What is DOGE? Officially, it’s a “Department of Government Efficiency,” intended to find and eliminate government fraud and waste; officially, it’s also a joke, named after an old meme. DOGE doesn’t just emit mixed signals — the incoherent messaging is right there in the name. It’s part of the plan and, for supporters, part of the fun. When necessary, the government argues that what DOGE is doing is just common sense, that Musk is spearheading a “comprehensive forensic audit of every department and agency in the federal government,” and that the administration has a “commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce.”
Nearly as often, though, the mask slips, or gets pulled off and thrown on the ground:
This isn’t true, not that we’re engaged in any meaningful sort of collective debate over facts here: According to polling, a majority of Americans think that Musk has too much power in government and share a negative view of DOGE. It’s not pure MAGA polarization, either — the public views Musk less favorably than it views Trump. You may grant, if you insist, a genuine desire to find and eliminate inefficiencies in the federal government, but Musk and his supporters are barely trying to hide other animating impulses here: The immense contempt they have for federal workers; the immense contempt they feel for courts, or anyone else that might slow their efforts to fire said federal workers; the zealous energy they bring to cutting as many people as possible; and the willingness to make things up, or to refuse to correct falsehoods, in pursuit of a nakedly ideological project, and of power more generally.
Musk, who is arguably the second most powerful person in government, and the most successful capitalist in America, officially has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” according to White House lawyers, but his constant (and constantly heeded) posts betray both his functional position and the minimum bound of his ambitions. Specifically, he wants to fire as many people as possible. Punishing workers is a cause and a purpose unto itself, inseparable from a grandiose conflation of personal desires and successes with the fate of humanity. It’s an ecstatic project with an accelerationist character. “I am become meme,” he declares, as his team of private sector loyalists harasses federal employees with spiteful emails threatening to get rid of them. The message from the largest employer in the country to its disfavored employees could not be much clearer: You are waste, you are fraud. We want to make a spectacle of your misfortune. We cannot wait to fire you.
DOGE is certainly helping to achieve, to quote the words of Project 2025 author and new director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, the goal of putting federal workers “in trauma” and casting them as “the villains.” But Musk is more than a willing mercenary for someone else’s project, and his stature and influence within and outside the government imbues his slash-and-burn campaign with greater significance. Within the scope of DOGE, Musk is playing the role of government auditor and contractor, which is conflict enough. But he’s also a singular industrialist with multiple companies devoted to automation, a history of executing brutal and punitive firings, and a proudly hostile stance toward organized labor and regulation. Most relevant, however, is his longtime obsession with what he sees as the mother of all technologies. He’s an AI guy.
This might explain why DOGE’s flamboyant and unprecedented performance feels both familiar and unsettling beyond the government workforce. We’re committing all of our time and resources to eliminating your job, and by the way, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. We’re chasing inconceivable power, and you might end up as collateral damage. We’re making a new world, and this is our only chance to get it right. We’re trying to fire you. This is how MAGA Republicans talk about the political moment. It’s also how America’s premier industry sounds when when it’s talking about AI.
Most other tech executives aren’t openly fantasizing about detaching employee “parasites” from their hosts, but some get closer than others. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg recently announced layoffs explicitly targeting “low performers,” which many at the company saw as a pointed and unnecessarily damaging way to cut costs, adding insult to injury and damaging prospects for former employees. The layoffs came in the context of a larger attempt at an ideological pivot for the company, marked by Mark Zuckerberg’s interview with Joe Rogan (and following Musk’s mass layoff trial run at Twitter, about which Zuckerberg, and other corporate leaders, had publicly expressed envy.) They also came in the context of the company’s massive planned investment in AI, which Zuckerberg talked about on the show. “Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” he told Rogan. (He softened the implication by suggesting that AI would simply free people up to work on more interesting problems, but the comments reverberated, as intended, through the tech industry.)
More commonly, AI executives talk about work and labor in general. In a recent blog post, OpenAI founder Sam Altman made his case for mass automation. “[I]magine AI as a real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworker. Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or 1 million of them. Now imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work,” he wrote. He suggested, with an optimistic gloss, that “huge” changes are coming. “We will find new things to do, new ways to be useful to each other, and new ways to compete,” he wrote, “but they may not look very much like the jobs of today.”
In AI, we’re getting some mixed messages, too — the people working on this stuff are excited but worried. Founders and CEOs talk about glorious abundance with the public and tease concentrated returns to investors. They muse about automation and the future of work, raise alarms, fund alignment research, and talk about existential risk. Altman, for his part, has commissioned research into the plausibility and effects of UBI for a post-AI world. A bit like DOGE, however, OpenAI’s conflicted identity is embodied in its name and concept. The company was as a non-profit with the mission to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” By 2019, it was teaming up with Microsoft to raise tens of billions of dollars. Now, it’s in the process of converting into a for-profit company. Just as DOGE is pursuing something more than simple increases in efficiency, AI firms are pitching something more than simple increases in productivity.
