With President Trump ordering the charge, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have smashed into the federal bureaucracy and are proceeding to dismantle it piece by piece.
An early target was the Agency for International Development, better known as USAID. One day it was there, immutable and eternal like every government organization — the next day, it was gone and employees were locked out of the building.
The legality of this demolition is an open question, and there’s probably a handful of functions USAID carried out that need to be continued, but let’s not quibble. Nothing remotely like this had been witnessed in this staid company town during the lifetimes of those concerned.
Opponents of the move — mostly bureaucrats and Democrats — organized a protest in front of the USAID building on D Street, where Democratic lawmakers made speeches claiming the agency worked to prevent terrorism and feed children all over the globe. They also vented their outrage with Musk, who seems to have replaced Trump himself at the top of the Democratic hierarchy of devils.
Musk stood accused of breaking the law by ignoring Congress in his mass slaughter of the bureaucrats. In an uncanny moment of historical inversion, the protesters began to chant, “Lock him up!”
The case of USAID presents us with a good opportunity to pose the question: Can an assault on a legally constituted government agency become a matter of ending graft and inefficiency and saving taxpayers’ money, as Musk and DOGE maintain, or is it demonstrably an act of nihilistic vengeance that will cripple important services, as the Democrats insist?
USAID is a Cold War organization. It bribed or otherwise seduced corrupt foreign governments into supporting our side in the twilight struggle against world communism. That’s a perfectly honorable mission in my book. But the Soviet Union went belly up in 1991. Like a surprising number of federal institutions, USAID has had trouble dealing with victory, enduring a prolonged identity crisis during which its purpose has become less and less clear.
Back in 1991, the agency could have hung up a banner saying “Mission Accomplished” and sent its employees home, as Musk has now done.
But this is Washington. Billions of dollars were at stake — $72 billion by fiscal year 2023. Surely something pure and compassionate could be done in a suffering world with all that cash . . .
So began USAID’s descent into corruption.
That word, I hasten to note, has a specific application in Washington. It doesn’t necessarily mean fraud — the illegal transfer of public funds into private pockets.
Corruption in the federal government entails treating other people’s money frivolously and lavishing it on projects disconnected from the national interest — often benefiting, in a formally legal way, allies of the bureaucracy among progressive-minded nongovernmental organizations and special interest groups adjacent to the Democratic Party.
Corruption assumes that the monstrous $7 trillion federal budget exists to sustain the virtue and self-importance of petty functionaries, rather than to make the country stronger, smarter, or more secure.
Corruption induces a sort of amnesia about the function — the actual job — of an agency and stimulates an amazing creativity in dreaming up budgetary cutouts and rabbit holes that promote saving the Earth, assuring perfect “equity” and other cosmic benefits.
USAID doesn’t stop terrorists. Whether or not the children get fed, it can still amuse the hungry urchins of Peru with a transgender comic book paid for by the American taxpayer.
The agency has strayed so far from its original mission that its projects have a random, almost cognitively impaired quality to them. The only persistent theme seems to be an obsession with sexual fluidity.
Matt Taibbi digs deep into the madness:
From $39 million for “Gender Equality in Water, Power, and Transportation” to “Recognizing the Third Gender in Bangladesh” to “Ukrainian Resilience Through Fashion” to a “TransFormation Salon” to a pre-Taliban plan to help “Afghan Women Enter the Financial Sector,” it’s a bottomless pit of “I don’t want to pay for that.”
In fact, it’s even worse. Under the guise of rooting out “disinformation,” USAID was an active participant in the Biden administration’s war against free speech. It committed our country to the justification and implementation of censorship worldwide.
At the same time, as we now know, administration-friendly media like Politico were funded through various means by USAID.
So to put it in plain language: The agency paid for the silencing of independent media and the subsidizing of compliant media, in the hope of erecting an information system redolent of China or Russia today.
USAID was a brick in that wall.
