Elon Musk and his DOGE boys are on the loose within the corridors of power.

Some depressing news: It feels like every other media company in America was getting paid beaucoup bucks by the federal government for digital subscriptions over the last four years except us. Granted, National Review doesn’t feature a nifty “terminal” like Bloomberg, or offer dense “daybook”-style legislative expertise on subjects like federal forestry policy the way Politico Pro does — which, as it turns out, is how they gobbled up $8 million in subscription money from the U.S. government over the last several years, even as their better-known sister publication was reporting on the U.S. government with all the pie-eyed credulity of a lovestruck teenager.

But then again, those guys were charging $10,000 a pop for a subscription, and meanwhile NR Plus only costs $4 a month! Why, I’m almost embarrassed that we’ve set our prices so reasonably low that we can’t even be successfully bribed by government bureaucrats buying subscriptions in bulk. (“Introducing the new NR Plus Platinum $8,000/year plan, all subscriptions come with Charlie Cooke’s personal cellphone number!”) So take pity on our inability to capitalize on easy grift from Uncle Sucker, and subscribe. You often get a surprise serving of transgender rationalist death cultishness on the side to go with all of this crisp and penetrating commentary you (barely, really!) pay for.

Either way, we’re glad this isn’t our problem, because it is indeed an inauspicious day to be a media organization with a substantial federal government clientele. Elon Musk and his DOGE boys are on the loose within the corridors of power, freezing payrolls, putting entire divisions on permanent leave, cancelling contracts, and auditing every federal government expenditure they can possibly get their hands on. (Since I enjoy mayhem, I’m imagining what sort of chaos would result from Musk’s team really looking into all those invisible line items in the Defense budget. Let’s see how long it takes before black helicopters start landing on these kids’ lawns at 3 a.m.)

Currently almost all media attention is on USAID, now reduced in size from roughly 10,000 employees to about 290 overnight. Government unions are already suing over it, and the media is having such a conniption fit about this one admittedly tiny institution that they seem to have completely ignored the fact that Lee Zeldin just permanently downsized everybody in the EPA’s noxious “Environmental Justice” division.

Ruth Marcus is rending her garments at the Washington Post over what she describes as “the most damaging first two weeks in presidential history,” and bless her heart for describing it in terms meant to scandalize and horrify her readership, but lift my heart with joy: “Trump’s second term is all about curtailing government’s power and reach.” (God forbid.) Susan Glasser at the New Yorker is wailing about Elon Musk’s “revolutionary terror,” informing us of the delightful existence of a “19-year-old high school graduate” on Elon’s team who goes by the nom-de-guerre “Big Balls.” (She’s appalled, but I’m just hoping the kid’s an AC/DC fan as opposed to afflicted with some unfortunate condition.)

Glasser’s piece is notable, not just because of its panic-button hysteria, but because she accurately captures the magnitude of what is currently going on inside the federal government while failing to grasp the strategic calculation Musk and his DOGE team are making. Beyond any doubt they have hit the ground running, with a pre-existing plan of attack and enormous ambitions: to reorganize the federal government, shear its hull of all the barnacles long since attached to it via long unexamined log-rolling contracts, and cleanse it as much as possible of its engrained “deep state” mentality. Needless to say, it’s a prospect to horrify all Democrats everywhere, as well as many a mild “good government” type. But Glasser and her ilk completely misunderstand the reason Musk is moving so abruptly and quickly — she is thrown off by his admitted inability to stop trolling on social media — attributing these actions to cruelty and a desire to instill fear in the entire federal government. (The analogy to revolutionary terror is typically overheated for Glasser; Felix Dzerzhinsky did far more than merely cancel people’s opposition newspapers subscriptions in Lenin’s Soviet Union.)

Such nonsense isn’t just easily mocked, it’s self-defeating for the Left; it fails to understand the true purpose behind Musk’s methods. The cruelty isn’t the point of these sudden and (purportedly) indiscriminate cuts, the speed is. Musk and his team are no strangers to the world of litigation; they know as well as anyone else that these firings and defundings and restructurings are going to be litigated fiercely in court for years to come, and that to delay this process now — in a hopeless attempt to make every cut politically palatable — is to give up on it altogether by slow-rolling it to death. It is this urgency which shocks so many progressives and media types, but it is an urgency borne of years of experience reforming sclerotic systems. We have long accustomed ourselves to the idea the entire edifice of federal government, with its deep entanglement in left-wing causes and funding, had simply gotten to immense and overgrown to ever prune back in any substantive way.

Musk is determined to prove us wrong, which is why it’s fitting that his team consists primarily of young Silicon Valley types and engineering prodigies. These people come from a culture where the key motto has always been “move fast and break things,” and that is exactly what they are now doing. It is an incredibly high-stakes gamble, despite the laudable goal. Because to be fair to those currently feeling nauseated about what Musk is doing, a philosophy of “moving fast and breaking things” meshes with the idea of “the U.S. federal government” as well as whiskey goes with an ipecac chaser. So don’t be surprised that so many previously comfortable people are now spitting the bit — or if there an enormous mess on the floor sometime very soon.