We’re Thinking About DOGE All Wrong

President Donald Trump meeting CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the Oval Office. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) siege on the federal bureaucracy is, in many ways, the culmination of an ideological project associated with Ronald Reagan and the neoliberal ‘Chicago School’ of economic thought. Fiscal conservatives and neoliberals, from Reagan to Bill Clinton, have called for downsizing the federal bureaucracy since the 1970s. Anti-bureaucrat rhetoric has become even more malicious in recent years, with the advent of right-wing fearmongering and conspiracy theories regarding the evil ‘deep state’.

To be sure, the gutting of the federal bureaucracy is a triumph of the conservative movement for limited government, which has succeeded in institutionalizing its power and ideology ever since it broke into the mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s. A harbinger for the successful siege on the bureaucracy came a few months before the 2024 election, when the Supreme Court dealt a critical blow to the independent administrative authority of federal agencies. Since 1984, the so-called ‘Chevron doctrine’ has established the precedent for courts to defer to federal agencies in interpreting obscure and ambiguous statutes, in order to let experienced bureaucrats make apolitical decisions on policy, rather than be constrained by the political whims of Congress. However, last summer, the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed conservative majority overturned the Chevron doctrine, ruling that courts, not agencies, should be responsible for interpreting ambiguous statutes set by Congress.

On its face, this decision appears to be a victory for limited-government conservatives in curbing the independent power of federal agencies. However, it is more in line with a wholly different principle: the unitary executive theory. Right-wing proponents of this legal ideology argue that the president should enjoy ultimate, centralized authority over the entire executive branch, without an independent bureaucracy operating on the basis of its own expertise rather than answering directly to the president. The unitary executive theory is the guiding principle behind Project 2025, the ideological program laid out by the Heritage Foundation (a ringleader of the conservative policy establishment). Affirmed by the overturning of the Chevron doctrine, the extensive policy playbook has often been conflated with the conservative push for limited government, but in reality, it is quite the opposite. Project 2025 and the unitary executive theory in general seek to intentionally enhance the power of the federal government, not weaken it, so that the government may be weaponized by the president. Late in his first administration, Trump attempted a sweeping reorganization of the federal government to give himself personal, political discretion over thousands of government jobs previously shielded by civil service protections. With regards to unitary executive theory, this was the canary in the coal mine.

Safeguards against unchecked executive power have been built into the federal bureaucracy; as I detailed previously in this column, the federal workforce is divided between two categories of civil servants: those with meritocratic protections intended to insulate them against political impulses and those who serve at the political discretion of the executive branch as a way for the president shape the government in their image, according to their popular mandate. However, since reassuming the presidency, Trump has worked to erode these safeguards and carry out the policy program of Project 2025, to devastating effect. He resumed the reorganization of federal employees into ‘Schedule F’ jobs, which places them under the direct political discretion of the president. He installed Russell Vought, Project 2025’s principal author, as head of the Office of Management and Budget, who has used this platform to take a sledgehammer to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Even more consequentially, he unleashed Elon Musk to hijack the federal bureaucracy.

Under Musk’s leadership, DOGE has been granted wide-ranging authority over government personnel, as well as access to American consumers’ sensitive information, and it has fired and forced out over 200,000 federal workers and counting. Like the overturning of the Chevron doctrine, DOGE can, at first glance, be interpreted as a manifestation of limited-government conservatism. However, the true mission of DOGE is to advance the interests of a clique of venture capitalists and tech kingpins who are using the Trump administration as a vehicle to weaken the working class, beginning with the government workforce. DOGE should be understood as the shock troops of powerful venture capitalists and tech oligarchs in their war against workers and the American public.

The key to understanding DOGE as a tool of the tech oligarchy lies in its membership. Much about DOGE, which claims to strive for transparency in government, is shrouded in secrecy. There is still uncertainty over the formal basis of its power. Trump initially claimed it would be an informal body, but then he reorganized the U.S. Digital Service agency into the ‘U.S. DOGE Service’ in order to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda.” Until recently, the White House would not even divulge the identity of its official head. However, despite all the secrecy, we do know a fair amount about its membership, thanks in part to investigations like that done by the New York Times.