Here is a laboratory-perfect example of corruption, Washington-style.
The rot may not be so far advanced in other agencies of the federal government, but the syndrome is the same for all. The crush of history has warped their structures and erased their original purposes.
To a surprising extent, Washington is still a Cold War town. The current architecture of the government was designed to withstand the stress of a colossal and potentially world-destroying ideological conflict.
Every agency is steeply hierarchical, command-and-control, almost militaristic in its automatic deference to rank and protocol. The media is considered an adjunct of government in the great struggle. The economy is viewed as a mighty weapon, which a patriotic duty ordains must be squeezed to the limit.
The people who inhabit the system resemble some lost tribe in the jungle — the last remnants of analog humanity. Many do excellent work, but as a whole they are hyper-credentialed, super-ambitious, secretive and utterly hostile to every change that has transpired over the last 35 years, particularly the advent of the digital age.
Because their eyes are fixed on the past and the top of the pyramid, they are blind to whatever perils lie immediately ahead.
The denial of history is the ultimate cause of dysfunction. Since the end of the Cold War, we have fought multiple hot wars with a notable lack of success, endured the vast socioeconomic disruption of the web and the smart phone, died by the thousands in a pandemic, and now face an inscrutable future controlled by artificial intelligence.
The missions to which many of our government agencies were oriented no longer exist. Grand but nebulous causes were embraced to fill the void — the defense of the environment, the climate, racial justice, transgenderism, etc. These had the effect of paralyzing Leviathan, as it tried to head in all directions at once.
I experienced an early version of this confusion during my tenure at CIA. When I first joined, early in the Reagan era, the Agency was probably the leanest and certainly the most mission-driven outfit in the federal government. From the director to the rawest GS-6, we all knew what we were about: defeating communism.
The collapse of the Soviet Union inspired something like panic in the troops. Hundreds of Soviet experts lost their jobs. The rest of us wondered what we were supposed to be doing. With Bill Clinton, the lawyers and the climbers arrived and things began to get unpleasant.
The horrors of 9/11 and the war on terror were met with a kind of grim satisfaction: We had found a strategic conflict to orient the Agency once again.
But whereas the old defeated enemy had been a nuclear superpower, we were now fighting 200 jihadis hiding in caves.
Loss of purpose and mission failure reached Theater of the Absurd proportions with the just-departed administration.
Ex-men in skirts gave orders from the Pentagon. Government buildings stood empty as workers chose not to show up at the office. A $5 billion allocation to build 500,000 EV charging stations delivered 58 instead.
The president, fulcrum and active principle of the bureaucratic machine, was missing. That feels like a symbol but it was real.
Given the cognitive disintegration of the incumbent, the government of the United States, wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth, was not only mindless but headless.
The shadowy figures who pulled the strings of the sad marionette we called “Joe Biden” kept spending ever more money on ever less mission-critical activities, and stood by while the government, bereft of leadership, behaved like an airplane on automatic pilot, drifting in ever tighter circles as it ran out of gas.
Enter Trump, Musk and the young buccaneers of DOGE.
Yet we shouldn’t be misled into fundamentalism on this question. Any society deprived of government would soon sink into barbarism — we can see this happening in many of our own urban centers, where local governments have effectively abdicated their duty to prevent crime.
The critique of modern government has to do with sprawl and ineffectiveness — how to meet legitimate needs in a manner that restores the public’s trust in the institution.
The Democrats would be wise to fight their battle on that front — legitimacy and effectiveness in government — rather than on a noisy defense of decades of accumulated corruption and waste.
I worry that they can’t tell the difference.
The same principle applies to the other side. The mission of DOGE isn’t to obliterate government on behalf of some libertarian utopia.
It’s to end corruption where corruption is found, replace incompetence with efficiency, and restore the sense, nearly lost in those decades of drift, that the federal government works for the public rather than the other way around.
We will learn in the next few months whether Musk and his minions can discern the difference.