Welcome to the Department of Government Idiocy

Give the incoming Trump administration a lot of credit: Faced with the potentially devastating burden of maximum powers for a tech bro meddling in government business, the president-elect sent Elon Musk into a powerless bureaucratic quagmire. What’s more, it paired Musk with another tech bro, albeit one with a different name: biotech executive and one-time failed GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The nominal duty of the group the couple will lead, the Department of Government Efficiency, is to eliminate wasteful government spending. But as Trump’s announcement carefully stipulated, their cooperation — even though the word “government” is in the title — will take place “out of government,” loosely translated as “out of earshot and sight of White House staff.” , who are actually trying to get a job.” done.”

The eternally forgettable Musk, who, as you may recall, gave more than $200 million to support the Trump campaign in a super-user concern, gleefully announcing the new gig, post fan art promptly with a mockup of the new group’s DOGE acronym logo on his website X. See Doge is the name of a crypto product in which Musk has a major stake. Its logo, which also briefly replaced the bird symbol with an X on Twitter, is a crude version of the dog mascot. (Following Trump’s announcement, Dogecoin instantly boom in the investment marketsrepeating the same trend throughout the shady crypto sector, which is waiting for a good bottom from regulation after donating fully half of all corporate money until campaign 2024)

In addition to the fact that Musk has never been funny for a minute in his life, not only extending Musk’s amazing streak, the post on X also captures something more sinister: the chief executive of the cost-cutting agency has a huge array of economic conflicts of interest, having amassed a significant part of his hundred-billion-dollar fortune on the basis of government contracts. In addition, Musk’s private-sector ventures, such as his electric car company Tesla and his now-defunct social media platform X, often run afoul of regulatory requirements from a host of federal agencies. However toothless the DOGE may be in the White House organizational chart, it will still be designed to intimidate administrators pursuing Musk’s selfish agenda.

Still, the joint concert was undoubtedly a coup for the newly appointed MAGA fan, who has engaged Trump in numerous campaign talks with lawmakers and foreign leaders, as well as walking around the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort as his self-promotion.”first friend.”

Still, Trump’s second White House will be anything but a playground for friends. Any cursory acquaintance with Trump’s family history will confirm that close White House associates who associate themselves too closely with the former business magnate are often subject to swift banishment. (Watch Don Jr.’s tour as third-tier personality at the Rumbleand Eric’s career is, well, doing whatever Eric does.)

To top it all off, Musk, a crazed egomaniac incapable of maintaining many close relationships, faces the added humiliation of sharing authority over the new gig with Ramaswamy. A much more practiced Trump sycophant, he was briefly touted on shortlists for more senior, grown-up Cabinet appointments, but quickly fell to the ground as a phony spendthrift. Ramaswamy’s comically inept presidential campaign ended with his promise to be “freed” in his last debate. That promise could double as his campaign’s mission statement, sold mostly in impassioned tirades about the threat of vigilantism, along with conspiracy-mongering about January 6th and the occasional call to invade Mexico and possibly Canada.

On the one hand, Musk and Ramaswamy’s collaboration could almost turn into an inspired storyline from Mike Judge’s HBO satire Silicon Valley. Take two of the most irredeemably shitty, narcissistic figures in modern right-wing tech politics and make them work together. Better yet, strengthen the mandate for responsible government spending by picking up the vaporware mogul who raised the share price he paid to acquire the white elephant Twitter to include talisman pots number 4.20 with a biotech con artist who rarely makes a living off drugs pass the testing phase. What can go wrong?

Indeed, the very act of appointing two chairs to investigate the misuse of public resources is the kind of self-defeating flourish that could be passed down, say, at a music conservatory called the Kenny G Institute for Free Jazz Improvisation. » It is already painfully clear that the arrogant Musk has little idea what this work should entail. On the campaign trail, when he wasn’t running around like a red-hat slob after Trump, Musk confidently stated that it “wouldn’t do too much good” to detect and eliminate.at least $2 trillion” in waste, with all discretionary spending in fiscal year 2024 at $1.6 trillion and total spending at more than $6.75 trillion. In order for Musk to achieve his goal, many important spending and income supports, such as Social Security and Medicare, would have to be cut. That’s probably why X Musk’s later heyday supported the user’s view that the rapid spending cuts, along with other proposals such as higher electricity tariffs, would cause a “severe overreaction in the economy” ahead of a “crash” in financial markets. “Sounds about right,” replied the slurp.

Indifference to the social costs of his wasteful projects is as normal for Musk as it is for his presidential benefactor. But since Trump is always able to undo his past commitments on a dime and seduce a whole bunch of de facto lackeys in the cabinet — up to and including his former vice president — it’s hard to tell when and if Musk’s fiscal horse will turn into a real one and now threaten the well-being of millions of Americans.

I suppose there is some consolation in recalling the fate of two high-profile White House special commissions that Trump unveiled in the early days of his first term. In 2017, the White House launched the Office of Immigrant Victims of Crime under the Department of Homeland Security, a highly publicized group dedicated to documenting and investigating mass violent crimes among immigrants. The commission was an early indicator that the MAGA movement was leaning towards fascism as it sought to portray the ethnic group as the source of the scourge of dangerous criminal behaviour. It also quickly proved to be a failure, as there really was no such crime epidemic among immigrants. Meanwhile, Kris Kobach, former Kansas Secretary of State, became captain a Trump-authorized investigation into a parallel moral panic over vote fraud and also came out empty.

Again, fear-mongering about immigration and rampant electoral denial remain the two main calling cards of the current MAGA movement, even after the first Trump administration tried to document both. Even if Musk and Ramaswamy are distracted at DOGE meetings discussing the pernicious scope of the awakened mind virus that eats away at the impunity of the oligarchs, sharing memes or playing hacker, as they do at Google HQ, there is little chance that they may give birth to another nihilistic MAGA crusade. As we saw in the final series Silicon Valley, melting Coding and greed may be dangerously close to destroying the world.