The DOGE Death Star Must Be Stopped
Trump’s cost-cutting entity is an unworkable fiasco.
This article is part of an ongoing project by American Purpose on “The ‘Deep State’ and Its Discontents.” The series aims to analyze the modern administrative state and critique the political right’s radical attempts to dismantle it. Click here to subscribe to Francis Fukuyama’s blog and American Purpose at Persuasion to receive future installments into your inbox!
A week after Donald Trump’s election victory, he announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would head a “Department of Government Efficiency,” which quickly became known as DOGE. “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” the president-elect said.
Reporters scrambled to figure out just what this “DOGE” was. Called a “department,” Trump hailed it as a “commission.” Back in August, in the online conversation he hosted on X, Musk had pitched the idea of heading a commission. Trump immediately replied, “I’d love it.” That established that DOGE was a thing, but it was anything but clear about what kind of thing.
Critics immediately pounced. A new “department” would require an act of Congress, reporters (correctly) noted. Sticklers claimed that, if it were a “commission,” it would have to follow the rules set out in the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act, with requirements for transparency, budgeting, and record-keeping. “DOGE” was a play on Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency created a decade ago as “the people’s cryptocurrency.” According to its website, it’s an acronym for “Do Only Good Everyday” and is the cryptocurrency “favored by Shiba Inus worldwide.” (A shiba inu is a small dog that’s one of the most popular canine pets in Japan.)
That’s all so quaint, because DOGE is—and will be—nothing like we’ve ever seen before. Any effort to squeeze it into any existing box, or to be taken in by the doggie allusions, will miss everything that’s really important.
DOGE is much more like the Death Star featured in the first Star Wars move in 1977—a weapon of mass destruction dispatched by the Galactic Empire and capable of wiping out entire planets. DOGE isn’t a federal department. It’s a loose fast-moving collaborative spinning out ideas with breathtaking speed that are designed to wipe out existing power centers in the federal government, especially the “deep state” that Trump and Musk are convinced control the bureaucracy. DOGE isn’t one of the federal government’s 1000+ advisory committees. It’s operating completely outside the law’s requirements. It has no charter, no membership (at least none, besides Musk and Ramaswamy, that’s publicly known), no public notice of its work, no transparency to the public—not anything that fits inside the current rulebook.
DOGE is, however, a weapon, as Musk and Ramaswamy made clear in their almost-1400-word Wall Street Journal op-ed game plan. “We won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs,” they wrote. Like the Death Star, it’s going to take serious work to figure out what makes it work on the inside. And, as in Star Wars, anyone wanting to blunt its attack is going to need tools they’ve never seen before, let alone used.
Consider what we know so far.
This is a committee giving advice, not an advisory committee. In the op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy write, “We will serve as outside volunteers.” And then: “Unlike government commissions or advisory committees…” It’s neither a think tank nor a federal advisory committee nor a department. It’s an entity servicing some of the biggest ideas of the right, with far more power than even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conceived.
This isn’t a typical op-ed, drafted quickly over a few days. It’s so sophisticated that it’s almost certainly the product of several months of work. That suggests the size of the iceberg underneath the visible Musk/Ramaswamy leadership.
The op-ed repeatedly reaches back to the Constitution. It mentions the Constitution four times and the Founders twice. The plan not only seeks to root its work deep in the country’s history. The Constitution + Founders approach sets the stage for defense against the inevitable court challenges to come.
They’re not just churning out ideas—they’re launching an army. The op-ed says that DOGE is seeking “to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders.” DOGE is an effort to couple big new ideas with foot soldiers to carry them out. They have political appointments, Schedule C positions (confidential roles supporting political appointees), and the inevitable relaunch of Schedule F (the plan to convert tens of thousands of federal employees into at-will workers). DOGE is looking for “mass head-count reductions” in the number of federal employees, perhaps by eliminating all workers whose Social Security number ends in an odd digit. That’s a goofy idea, of course—the air traffic control system would quickly collapse if it lost half of its controllers. But it’s the kind of threat that would have made Darth Vader proud on the bridge of the Death Star.
DOGE aims to slash the number of federal regulations. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright at the end of the 2024 term held, among other things, that federal agencies can’t write rules that go beyond the explicit language of the laws Congress passes. Since those laws are notoriously fuzzy, the decision provides an opportunity for conservative groups to challenge any regulation where they believe regulators went beyond the precise words Congress wrote. DOGE might want to deregulate the federal government, but that’s not really necessary if conservatives can simply throw sand into the existing regulatory gears.
