Elon Musk arrived in Washington with a plan to eliminate the so-called deep state—but did it actually work? A report from inside the DOGE ecosystem to find out. And, then, confronting the epidemic of political violence. Plus:
“Elon goes on these destiny quests,” a prominent conservative said. “And then a lot of the government is on a destiny quest.”Illustration by Barry Blitt
Benjamin Wallace-Wells
A staff writer covering American politics and society.
Elon Musk spent nearly three hundred million dollars to help elect Donald Trump in 2024, and, with the access that bought him, he got an unusual reward: a free-floating executive-branch agency—the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—that he would use freely to remake the government. While conservatives and libertarians have long lamented the steady growth of expenditures on the federal bureaucracy, they have generally been more successful at adding their own legacy projects than in eliminating anyone else’s. But, as one of the most famous people on the planet, Musk arrived with some powers that conservative reformers rarely have: a unique public profile, the backing of the newly elected President, a small army of young techies, and a sweeping disdain for the “deep state.” One source close to DOGE told me that Musk often referred to members of Congress, disparagingly, as “N.P.C.’s”—non-player characters—the mute and nameless figures who populate the background of video games.
Earlier this month, before DOGE slipped into a zombie state following a spectacular online snit between the President and the wealthiest man in the world, its efforts to remake the civil service were the defining project of this new Trump Administration, and I wanted to figure out whether those efforts had worked. For a piece in this week’s issue, I spoke with people who encountered the agency at every layer—DOGE engineers and insiders, as well as ordinary civil servants whose jobs were upended by it. My starting question turned out to depend on the more complicated question of how DOGE worked. As the techies made their way through government, insisting on unprecedented kinds of access and authority, mid-level bureaucrats had to decide whether to grant it—and to determine, without much preparation, how much power the new Administration had to overhaul the government, and to rewrite its legal commitments to the American people.
The final social-media dustup between Trump and Musk ended, as so many deranged internet arguments do, with invocations of the serial sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. But it hinged on the spectacular collision that Musk had engineered over the past six months, between the ethos of the tech industry and that of the civil service, and on the Tesla billionaire’s conviction that DOGE could radically recreate Washington on Trump’s, and perhaps, just as important, his own, behalf. And so, again, the question: Did it work?
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How Bad Is It?
This weekend’s shootings in Minnesota are the most recent examples of an escalating epidemic of politically motivated violence in the United States.
How bad is it? “It’s bad, and it looks like it’s getting worse,” Michael Luo, an executive editor at The New Yorker, explains. “I wrote a piece in October of 2024 that explored the idea of treating political violence as a threat to public health. It would involve tackling the problem with community-wide interventions, in the manner of tuberculosis or motor-vehicle accidents. The public-health approach begins with data, and, this year, several new reports have provided a set of especially alarming data points.”
Luo shares three recent studies:
- The Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University issued a policy brief in May which reported more than six hundred incidents of threats and harassment against local elected officials in 2024, a fourteen per cent increase from 2023 and a seventy-four per cent increase from 2022.
- A report from February found that, last year, the U.S. Capitol Police investigated more than nine thousand statements and direct threats against members of Congress, including their families and staff, compared with fewer than four thousand in 2017.
- A report published in January by the Brennan Center for Justice said that forty-three per cent of state legislators had experienced threats; thirty-eight per cent said that the abuse has become worse since they first took office.
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