DOGE’s slashing and burning has nothing to do with “efficiency” and everything to do with further enriching Elon Musk and his fellow plutocrats.
Last Friday, Elon Musk posted a succinct boast on the social media platform he owns. “CFPB RIP,” it said, along with an image of a tombstone. He was bragging that he had, at least for the moment, shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a regulatory agency that polices the business practices of plutocrats like him.
Musk is not just the richest man in the United States but the wealthiest person who’s ever lived. He also owns multiple companies that rake in billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government. And now, he has a major role in the Trump administration. How major? On Tuesday, he joined Trump for a press conference from the Oval Office where, for much of the event, Musk stood and spoke while Trump sat at his desk looking bored.
Musk’s formal position is an odd one. He heads something called “the Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). But DOGE is a department. Those have to be created by acts of Congress. Nor does it seem particularly focused on government efficiency. Instead, its freewheeling “audits” of various federal departments and agencies have amounted to a campaign of de facto budget cutting and deregulation not authorized by any legislation. Working together with acting secretaries and agency heads recently appointed by Trump, Musk’s DOGE has put a stop to congressionally authorized spending and fired (or put on leave, or ordered to halt all work) many thousands of federal employees.
Nowhere has the disconnect between this agenda and the stated mission of increasing “government efficiency” been more obvious than DOGE’s assault on the CFPB. The total budget of that agency seems to be well under $1 billion, and it has returned $20 billion to consumers in recent years by cracking down on junk fees and similar unsavory practices. That’s actually a model of government efficiency.
Like many of Musk’s recent actions, the CFPB’s shuttering is very well explained by a combination of two factors. One is Musk’s pursuit of his personal interests. The other is solidarity with his brother plutocrats against the encroachments of the regulatory state.
As the Washington Post reported, Musk unveiled a payment system for his social media platform, X, “about a week” before DOGE targeted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The system, “X Money,” would be directly tied to debit cards and bank accounts, which would normally place it under the regulatory oversight of the CFPB. Perhaps nothing about the plans for X Money would have run afoul of the CFPB’s mission to “crack down on unfair, deceptive and predatory corporate practices.” But now we may never know, since the agency’s employees have been ordered “not to issue any proposed or formal rules, stop pending investigations and not open new investigations, halt all stakeholder engagements and abstain from issuing public communications.”
This is one instance of a broader pattern of Musk’s raid on the regulatory state redounding to his personal benefit. An investigation by the New York Times found “more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies” by agencies targeted by DOGE’s slash-and-burn campaign. As the recipient of numerous federal contracts, Musk’s “audits” also give him access to confidential information about his business competitors.
Nor has Musk’s involvement in a deregulatory campaign that serves his own interests been confined to his role at DOGE. He’s been a major player, for example, in the Trump administration’s push to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). As I’ve written elsewhere, Trump illegally fired one of the board’s members, thus bringing it below quorum, and this in turn is preventing the board from contesting a legal challenge to its own constitutionality filed by . . . Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which, like Musk’s other companies, has pushed hard to resist unionization.
At Tuesday’s press conference, a reporter asked Musk about these glaringly obvious conflicts of interest. Musk shrugged it off on the grounds that everything DOGE does is “transparent” so that if they did anything that looked like a conflict of interest, people could “point it out.” (In real life, of course, lots of people have been pointing it out, and Trump and Musk have simply ignored them.) Trump then perked up and appealed to the public’s trust, saying, “If we thought that, we would not let him look in that segment or area.”
When the Right complains about government waste and inefficiency, its critics often respond that it’s hypocritical for conservatives to exempt the United States’ massive imperial war machine from their critique. As such, DOGE “auditing” the Department of Defense might sound like a welcome surprise. But this is the department where Musk’s conflicts of interest are the most egregious. As the Times notes, the DOD “relies on Mr. Musk to get most of its satellites into orbit and works closely with his companies on a variety of other initiatives.” We shouldn’t expect this particular “audit” to lead to any major cuts in defense spending. But we can absolutely expect it to favor the businesses owned by Elon Musk.
However blatant Musk’s corruption, it’s necessary not to reduce his actions to personal interest alone. There are collective interests at play too. Just before the CFPB was kneecapped, the administration scrapped a CFPB rule banning medical debts in credit reports. Given the sheer size of Musk’s fortune and the complicated webs of investment involved, it’s hard to be confident on this point, but to the best of my knowledge, Musk isn’t personally invested in the health care industry, nor does he own any credit reporting agencies. It’s quite likely that actions like these are better explained as part of a broader ideological crusade on behalf of his class.
And this brings us to the second point. Musk’s spectacularly brazen corruption is certainly worth highlighting, but there’s a broader class project underway as well. If the head of DOGE were not the richest person to have ever lived but instead some libertarian professor pulling down a modest salary in the economics department of a small state college, and his scorched-earth campaign against regulatory safeguards that protect workers and consumers from plutocrats were 100 percent motivated by ideology and 0 percent motivated by self-interest, that wouldn’t make it any less objectionable.
Either way, when Musk and his cronies claim their agenda is designed to make the government leaner and more efficient, they’re telling you not to believe your own lying eyes. At Tuesday’s press conference, Musk wasn’t wrong when he said that what he was doing was “transparent.” He and his ultrawealthy friends have, in fact, been carrying out this robbery in broad daylight. That’s how sure they are that no one will stop them.