But that’s only a down payment. DOGE suggests that it would be possible to package together a very large number of existing federal regulations, along with waivers of existing rules for environmental and health care policies, and then give that package to Trump for his signature, which would “nullify” existing regulations. That’s a brand-new strategy that’s never been tried before. At the very least, it would toss a big chunk of the executive branch’s operations into the courts—and it would pull the rug out from underneath the strategies that progressive states like California have used for their aggressive clean air and health care programs. The op-ed criticizes “the use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking,” but that’s a principle that applies only to what the left has tried.
There are, however, a number of roadblocks that DOGE will face. Reducing the number of feds in proportion to the nullification of federal regulations is crazy. The one fundamental truth about regulatory policy is that it doesn’t take very many feds to get enormous leverage over the rulemaking machinery throughout the economy. It’s also possible to take a lot of regulations off the books without dramatically reducing the number of feds required to administer the rest of the regulatory system. Take airline and food safety. There already aren’t enough feds to manage existing rules; that’s the story of the door plug that fell off an Alaska Airlines plane back in May 2024 and the contamination of baby formula in 2023. It’s possible to roll back lots of rules and still not have enough feds to make the rest of the system safe.
Further, reductions in force are likely to send opposing groups to the foxholes. The op-ed is full of talk about reductions-in-force for federal employees. But 30 percent of all feds are veterans. Does DOGE want to pick a fight with vets and the groups that support them?
Another problem is that it’s hard to cut spending “in ways Congress never intended,” as the op-ed says. But the examples Musk and Ramaswamy give include money for foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Those are traditional targets for budget cutting—but there’s not a whole lot of money in these categories and, in any event, they are programs for which Congress has appropriated the money. They aren’t cases of woke bureaucrats run wild. There’s a fundamental principle here: feds often get the blame for doing things that Congress requires and to which the president has already agreed. Cutting federal programs is certainly fair game; that’s the only way to make any meaningful dent in federal spending. But good luck with that. A March 2023 poll found that 60 percent of Americans believed that the federal government spent too much money. But there was just 29 percent support for cutting the military, and support for other cuts fell off from there.
DOGE is right that the “procurement system is also badly broken.” But to try to fix the procurement system by fiat is sure to make things worse. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has been looking at “waste, fraud, and abuse” for decades. The lesson of GAO’s high-risk programs most prone to problems is that making progress requires more and better and smarter oversight by more feds with more capacity. “It costs money to save money,” as one character quips in the 1987 Academy Award-winning movie, Moonstruck.
There’s a blizzard of ideas coming from the shadowy DOGE. It’s certain that even more ideas are coming, along with a dramatic beginning-of-administration slew of pronouncements, orders, recissions, and nullifications—actions likely to rival the Death Star’s superlaser, turbolasers, laser canons, tractor beams, and ion canons. It will be like nothing we’ve ever seen before. That in turn makes it far harder to figure out how to engage it.
DOGE is leading the charge to establish a unitary executive presidency: a president with the power to pull any thread to reinforce Trump’s ability to shape policy from the Oval Office, with minimal interference from the other branches of government and even less influence from experts in the federal bureaucracy. The unitary executive theory, in fact, is the one uniting approach across everything that DOGE is rolling out.
Not only is this Death Star moving at a speed previously unimaginable. It’s moving in ways that are confounding the ability of outsiders to understand it. By the time traditionally organized groups working in traditionally organized ways figure this out, it will be too late to slow, let alone stop a movement intended to radically transform the balance of constitutional power in American government. These are the most fundamental of questions and they require equally fast work to understand and counter them.
In the words of that great American philosopher and public policy analyst John Wayne, in 1972’s The Cowboys, “Slap some bacon on a biscuit and let’s go. We’re burning daylight.”
Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He is the author, with William D. Eggers, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.
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What’s really going on here is that Trump is convinced that Musk will both help him in his authoritarian urges by weakening or eliminating any government agency from getting in the way of those urges, whereas for Musk, DOGE is simply a shiny new toy, much like SpaceX with which he can wow Trump, the world, and keep him from getting bored. Also, of course it allows him to play on the biggest stage he’s managed yet.
What could go wrong?