So here we are, back to the era of waking up to headlines that trigger audible “ughs” and a desire to act out being violently sick. On Wednesday morning, this was the news that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy had been appointed by the president-elect, Donald Trump, to run something called the Department of Government Efficiency, a newly created body tasked with cutting back federal bureaucracy and given the larky acronym Doge. (Musk has been a longtime promoter of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, so there’s a great conflict-of-interest gag straight out the gate.)
On X, Musk duly posted an image of himself in gangster pose, with digitally volumised hair alongside the lettering D.O.G.E, the message of which was clear: cutting $2tn from the federal budget, a figure touted by Musk before the election, was going to be not only satisfying, but fun!
Quite apart from the fact that Musk may now be nominally in charge of government agencies with oversight of his companies – the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, has had run-ins with Musk over threats to wildlife near the SpaceX launch pad – it opens up a future in which the richest man in the world gets his lolz not from incontinent tweeting, but from the side-splitting task of slashing 75% of the federal workforce.
This is the figure that Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who ran against Trump in the 2023 Republican primary, has floated as desirable, along with his recommendation to shutter the Department of Education, the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI. And to be fair, Musk has had recent experience with this kind of efficiency when he fired 6,000 people at Twitter after buying the company in 2022, one of the actions that, by some calculations, wiped 80% from its value.
If large numbers of Americans voted for Trump in the electoral equivalent of looting – roughly: everything’s shit so let’s burn the place down – they are in with a good chance of seeing that nihilism come home to roost. In his official statement, Trump likened Musk’s new department to the Manhattan Project, the US nuclear programme that produced the world’s first atomic bomb and an analogy that makes no sense beyond the broad outline of blowing-things-up.
“Doge will soon begin crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud & abuse,” tweeted Ramaswamy, and you can imagine what’s going to follow: the mockery and destruction of any programme not personally interesting to these extremely limited men, and the promotion of programmes that personally favour them.
This will be bad for social programmes supporting those on public assistance. It will be bad for the environment. It will almost certainly be bad for the arts. When, in response to Trump’s announcement, Ramaswamy tweeted: “We will not go gently”, it was in reference, I suspect, to the closing lines of the 1996 action movie Independence Day, rather than to Dylan Thomas.
That the Musk/Ramaswamy announcement was the most eye-catching of Trump’s appointments this week points to another issue with his leadership, which is the sheer reaction-fatigue we are likely to experience as we enter this exciting new era. In normal circumstances, the appointment as head of homeland security of Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota informally known as “dog lady” for admitting in her book earlier this year to shooting her own dog, would be dominating headlines. As would the nomination for secretary of defence of “Pete Hegseth”, a former infantry captain who served in Afghanistan but is better known as a Fox News host and author of the book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. (Hegseth, who looks like a child’s drawing of Mr Incredible, is an enthusiastic defender of US soldiers accused of war crimes and, if confirmed by the Senate, will be in charge of 1.3 million active-duty troops.)
But it is Musk, a man with no experience in government, no interest in public service, and an apparent narcissism equal to Trump’s that will surely see the men fall out before long, who grabbed all the headlines. Like Trump, Musk wins by doing things that trigger the endorphin rush of witnessing cruelty to others. And right on cue, there was Liz Truss, euphoric, reposting Trump’s statement about Musk’s appointment with the remark, “what is needed in Britain” – a piece of toadying that won her a repost by Musk. Truly, we live in terrible times.