We at Human Events know better. In the past two months, DOGE has become one of the most effective watchdog (no pun intended) organizations in the history of the federal government. It is no wonder that President Trump himself has turbocharged it. Just yesterday, he gave Musk the mandate to eliminate $1 trillion of federal spending, and sent out a stern executive order directing all federal agencies to comply with Musk’s department. Moreover, it’s no wonder that the Democrats have made DOGE and Musk the focus of their derangement even moreso than Trump himself, given their crushing effectiveness.
Even the nattering nabobs of #NeverTrump have gotten in on the act, with the Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last offering Democrats unsolicited pointers on how to win the fight over the left-wing slush fund known as USAID. And to be fair to Last, his suggestion—that Democrats spotlight real people in foreign nations who have been affected by Musk’s dismantling of USAID as a way to tug at American heartstrings rather than waste time with procedural freakouts—is not a self-evidently unreasonable idea. The problem is that Musk—whose net worth is roughly 8 times USAID’s annual budget—could easily commit to private efforts to help all the actual unfortunates affected by the shuttering of an organization like USAID while still leaving the people it was actually built to serve shut out of their government checks. Such an approach, of course, never occurs to Last, who thinks Musk and his “menagerie of 20-year-old incels” will respond to the plight of, say, cholera patients in Bangladesh with comic book villain levels of cruelty, declaring them “Untermenschen” who “deserve to die.” An absurd idea, but then, the neocons who make up #NeverTrump have never exactly been strong on empathy for their opponents, even when it might enable them to predict their movements. You can ask the Iraqis all about that.
But what makes articles like Last’s more interesting than their proposed solutions, we would argue, is how thoroughly they embody the view of the Bad Old Uniparty that used to dominate not just the GOP, but Washington, generally. And, accordingly, several themes in DC’s loathing of DOGE can be gleaned if you inflict enough of this sort of literature on yourself. And, in defending DOGE, it is to refuting those themes which we now turn.
Firstly, and most importantly, DC hates Musk’s hires, not just because they are politically inimical, but (perhaps even moreso) because they’re young. No, seriously. Turn on any cable news show not featured on Fox, and you’ll be treated to the sight of a veritable witch’s coven of establishment Karens sneering at these young men for everything from their past usernames, to their online comments, to their weak credentials. This is not just because the women in question have splattered against the proverbial “wall” like Wile E. Coyote, but rather a function of DC’s political culture writ large. Anyone who has come of age in the city in the past 20 years has been subject to the absolute, seething contempt with which it regards youth, impetuousness, or new ideas of any kind. Young people—who are derided as “interns” regardless of their actual professional position—are regarded by the DC political class as unconnected hoodlums whose only purpose is to take endless abuse from older people until all the ambition or vision is sapped out of them and they can be turned into pliable servants of the status quo.
Musk’s crew of iconoclastic young geniuses, on the other hand, have inverted this power structure entirely. Now, it is people with credentials and connections, but no record of producing actual value (and, indeed, of squandering taxpayer money) who are being held accountable to people who are young, ambitious, and (most importantly) incorruptible because they have no reason to consent to DC’s pyramid scheme of dull, diligent, back-scratching mediocrity. The calcified, absurd norms of Washington, which have been out-of-date since at least the Great Recession, are being swept into the dustbin of history along with so many ancient Social Security numbers, which somehow still receive checks after a century.
So, what’s a city built on everyone keeping their mouth shut and passing the costs along to the taxpayer to do? Well, find something to blackmail these upstarts. Which brings me to the second reason DC hates DOGE: because Musk and his hires are immune to the kind of juvenile, high school-style social pressure which the city uses to enforce its artificial, predatory consensus. We saw this with the sagas of Marko Elez and the now famous BIG BALLS (whose name no one can be bothered to look up because the pseudonym is funnier).
With respect to “BIG BALLS,” we have no apology to make. It’s about time someone in DC had them. But Elez’s case is more complicated, as admitted by no less an authority than Vice President Vance himself. Yes, it is undoubtedly true that some of the sentiments Marko Elez expressed—such as “Normalize Indian hate”—would, under normal circumstances, be questionable statements from a member of the US government. But these are not normal circumstances; this is an era where hatred against certain groups (whites, men, Jews, ‘cisgender’ people) was not only normalized but funded by the very agencies which Elez is now involved in shutting down and, moreover, where those who objected to such things were censored out of existence, cut off from their finances, and fired from their jobs.
What’s more, it is not as if Elez snuck into his position. He resigned, only for Musk to hire him back. So, ask yourself this: does anyone seriously believe that Elon Musk is in favor of normalizing Indian hate? Given his stance on H1B visas, the question is absurd. No; Musk clearly believes, as do Vice President Vance and President Trump, that Marko Elez is too valuable a soldier to lose and we, at least, are prepared to trust his judgment. What’s more, we do not believe for a second that the people crying crocodile tears about what Elez posted would care one iota if he were not also threatening their grift. A revolution to bring down effectively a criminal cartel that’s been in power for decades doesn’t have the luxury of tone policing its best knife fighters, particularly when tone policing is the only way its enemies can get leverage over those very knife fighters. Getting rid of that leverage from the Swamp is worth all the cringey tweets in the world, though honestly, firing people over tweets was always stupid and beneath the dignity of any serious organization. Not that the US government is serious, at least not yet, but you get the point.
So, when you strip away the complaints that Musk’s team is too young (read: uncorrupted), and too cavalier with the feelings of others (read: hard to blackmail), what is left for DC to complain about? Well, we don’t have time to go through the litany of pedantic administrative law complaints and dubious arguments about the appropriations process, but essentially, what it reduces to is that DOGE isn’t playing by the rules… which DC wrote to protect itself from reform. Probably the peak absurdity on this count is the recent order by a District Court judge (appointed by Barack Obama, naturally) which bars all “political appointees” (including President Trump’s own Treasury Secretary) from accessing the Treasury Department’s finances. And about this, we can only say that while the administration is right to comply with such orders in the short run, it cannot simply allow such bad faith legal sabotage to go without lasting political consequences.
The third branch of government is rightly equal with the executive branch and the legislature, but that does not mean that it is immune from being checked by them. If such orders persist, Congress should invoke a little-known power from the so-called McCardle clause and make DOGE’s actions unreviewable by the judiciary altogether, just as they did with President Lincoln’s measures in the midst of Reconstruction. As was the case then, an old, corrupt, predatory order is dying, and letting it hide behind legal wrangling is unbecoming of the historical moment. President Trump was right to let DOGE continue its work, and for the sake of the nation, Congress (or the Supreme Court) must permit it to finish that work. DC’s foxes have run the taxpayers’ henhouse for too long; it’s time to let the DOGE off its chain and chase them back into the dark woods of error they came from.