DOGE has received substantial media attention for hiring college-aged engineers with far-right bona fides to do much of its dirty work. However, a glance at the New York Times’ tracker of DOGE’s known staffers and associates reveals that in reality, most of its staffers aren’t alt-right 19-year-olds. Equally surprisingly, most DOGE members are not being pumped out by the Heritage Foundation or the rest of the conservative policy establishment. Rather, DOGE is mainly composed of tech executives, investment bankers, and private equity partners. Elon Musk’s business empire is well-represented in DOGE, which includes a litany of employees of Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company, X, Neuralink, and xAI. But the connections to big tech and venture capital don’t stop with Musk. There are private equity CEOs, partners at McKinsey, employees from Uber and Palantir, and even the co-founder of Airbnb. Sure, there are a few former RNC staffers and Supreme Court clerks mixed in as well, but it’s clear that at its core, DOGE is a manifestation of the new tech oligarchy, populated by investment firm lawyers, consultants, and venture capitalists rather than acolytes of Reagan and the Republican right.

A central mission of the political force behind Trump is to bulldoze the bureaucracy and sublimate the federal government to the forces of big tech and venture capital. To understand this, we must look back to the days following the 2016 election, when Peter Thiel—venture capitalist, co-founder of PayPal (alongside Elon Musk), and founder of Palantir—made waves by joining Trump’s first presidential transition team. At the time, Thiel was an aberration among the tech entrepreneurs, who generally supported Barack Obama, opposed Trump in 2016, and were rattled to their core by his win. Thiel was described as an “outlier” in the tech world when he endorsed Trump in 2016. However, since then, the new capitalist order of tech investors and entrepreneurs has coalesced solidly around Trump.

The fingerprints of big tech and venture capital are all over the second Trump administration. Again, we must look back to 2016, when a Yale Law graduate and corporate lawyer moved to Silicon Valley to enter the world of venture capitalism, joining Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital investment firm. In 2021, Thiel arranged for his protégé to meet Donald Trump. The next year, Thiel and fellow venture capitalist David Sacks orchestrated the election of that man—JD Vance—to the U.S. Senate. And in 2024, Thiel and Musk privately convinced Trump to select Vance as his running mate.

Both Trump and big tech have undergone major ideological shifts since Thiel first crossed over to support Trump in 2016, and Vance’s ascension to the vice presidency is emblematic of this shift. It’s worth remembering that for a moment a few years ago, when a post-January 6th, post-indictment Trump was at his lowest, the Republican Party was seriously (if briefly) considering pivoting to Ron DeSantis for the 2024 nomination, especially after a slate of Trump-backed candidates modeled in the former president’s image. In his first run in 2016, Trump overcame resistance from the Republican establishment to secure the nomination on his own. In 2024, hampered by his legal issues and weakened after an unpopular administration and his 2020 election loss, he needed help in consolidating his own party, and he got it from the world of tech. Elon Musk was infamously a key Trump backer in 2024, but he was not alone, as the likes of Thiel and Sacks were also critical in bankrolling Republican candidates in races across the country. In the lead-up to the election, one by one, the leaders of the tech world bent the knee. Fast forward to January 2025, when tech CEOs like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai piled into the front row of Trump’s inauguration, joining Musk, Thiel, Sacks, and others at the vanguard of the new political order.

Big tech and venture capital have been rewarded for their fealty with free rein over the federal government—the number of venture capitalists in the new Trump administration has been described as “unprecedented.” In addition to Musk’s broad role as a senior Trump advisor, Sacks was tapped to coordinate the Trump administration’s policy on AI and cryptocurrency. When Trump was first elected, tech investors and venture capitalists found their world, predicated on a mutually-beneficial alliance with America’s liberal establishment, shaken to their core. They have since adapted and now have the keys to the American government.

What does this mean for workers? For starters, thousands of employees have already been fired as a direct result of the tech oligarchs’ rampage through government. Further, as I warned in my previous column, Trump is looking to exercise political discretion over the entire civil service, endangering the jobs and livelihoods of millions of workers and their families. But the threat goes beyond even the federal bureaucracy. The tech entrepreneurs’ endgame is the weaponization of the American government in order to further their own business interests, which means weakening the power of workers.

Musk’s takeover of Twitter demonstrated that the tech oligarchy could hijack a source of central authority (in this case, authority in culture and communication) and use its power to amplify its own interests. With DOGE, they have fired masses of government workers and weakened the government’s ability to protect workers and consumers. They have targeted the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that enforces collective bargaining and addresses unfair labor practices, and staffed it with union-busters. They have gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects consumers from predatory action by big business. They have conducted layoffs at the Department of Labor. And, most telling of all, they have killed various government investigations into various malpractice and violations at Elon Musk’s companies.

