By Yuval Levin
Monday, January 13, 2025
A New York Times piece on Sunday offered a bit of a
peek behind the curtains of the DOGE. It suggested that questions about the
basic structure of the DOGE’s work — the sorts of questions I pointed to in this piece last week — remain unresolved, but that the
group’s leaders are leaning in the direction of working as an informal alliance
of tech executives somehow imbedded into various government agencies.
If the story is broadly accurate, this approach would
raise obvious conflict of interest questions, which Jack Goldsmith and Bob
Bauer have been ably taking up at their Substack. It would also put the work of
the DOGE in tremendous jeopardy: If any ideas they raise get applied by a
federal agency, opponents will sue to get the records of any communication
between anyone connected to the DOGE and that agency, and the courts won’t be
patient with pretextual claims about where the idea came from. The notion that
these imbedded agents can operate as outsiders because they’re just texting
each other is going to run into lots of trouble.
But I was most struck by the tension between this
approach and the populist logic of the broader Trump coalition.
The case for the DOGE, as it is taking shape, is
basically a case for elite expertise dressed up as a case against bureaucracy.
And as such, it is remarkably unconcerned with the challenges of legitimacy
that are so central to populism in our politics. It’s being structured as if we
haven’t just lived through two decades of increasingly intense populist
conspiracism about billionaires using their influence to pull the strings of
American government. Without intending it, perhaps without quite seeing it, the
DOGE is setting itself up to be the subject of endless conspiracies to come, on
all sides of our politics.
Consider this paragraph from the Times piece,
about how the individual tech executives volunteering for the DOGE (without
becoming civil servants) will be deployed:
The representatives will largely be
stationed inside federal agencies. After some consideration by top officials,
DOGE itself is now unlikely to incorporate as an organized outside entity or
nonprofit. Instead, it is likely to exist as more of a brand for an interlinked
group of aspirational leaders who are on joint group chats and share a loyalty
to Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy.
What could go wrong, huh?
They might as well just call this thing the Trilateral
Commission and start talking in hushed tones about a new world order.
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