Le Elon Musk resigns from the effective leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose has always been responsible formally an obscure republican official named Amy Gleason, are typically presented as a side effect of the breakdown in relations between Donald Trump and the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and chairman of X (formerly Twitter).
Less attention, however, was given to the fact that the DOGE has substantially missed the objectives that he had posed, an observation that helps explain why Musk abandoned the management on May 28 even before the split with Trump became public knowledge.
The failure of the DOGE
The DOGE was established as temporary task force of White House advisers with one of the several executive orders issued on the day of Trump's second inauguration, specifically Executive Order 14158, aimed at making the federal administration more efficient and maximizing its performance.
From the very beginning, however, it is lack of quantification of productivity that the DOGE had set itself and the only parameter indicated as a significant target was a saving in federal spending in the order of about 2.000 billion each year, about a third of the government's overall budget.
Last June 3rd the DOGE website was he gave credit, after more than four months of activity, to have rnationalized the federal administration in order to allow a reduction in spending of 180 billion dollars, that is, a figure less than 10% of the goal it intended to achieve, a real failure bordering on disaster.
This negligible saving, achieved through a workforce reduction of the federal administration and at the price of not indifferent costs (estimated by some as high as 135 billion dollars), has led many analysts to conclude that the containment of expenditure would have been nothing more than a pretext for firing several thousand officials who were not aligned with Trump's positions, as part of the broader campaign waged by The Donald against the deep state, that hard core of progressive bureaucrats intent on sabotaging the political agenda of the tycoon.
The Current Size of Federal Employment
- staff salaries together amount to just 6% of annual federal spending. However, since 75% of the original $2.000 trillion spending cut would have been in this area, the DOGE initiative has also brought to the fore the issue of the supposedly overabundant growth of the federal government workforce.
At the end of 2024 the federal employees there were just over 2,4 million, to which should be added over 600.000 employees of the postal service, which is formally considered an independent agency.
Providing an employment of almost 2% of the total of the working-age population, not counting the approximately 1,3 million active-duty military members in the United States and abroad, the federal government is the nation's largest employer by number of employees.
This role has strengthened over the last quarter century in absolute terms, to the extent of an increase of approximately 1% in staffing each year, considering that in 2000 the federal workforce, excluding those employed in the postal service, was nearly 1.860.000.
The increase, however, was insignificant as a percentage of the total U.S. workforce.
Staff Growth and Alleged Administrative Inefficiency
In recent times theincrease in public employees, linked to the multiplication of government powers, has been considered a sort of litmus test of the dysfunctions of the federal administration.
Therefore, speaking once again to the gut of the country as he usually does and interpreting the concerns expressed by a part of American society, the one that sees its individualism threatened by the alleged interference of the State, Trump was able to equalize staff cuts indicated by the DOGE as the instrument to streamline bureaucracy in terms of the number of employees, to guarantee aadministration not only less expensive for the treasury and taxpayers, but alsoeven more capable and more productive for the benefit of citizens.
From this point of view, especially thanks to the importance given to it by a successful and more or less visionary entrepreneur like Musk, DOGE was also a attempt to introduce embryos of technocracy to simplify the procedures of the federal administration, almost an experiment in view of a transition from democracy to a government of experts, placed in decision-making positions by virtue of their professional skills rather than in the capacity of representatives elected by the people.
Not by chance, in an editorial published in the “Wall Street Journal” on November 20, 2024, two weeks after last year's presidential elections, and signed together with another entrepreneur, Vivek Ramaswamy, already Trump's challenger in the Republican primaries and at the time hypothetical co-director of DOGE, Musk had presented the DOGE project along the lines of the traditional libertarian conservatism's denunciation of the hypertrophic dimension of the federal bureaucracy, seen as a threat to the republic (mind you, not to democracy, the safeguarding of which evidently did not represent a necessity for the technocratic component of the Trump administration).
For Musk, as he declared in 2021 on the occasion of the transfer of Tesla's headquarters from California to Austin, Texas, bureaucrats were the “party of taxes and rules”, that is, those who oppressed citizens both financially and by hindering their activities with suffocating legislation.
Today's Technocrats
- Today's Aspiring Technocrats are the high tech bigwigs, those who – excluding wives and girlfriends – were in the front row, almost with hats in hand, at Trump's inauguration ceremony: Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jeff Bezos of Amazon e Sundar Pichai of Google, who jumped on the bandwagon in good time (for example, a few days before the vote, Bezos banned the editorial staff of the “Washington Post”, which he owns, from publishing an editorial supporting Kamala Harris’ candidacy in the 2024 presidential elections), in addition to the then inevitable Musk.
