The degree to which progressivism has confused technocracy with democracy in popular consciousness is impressive. Now progressives are just embarrassing themselves. Victims of their own design. There is widespread panic that deconstructing the administrative apparatus is an authoritarian move instead of what it is: the restoration of democratic governance to a constitutional republic and getting the nation’s financial house in order.
One of the biggest panics to emerge over the last couple of days concerns the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump is an authoritarian, we are told, because he created a government agency without congressional approval, and it’s doing things. We now live in a fascist dictatorship and DOGE is Exhibit A. Support the brave federal employees resisting the fascist dictator! But did the President do this? It’s yet another false narrative. Hell, DOGE isn’t even new.
The office in question is officially the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization, formerly known as the United States Digital Service (USDS). That’s right, the office already existed. And progressives are going to love this part: USDS was established by executive order under President Barack Obama as part of his efforts to improve the federal government’s digital services and technology. Congress was not involved. The goal of DOGE, and USDS before it, is to modernize and streamline government services, making them more efficient and effective—to reduce the size of government and save the taxpayer money.
This good idea hardly begins with Obama (who had few good ideas, frankly, and a lot of bad ones). I wrote about this in a November 14, 2024 essay titled A Week Into a Four Year Term That Hasn’t Started—and Progressives Are Already Losing Their Minds. (Progressives were panicking about DOGE then, so we knew what was coming.) In that essay, I highlight Al Gore presenting his final report, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less (a Report of the National Performance Review) to President Clinton in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House.
By 1999, estimates suggested that the initiative had saved around $136 billion through various cost-cutting measures, including workforce reductions, streamlining of federal agencies, and improvements in government procurement and service delivery. That’s no small sum of money given the federal budget at the time, which had not yet reached two trillion dollars. I did a little math and determined that, today, the US would save half a trillion dollars using the same approach. If DOGE is more aggressive, it could save a lot more than that. That’s a bad thing? I guess if you are progressive and want big, intrusive government to enlarge the number of those dependent on your power (see my recent essay Make Our Republic Great Again).
Despite the name, DOGE is not a federal executive department. It is well within the power of the president to reorganize existing agencies, combine existing functions, or create new offices within agencies through executive orders. We should want to see our government agencies run efficiently—or eliminated when detrimental or no longer useful. Do readers know how big the federal government is today? It’s approaching seven trillion dollars. And it’s deeply in the red. The present deficit is closing in on two trillion dollars annually. The government is adding trillions to the debt—which now exceeds 36 trillion dollars—every year. It’s time to whack agencies and offices.
The Washington Post story “USAID security officials on leave after refusing access to Musk allies” is Exhibit A in the problem of bureaucrats defying the will of the people and the need to whack programs. Once again, we confront the technocratic problem: agencies resisting directives of the executive. The term of art used here is “agency independence.” You hear this all the time from bureaucrats in corporatist style governments when asked what they would do if, say in Sweden, the Sweden Democrats came to power. Answer: ignore their directives. The idea is that if an executive enters office whose policies are seen by bureaucrats as detrimental to practices that they have deemed appropriate, then they are right to resist the executive.
CNN is reporting this morning that Elon Musk said President Donald Trump agreed the USAID should be “shut down” after its funding was frozen and dozens of employees were placed on leave. “With regards to the USAID stuff, I went over it with [the president] in detail and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said in an X Spaces conversation Monday. He added that Trump confirmed this decision multiple times. Trump, when asked about USAID before the conversation, told reporters: “It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out, and then we’ll make a decision” on its future.
Two top USAID security officials were placed on leave for blocking DOGE personnel from accessing the agency’s systems, despite threats to call law enforcement. Around sixty senior staff were also put on leave for attempting to bypass Trump’s executive order freezing foreign aid. Musk, co-hosting the X Spaces conversation with Senator Joni Ernst and Vivek Ramaswamy, criticized USAID as “incredibly politically partisan” and beyond repair. “USAID is a ball of worms,” he said. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee letter requested an update on the incident, raising concerns over security breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive data. However, Katie Miller, a Trump appointee to DOGE, confirmed, “No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances.”
USAID officials warn the State Department lacks the capacity to manage USAID’s vast development projects and that eliminating the agency would severely weaken US foreign policy. “We’re basically going to be punching with one arm behind our back,” a former senior USAID official said. It’s fine to express one’s opinion, but the future of the agency is not up to the federal bureaucrats appointed to run it. The future of USAID is up to the Executive. Indeed, the attitude expressed by action resisting democratic authority suggests Sheldon Wolin’s observations concerning inverted totalitarianism. If a nation is to avoid that situation, or to unwind it if substantially there, which we are, then it is imperative that agencies of the executive in a constitutional republic understand that they are duty bound to carry out the directives of the executive, who in our system is elected by the nation. Bureaucrats don’t choose the president or his policies. The people do. Bureaucrats carry out the policies of the president the people elected. If they aren’t prepared to do this, then they should resign. If they won’t resign, then they should be fired and locked out of their offices.
Here’s the reality: Bureaucratic inefficiencies and mismanagement are rampant at USAID—corruption, lack of oversight in aid distribution, wasted funds. But that’s just part of the problem. The mission is the problem. USAID-funded initiatives undermine local economies by flooding markets with free goods, discouraging local production. When the bureaucrats aren’t doing that, they encourage the production of goods that are not sought in the market, with the effect of destabilizing foreign economies. USAID promotes “democracy projects,” i.e., interventions in domestic affairs that advance the interests of transnational corporate power. USAID projects have prioritized US geopolitical interests, a euphemism for capitalist globalization, these deriving from neoliberal and neoconservative assumptions, over genuine development needs, which leads to dependency rather than self-sufficiency. Moreover, while USAID is pitched an independent agency of the US government responsible for providing foreign aid and development assistance, its operations provide cover for CIA operations. During the Cold War, USAID programs were used as fronts for intelligence operations in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. USAID is a weapon US intelligence operations and imperial adventures. It needs to be whacked.
Belief that USAID is necessary for delivering sustainable development solutions reveals at best a profound naïveté. But watch progressives lose their shit because it’s Trump and DOGE reforming the agency, pitching this as another instance of Trump’s authoritarianism by those who haven’t a clue about how the agency works, the power it serves, the ends it seeks. This is one more piece of evidence for my claim that the progressive left is not really left at all but handmaidens of the corporate state. What we call the left today is a customized rhetorical gloss of leftism, one rooted in the postmodern rot of CRT, postcolonial studies, and QT, i.e., ideologies that invent oppression or portray the normal as oppressive, and obscure the functional role of the progressive in transnational power schemes. But then progressivism was never really a working-class politics. It was from the beginning a corporate substitute for populism and genuine reform. This is why true populist figures and reforms are reviled and resisted by those who are now on the run.
I was telling my wife Friday on the way to dinner that, at this point, the constant panic reporting only serves the punctuate the reason why the corporate media and Democrats are no longer trusted. The propagandists and progressive politicians thought that when they told big lies that didn’t work that the problem was that their lies weren’t big enough. So, they kept telling bigger and bigger lies not realizing that the effect of the strategy runs in the opposite direction once the apparatus is viewed as illegitimate. It’s a habit they can’t kick, apparently. And a big part of the problem is that deny they are addicts. Liberating social media has made mutual knowledge an insurmountable problem for the propagandist. Progressive lies now only work on progressives, a dwindling proportion of the population. The Democratic Party is now more unpopular than at any time since the pollsters started asking people about it. If Democrats don’t change direction, then they’ll dwell in the wilderness for decades—where those who tenaciously cling to bad ideas should dwell.
freedom and reason 