Earlier this week, the Economist asked plaintively whether Elon Musk was fixing the federal government, as promised, or destroying it. “This newspaper looked forward to what Mr Musk might do with some hope,” it stated, but has watched with mounting concern as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has “broken laws with glee and callously destroyed careers,” as well as “made false claims about waste and seized personal data protected by law.”
The article concludes that Musk has become so intoxicated with authoritarian power and consumed by petty cultural and political grievances that his otherwise good organizational sense has fallen by the wayside — a genius’s tragic decline, dragging the federal government down with him.
The Economist should give Musk a little more credit. If DOGE fails at making the federal government more efficient, it’s instead because Musk has a grander vision for it, one many at the Economist might find agreeable: privatization.
All the smashing and breaking and outright ruining is not accidental. It serves a higher purpose: breaking public institutions to make way for private sector alternatives.
Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference in March, Musk was open about this ambition, saying the government should privatize “everything we possibly can.”
The American right has long wanted to accomplish exactly this. In George W. Bush–era conservative strategist Grover Norquist’s famous poetic phrasing, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Of course, when public services are no longer reliable or available, that doesn’t mean they’re no longer needed. It means that control…
Auteur: Meagan Day