Before Trump took office, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X faced investigations and court action from the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, the NLRB, the FCC, the SEC, the EPA, and various other cabinet departments and agencies. Since Trump’s return, those investigations have stalled. This isn’t specific to Musk’s companies: the new administration has also thwarted Biden-era investigations by the DOJ, the SEC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission into unfair labor practices (among other things) at major crypto companies. This isn’t just about Musk furthering his own interests—it’s about shielding the tech world as a whole from the power of the government.

These investigations proved that the federal government is a potent roadblock against tech companies’ ability to take advantage of their own workers and consumers. And the fact that Trump killed these investigations demonstrated that the tech oligarchy was threatened and inhibited by government scrutiny. All this demonstrates that DOGE, just like Project 2025, is not intended to limit the power of government, but instead to harness the unchecked power of the government, afforded by the principles of unitary executive theory. Ultimately, DOGE is geared towards empowering big tech and incapacitating American workers, turning the government against its constituents rather than using it to protect them.

The ethos behind DOGE and the new right-wing tech oligarchy is perhaps most on display on an online libertarian forum in which Peter Thiel posted a manifesto of his beliefs in 2009. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel declared. He decried “politics in all its forms,” and he specifically included “the unthinking demos that guides so-called social democracy” as one such deplorable form. In other words, when Thiel said that technology was in a deadly race with ‘politics,’ he meant the people.

A decade and a half later, Elon Musk channeled this antidemocratic ethos in two major acquisitions: the first being Twitter, the second being the U.S. government itself. In both cases, he fired workers en masse, and in the second case, he crippled the government’s ability to hold big tech in check. The tech oligarchy currently controls the most powerful companies in the world, virtually all of them with a long history of labor abuses. With Musk at the vanguard, the oligarchy now controls the U.S. government as well, and it has exercised this new power to render American workers defenseless against further abuses. They have incapacitated the federal government’s ability to investigate and hold tech companies accountable for unfair labor practices, giving the green light for the further exploitation of American workers and dismal working conditions. And, with Musk puppeteering the Trump administration in all matters of government personnel, the U.S. government is now in the legal process of obliterating federal unions and stripping over a million government workers of their right to collective bargaining.

Success in big tech means profit and efficiency achieved via algorithms and ruthless business maneuvering. These are all things which are not necessarily aligned with principles of democracy and good government, and at worst are antithetical to them. DOGE’s actions prove that Thiel’s anti-democratic manifesto encapsulates the guiding mission of the alliance between Trump and big tech. We are, indeed, immersed in a deadly race just as Thiel declared in 2009. On one side: profit-seeking venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs. On the other side: the people—and the government entrusted with protecting them, itself an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of workers with families and livelihoods of their own. The war DOGE has waged on the federal bureaucracy was anticipated by the rise of private equity and Musk’s makeover of Twitter just as much as by Project 2025 and the overturning of the Chevron doctrine. It is extremely telling that DOGE is primarily staffed not by archconservative Heritage Foundation activists, nor by far-right online memelords, but by lawyers and executives from tech companies and venture capital firms.

Since taking control of the U.S. government, Elon Musk has steadily expanded the scope of his operations. He began by targeting specific agencies, and now he is working to erode the collective bargaining abilities of all federal workers. The federal government is the only thing strong enough to decimate the power of organized labor throughout America, and in order for it to do so, the power of organized labor within the federal government must first be decimated. Once he incapacitates labor within the federal government, his control over all corners of the federal government will be complete, and he can use its power to incapacitate labor on a national scale.

The tech oligarchy will not stop its anti-worker crusade with the government workforce—with DOGE, it has trained its sights on the American workforce as a whole. The federal government is a key safeguard for the American people and their interests against predatory business. But the new tech right has joined itself to Trump in order to gain an edge over the American people, and with Trump’s blessing, they are using DOGE to do the dirty work of tearing down the government mechanisms and agencies that protect the rights of workers and consumers.

Once the tech oligarchy has finished co-opting the government’s immense power over labor, they will turn their sights on the rights and livelihoods of all American workers. In other words, DOGE’s mass firings are only the beginning.

Simon Panfilio (CC ’25) is a columnist majoring in political science and concentrating in history. He is from Denver, Colorado, and is interested in American elections, the American presidency, and the politics of bureaucracy and infrastructure.