To them you can add Peter Thiel – co-founder and president of Palantir Technologies, a company specialized in big data analysis – who already in 2009 theorized that freedom would no longer be compatible with democracy and that it would be technology and its promoters that would create new spaces of freedom for the individual, understood above all as deregulation of the market.
Genesis and developments of the desire for technocracy
Nonetheless, the technocracy is an instance which in the United States dates back to the early twentieth century. It emerged in particular in coincidence with the reconstruction of Galveston, a city in Texas half destroyed by a hurricane in 1900.
For its reconstruction, the municipal council was replaced in 1901 by a commission of experts, appointed for their specific skills and free from party control.
This model, based on the concepts of professionalism and simplification as opposed to the inefficiency and slowness produced by party clientelism, spread in the following years, especially in medium-sized and very homogeneous centers with regard to the ethnic profile of the residents, to stem the corruption attributed to the parties in local governments, but it did not take root in the large metropolises, where the population was much more mixed.
In the post-war period, about 400 cities were administered by commissions of technicians, rather than by municipal councils elected from candidates expressed by the parties and linked to them. The proposals to establish a technocratic regime to replace representative democracy had a brief season of popularity, although without achieving concrete results, during the economic crisis of the XNUMXs, motivated by the observation that the federal government, both under the Republican Herbert Hoover and under the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, seemed incapable of leading the country out of recession.
Having faded when the outbreak of World War II marked the end of the economic crisis and brought other priorities to the fore, the technocracy movement experienced a revival in the 1990s.
Even without explicitly referring to it, the IT entrepreneur's candidacy for the White House Ross Perot, a sort of Trump before its time, in 1992 and 1996 he was inspired by forms of technocracy, especially when he promised to cover the federal budget deficit using the same accounting method that a large corporation would have used, that is, by cutting spending items that corresponded to dead and unproductive branches such as Social Security and medical care for the elderly and the poor, in some ways anticipating the symbolic chainsaw given to him by Argentine President Javier Milei and brandished by Musk last February at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
The Administrative State and Its Critics
In recent times the Prospects for the transition to technocracy have become intertwined with criticisms of an administrative hyper-regulation that would multiply the merely bureaucratic functions of the federal government, with the consequent expansion of the workforce that the DOGE had proposed to reverse, and would end up slowing down innovation, to the point of suffocating it, especially in sectors such as infrastructure development, climate change control and construction, particularly housing.
It seems like a re-proposal of the aphorism that the Republican Ronald Reagan placed at the center of his inaugural address in 1980: “government is not the solution to problems; government is the problem.”
Beyond the specious invention of non-existent emergencies (from the “invasion” of members of a Venezuelan criminal gang, to justify the summary mass deportations of illegal immigrants, to “foreign threats” to the national economy, to motivate the imposition of stratospheric tariffs), Trump's decisionism itself, with its recourse to emergency measures passed by means of presidential decrees, rather than through the normal legislative procedures of Congress, feeds on the conception of a presumed slowness of the federal state machinery, which it would be necessary to remedy.
An unusual combination of anti-Trump conservatives, such as Francis Fukuyama, and reformist authors, such as Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson and Marc Dunkelman, share the idea that the Washington administration needs to be modernized to overcome its inefficiency and places the progressives in the dock and, in particular, a turning point that the American Left brought to fruition at the end of the 1960s.
Previously, as Dunkelman argues in Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back (Public Affairs, 2025), progressivism would have been characterized by a continuous dialectic between two components: the first advocated a decision-making government to rapidly implement significant reforms by promoting them from above, on the model of what was achieved by the presidencies of the Republican Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), an "enlightened" conservative, and the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945) with the New Deal; the second feared the possible degenerations of an excessively centralized federal authority, recalling the warnings of the Democrat Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), and supported the dispersion of power, the fragmentation of decision-making and controls from below.
This last soul of progressivism would take over at the end of the 1960s, deliberately building a cage of regulations that would effectively condemn the government to impotence.
Significant examples in this regard, according to Abundance (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by Klein and Thompson, would consist in the observation that a slew of administrative constraints prevented twenty years of public funding from building a high-speed rail network in California and in the fact that the best way to build housing systems with rehabilitation programs for residents in San Francisco was to use donations from private philanthropists, rather than having to navigate a regulatory jungle to resort to public funding.
