged by other shocks being created by other Trump policies. Even if Trump reverses down the line – as he’s done before on economic questions – it will take years to undo the damage DOGE did in just a few months. The faintest experience in large scale enterprise will teach you right away that there is no discernible advantage to losing talent or know-how, especially in the administration of key infrastructure, unless you can genuinely replace it. It follows that any industrial policy would be beginning from an even more disadvantageous position than before 2025. Which brings us to our inevitable conclusion: a Trump regime, if it is able to consolidate itself at all, will be weak, poor, and dysfunctional compared even to recent iterations of the federal government – and as a result, it will be unable to exert control over the entirety of the present-day US. 

Which, I hasten to add as one final point, is not exactly good news for anti-authoritarians. And not just because things can only keep getting steadily worse for so long before the dam breaks – though that’s true, too. There’s a deeper insight here about just what we’re up against: the far right themselves as a political faction, yes, but even more fundamentally, a key and underrated element of the conditions that have brought them into being. 

The socialist intellectuals are always sniffing around for structural causes, whether real or imagined – and some like to imagine truly fanciful mechanisms through which, allegedly, social being specifically determines social consciousness. But if you want to blame the DOGE debacle on a structure, here’s one nobody talks about. I believe that fifty years of neoliberalism did more than just change the institutional structure and investment patterns of global capitalism. After many years reflecting on the matter, and especially since the events at the start of this decade, I have more and more been unable to avoid the conclusion that the neoliberal order has (to employ a demonic phrase) permanently damaged the human capital available as a recruitment pool to the administrative state. Call it a crisis of competence in the elite. The midcentury economic planners retired or were hounded out of the vast bureaucratic apparatus. The neoliberals sunk their claws into the relevant university departments and journals. Two more generations filtered in and out of these, with wholly fantastical ideas in their pretty little heads. Then one day we blinked and came to realize the knowledge that upheld the midcentury regulated economy – the practical know-how, the stuff you learn by doing, everything that rarely gets written down except in napkin drawing form – had been lost. Maybe forever. 

I find it hard to otherwise explain how among literally everyone involved in the battle royale of today’s politics – whether left, right, or center; in power, or waiting in the wings – there’s simply a dearth of people who actually have any practical idea of how you’d transform the economy at its roots. And this, even though such transformations followed one another like machine gun bullets at the climax of the last century. The 1940s especially make a mockery of everything considered possible by our most respectable commentators. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the aforementioned Nazi rearmament schemes, or the US’s Arsenal of Democracy, or the USSR’s almost unbelievable “evacuation” of all its major industries to Siberia: in most countries of the world and especially in America, the Second World War seems to belong to a mythic age of heroes and monsters, where few of the rules by which we shackle ourselves today seemed to apply.³⁵ For the US’s planned economy during World War II, see Mark R. Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (2016); JW Mason, “The Economy During Wartime” in Dissent (Fall 2017); and Sam Levey, “How They Paid for the War” in the Strange Matters online section (27 January 2023). For a detailed operational analysis of the truly unfathomable Soviet evacuation – where the USSR uprooted thousands of its largest industrial plants, comprising more or less all its heavy industries, from the front lines and reinstalled them in Siberia to avoid the Nazi advance, effectively industrializing itself a second time – see Sanford R. Lieberman, “The Evacuation of Industry in the Soviet Union During World War II,” Soviet Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jan 1983), pp. 90-102. More and more with each passing year, this waning technocratic know-how seems to me a hidden root network at work beneath the surface of events. In past eras, the forest above depended upon its quiet activity, its growth, its exchange of nutrients. Its atrophy and its replacement by some cheap knock-off or other is like a slow radical death that year by year spreads rot and desiccation to every tree we can observe aboveground. Nor does my description really do the problem justice. Yes, you can talk about it in economic terms as a personnel issue or a labor shortage. But an economy is just a culture seen through the lens of its production process, and cannot but be influenced by cultural factors even as it influences these in turn. The neoliberal political economy created a neoliberal culture that has decisively mired us in the muck of that political economy even despite our sincere attempts to break free of it. 

No matter which way we push, we feel trapped. Every path seems foreclosed by the steady, piecemeal annihilation of anything in our shared way of life we could have drawn on as a resource in our bid to escape neoliberalism into something – anything – else. A culture that prizes absentee shareholders over not only workers and their unions but even above competent managers; that within the ranks of capital upholds a Musk over a Bezos, or treats a stock price as more important than not only production quality but even traditional profitability; that sends most of its best scientific minds into industries where they produce financial instruments or dating apps or advertising algorithms and not the frontier technologies our crises demand from us; that, in the midst of a pandemic threatening millions of people, cannot even organize itself well enough to mass produce little plastic sheets affixed with elastic bands – a culture like this, in short, is all of a piece with our state of stagnation and decay. This trend has reached its deepest development in the US, the cradle of the neoliberal counterrevolution. What we have in this country today is not only capitalism, but a debased and sickly form of it; and not only compared to the past, but even to other versions of capitalism found elsewhere today. The right-wing extremists of our generation have no solution to this crisis of competence, which shockingly makes them even more pathetic than their historical predecessors. Trump’s poor taste in advisors is just a symptom of it. But so, too, is the fact that no other political faction seems capable of rising to the occasion either. Overcoming this culture-wide collapse of industrial ability seems like the precondition for almost anything good ever happening again. So far, however, a solution has proven elusive.~