Elon Musk and GOP Pretend No One Is Responsible for DOGE Chaos

Who’s doing this crazy stuff? Me? Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

After Republicans won a trifecta in the 2024 election, it was widely assumed that Donald Trump’s agenda for reining in the federal government would be implemented by a supine Republican-controlled Congress, as Trump used his executive powers to rescind Biden-era regulatory policies and extend clemency to the victims of the Department of Justice’s alleged “weaponization of law enforcement.” With the Office of Management and Budget being led by Russell Vought, who has extremist views on presidential impoundment powers, an executive power grab seemed likely (sure enough, OMB created havoc with last month’s federal funding freeze, which was quickly aborted). But nobody had Elon Musk and his DOGE initiative firing tens of thousands of workers and conducting lawless raids on federal agency data on their bingo cards.

DOGE is, however, immensely useful to Republicans fleeing responsibility for what will likely soon become immensely unpopular spending and personnel cuts. Anything DOGE eliminates won’t have to be cut in upcoming congressional budget reconciliation and appropriations bills. And because DOGE is misleadingly labeling its firings and program closures as measures to achieve “efficiencies” and eliminate “waste” and “fraud,” the underlying ideology of austerity and upward income redistribution can be obscured even as the authorship is blurred.

And now responsibility for what DOGE (officially the U.S. DOGE Service, to maintain the fiction that it has simply replaced a preexisting U.S. Digital Service) is doing is really being blotted out. The White House now claims that Elon Musk is not running DOGE, according to the New York Times:

[O]n Monday evening, a White House official stated plainly that “Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.” The official, Joshua Fisher, made the statement in a declaration to a judge, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is hearing a case filed by Democratic attorneys general against Mr. Musk and the DOGE effort.

Mr. Fisher added that Mr. Musk was “an employee in the White House Office” and “not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service.” …

Leaders of Mr. Musk’s effort who could conceivably be its “administrator” include Steve Davis, Mr. Musk’s right-hand man for two decades, who has overseen the day-to-day work of his efforts in Washington, and Brad Smith, an official in the first Trump administration who has been intimately involved in DOGE’s moves. A White House spokesperson did not respond to another request for comment on Monday evening in response to Mr. Fisher’s declaration.

So this entity exercising previously unknown executive powers has no designated leader, despite Musk’s obvious authorship and control of it, based as it is on his well-known takeover strategy at Twitter.

Trump’s February 11 executive order retroactively authorizing the DOGE attack on the federal bureaucracy creates the legal fiction that it’s the individual agencies deciding to carry out Musk’s purges “in consultation with the DOGE Team Lead,” although so far there has been no evidence at all that even Cabinet-level agency heads have any input on what’s happening beyond inviting DOGE landing teams in and rubber-stamping whatever actions they take in their high-speed raids. So everyone gets to avoid real accountability in the courts or even in the court of public opinion.

When you add it all up, it amounts to a radical makeover of the federal government in which no one in the new regime is willing to acknowledge what’s happening or who’s in charge. Of course, Trump is ultimately responsible for his administration’s assault on the federal government. But as the 47th president frequently reminds us, he is not a details guy, and so the damage his minions are inflicting won’t really be his fault, either. It’s all very convenient.