The origins of the administrative state
Actually, it Administrative status It arose in the United States during Theodore Roosevelt's two terms and saw its consolidation under Franklin Delano Roosevelt's four. The first significant growth in the federal bureaucracy occurred in the early 1900th century, with its workforce nearly doubling between 1912 and 240.000, from about 400.000 employees to roughly XNUMX.
The legitimacy of the administrative state came in this period, in 1911, with the Supreme Court ruling on the case United States v. GrimaudThe verdict established that the administrative provisions had the force of law.
Furthermore, the promotion of technocracy It developed during that same period, in parallel with attempts by some large corporations to remove their activities from the supervision of federal agencies, such as the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which in 1906 acquired the power to set fair rates for railroad transportation, and the Food and Drug Administration, which was established in the same year to protect the health of consumers in the field of food and drug products.
According to historian Albro Martin (Enterprise Denied: Origins of the Decline of American Railroads, Columbia University Press, 1971), in a sort of early twentieth-century anticipation of Dunkelman's turn-of-the-century thesis, the ICC would have made the railway system "prisoner" of the interests of commercial users, halting the development of this kind of infrastructure in the United States.
Nevertheless, the ICC's powers were designed to rationalise and simplify the management of rail transport, overcoming the chaotic situation that had arisen from the overlapping of partly contradictory regulations, passed by individual States, which ended up hindering companies operating at a national level.
Recent positive experiences
Other regulatory agencies were created precisely to make the federal administration more efficient. One of the most recent and significant cases was the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), founded in 2010 to streamline and simplify consumer protection in the financial field by merging pre-existing agencies, following the experience of the securitization of subprime mortgages which had contributed significantly to the great recession that began in 2008.
Since its inception, the CFPB has obtained the return of approximately 21 billion dollars to consumers and has enacted rules to combat abuses in the granting of mortgages for the purchase of homes and loans to students to pay for college and university, one of the largest items of debt for Americans (today weighing on approximately 45 million individuals for an average amount of 30.000 dollars each).
The CFPB, which last year had a staff of about 1.800, has also been one of the agencies most targeted by DOGE, which has proposed laying off 90% of its staff in order to wipe out its operations and transform it – to quote its former director, Rohit Chopra, appointed by Joe Biden and removed by Trump in early February – from a “watchdog” to a “lapdog” for financial firms.
Not coincidentally, Chopra’s ouster was celebrated by Musk, then at the height of his power in DOGE and the Trump administration, with a lugubrious post on X: “CFPB RIP,” meaning “rest in peace, the CFPB.”
Furthermore, the growth of federal personnel is not necessarily linked to the multiplication of bureaucrats charged with enforcing a plethora of regulatory standards, but rather arises from the progressive expansion of the functions of the State to the welfare sector.
Today the federal department to which the largest number of civilian employees (so once again excluding the active-duty military sector and the independent postal agency), nearly 490.000, is Veterans Affairs, which operates a vast network of hospitals, clinics and medical care centers.
Some aspects of the little welfare state that exists in the federal administration also attest to more efficient accounting management than its critics assume. For example, the proportion of spending on Democrat Barack Obama's health care reform in relation to GDP is now almost 1% lower than the estimates formulated by its Republican critics when it was passed in 2010.
Administrative State and Techno-Reactionaries Today
In the “New York Times”, November 9, 2024, Maureen dowd summed up the significance of Trump’s re-election to the White House with the phrase “woke is broke.” The same cannot be said for the administrative state, however.
Much to the chagrin of Fukuyama, who implicitly echoed the well-known assumption that even a broken clock (in this case, The Donald's second presidency) tells the right time once a day by endorsing Musk's campaign for a simplified and more efficient public administration in an article in the “Financial Times” on May 30, the ouster of the former DOGE chief marks a setback for the techno-reactionary component of the Trump administration and a point in favor of the populist one.
After all, this balance of power It was already evident in Trump's staunch defense of a typical anti-liberal policy that is an expression of one of the functions of the administrative state, not only in terms of its content but also in terms of the instruments through which it is implemented: customs protectionism imposed through presidential decrees rather than through measures passed by Congress.
In any case, Musk's resignation demonstrates the resilience of the federal administration and the ambition of those who would like to manage and downsize it as if it were just another high-tech company.