The gap between the industry’s coy, delicate rhetoric around automation in some contexts — oh, maybe we’ll need UBI, haha, err, well, it’ll be a lot of change very fast but it’ll work out maybe, ehh, maybe regulate us? — and its far less conflicted pitch to investors is not lost on people whose jobs might be defined as “knowledge work,” nor is its fervor as expressed in sheer dollar amounts. “Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, intend to spend as much as $320 billion combined on AI technologies and datacenter buildouts in 2025,” reports CNBC, a level of investment for which observers have struggled to find comparison (although here’s one from The Information: “Big Tech’s Capex Gusher Tops Last Oil Spree,” aka the shale boom.)
Many of the largest and most visible companies in the economy, in other words, are working toward the same goal, collectively marshaling a level of resources otherwise associated with national infrastructure projects or wars. You can characterize their goals and corresponding long-term outcomes in a wide range of ways, but if you live anywhere downstream from their project, the message, again, is pretty clear, albeit with a few more apologies and caveats appended as necessary, delivered with polite contrition rather than foaming zeal: We’re sorry, but we have no choice but to do everything in our power to replace you with machines. New polling from Pew suggests that this message is being heard, and the Zuckerbergian appeals to the history of automation — that maybe it’ll create more, better jobs in the long term, after periods of transitional pain — aren’t resonating. According to a Pew survey of American workers, 52% are “worried about the future impact of AI use in the workplace,” while 32% “think it will lead to fewer job opportunities for them in the long run.” While 36% “feel hopeful” about how AI might be used at work, 33% are “overhwelmed” while just 6% believe it’ll lead to more job opportunities in the long run.
The parallels between DOGE’s all-or-nothing bet that it can purge the federal government and the AI industry’s promise to purge humans from wide swathes of the existing private workforce are united in the figure of Musk, a former partner in OpenAI who now runs his own AI firms; to him, the projects are clearly connected, synergistic, and mutually necessary. He’s making this fairly explicit! DOGE is claiming, with few details, to use AI to further its missions, however you might interpret them: AI to replace government work; AI to arbitrarily fire people with a sheen of analysis; “AI” wielded as a broader demoralizing force, or conveniently summoned threat to workers. There are intentional and unintentional aspects of his leadership at DOGE that, if nothing else, clarify the beliefs he’s enacting and seems to hold. Perhaps most of the government shouldn’t exist, and someone like him should run what’s left of it Perhaps most jobs shouldn’t exist, or at least inevitably won’t, so why wait around? Perhaps employees who wish to have jobs should be reminded to do as they’re told.
It can be hard to call a moment or define an era without the benefit of hindsight, and tipping points tend to reveal themselves in retrospect. As top-down attempts to impose and manifest a different world go, though, this is almost parodically blunt stuff. The president is a guy who rose to national fame firing people from fake jobs on a TV show. His publicly unhinged billionaire quasi-co-president is a man who appears to believe that most government jobs are definitionally fake, and who has been deputized to fire as many of them as possible. Like many of his peers in private industry, this same guy talks in urgent and increasingly dire terms about winning the race to build human-level and perhaps superhuman AI, a project into which the tech giants are sinking the hundreds of billions of dollars in cash they’ve harvested from their users over the last decade. Whatever you think of its chances of succeeding, and whatever you think would come out of the other side in the long term, their fundraising resembles a bet on, at minimum, short-to-medium-term mass displacement in segments of the economy that were until recently understood as relatively safe. In fuller expression, it’s not just a post-worker vision, it verges on posthuman. To anyone who isn’t invested in these outcomes, either literally or ideologically, it’s an unsettling wager.
In Trump, Musk, and Silicon Valley’s speculative CEOs — whose musings and strategies are certainly being heard and nervously interpreted by leaders across various potentially disruptable industries — America is living under a nightmare boss trifecta, each potentially familiar to different workers in their own way. There’s one who wants to fire you for disloyalty, the one who wants to fire you because he thinks you’re undeserving and less-than, and the one who grimaces through the PIPs and the RIFs but lights up during the earnings calls. The news can, at times, resemble a zoom call from hell, with Americans on mute as management talks through plans for getting rid of them. It’s layoff morning in America.
These parallels also extend into an unknown future. It’s increasingly clear that Musk — and perhaps Trump — have ambitions for DOGE that extend beyond cuts and into meta-governmental control. It represents, in other words, an all-or-nothing bet on remaking, destroying, or perhaps controlling the government, with massive potential upside for those involved and correspondingly large risk if they fail.
Big tech’s push into AI is similarly high-stakes, with firms both excited about possible returns but also fearful of getting stuck on the wrong side of a massive reallocation of power. A superpower freed of its opposition and a superintelligence freed of its labor force are versions of the same fantasy in which absolute power is seized, or obtained, through different means. These expressions of absolute self-belief shouldn’t be confused with inevitability, of course, nor, should they come up short of counterrevolution and post-human superintelligence, respectively, will their almost unbelievable nakedness be forgotten. (Perhaps the most pressing question about both is whether they’re accelerating toward a lasting new status quo, ramping like a manic episode, or a little bit of both. Either they have the potential to be widely galvanizing.) Given overlapping once-in-a-generation opportunities, America’s most empowered and resentful bosses have converged on the same simple plan: laying everyone off.
