The Dangerous Myth of DOGE: Why Disruption Is Not Reform
Elon Musk didn’t try to fix the government — he privatized it, and Donald Trump let him
DOGE Was Our Shot at Sanity, by , is a sincere, passionate, and well-written essay on the missed opportunity represented by the failure of the Department of Government Efficiency to “fix” our government. I recommend that you read it.
Though I respect Warren’s presentation of his point of view, and agree with some of what he has to say, my perspective on Elon Musk and DOGE is diametrically opposed to Warren’s. Here is my rebuttal.
DOGE wasn’t reform — it was a fantasy of privatization
When Warren calls DOGE “our shot at sanity,” he’s not describing a plan grounded in good governance. Instead, he’s articulating a tech CEO’s fantasy: government as a defective machine — something to be gutted, not repaired. But we’ve witnessed genuine reform. In the 1990s, the Clinton-Gore administration implemented the National Performance Review (NPR), which empowered public servants, made services more efficient, and saved hundreds of billions of dollars — all while upholding Constitutional norms. DOGE, by stark contrast, did precisely the opposite, setting a dangerous precedent for our public institutions.
DOGE wasn’t reform — it was an experiment in authoritarian privatization
Unlike the NPR, which was rooted in data, transparency, and respect for public institutions, DOGE operated in secrecy and spectacle. Elon Musk was given sweeping authority — without legal accountability or public consent — to “modernize” federal agencies using AI, proprietary systems, and Musk-owned platforms like Starlink and Neuralink. That wasn’t innovation. That was profiteering.
And the consequences were devastating: AI models mistakenly terminated benefits for veterans, the elderly, and low-income Americans. Oversight bodies like the GAO were denied access. FOIA requests were rejected on the grounds that DOGE’s systems were proprietary. Contracts were handed out without bidding — mostly to Musk’s own companies.
That’s not reform. That’s a hostile takeover.
Reform should build trust — not dismantle it
Warren accuses critics of political cowardice and hypocrisy for turning against DOGE. But criticism wasn’t a betrayal of reform — it was a belated defense of democracy. Al Gore’s NPR worked because it started from the inside out. It trusted and empowered career civil servants, embraced transparency, and set measurable, auditable goals. DOGE, by contrast, tore through agencies with AI-powered pink slips and made data and decision-making a black box. That’s not how you earn public trust — that’s how you destroy it.
We don’t need Silicon Valley egos hijacking the machinery of governance. We need public servants who know how to use it responsibly.
Elon Musk didn’t get scapegoated — he got exposed
Warren paints Musk as a misunderstood visionary punished for telling uncomfortable truths. But the truth is this: Musk never respected the Constitution, federal processes, or the public’s right to accountable governance. He wasn’t a reformer — he was a disruptor looking for a new playground.
His disdain for rules isn’t edgy — it’s dangerous. And his record of mismanagement is long: from Twitter’s collapse into disinformation chaos, to unsafe Autopilot claims at Tesla, to satellite internet deals with authoritarian regimes. He brought the same recklessness to DOGE. And when the inevitable backlash came, he ran from it, retreating behind claims of being smeared — while the damage to public services remained.
Donald Trump was never serious about efficiency
Warren blames Trump for “folding” on DOGE, as if it had been a noble effort worth saving. But Trump never cared about reform. He didn’t support DOGE because it worked — he supported it because it sounded good at rallies. And the moment it stopped producing applause, he moved on.
That’s not political cowardice. That’s Trump being Trump: a showman without substance, chasing headlines while abandoning the hard work of governing.
Let’s stop confusing theater with policy
DOGE didn’t collapse because it was too honest or too bold. It collapsed because it was ill-conceived, irresponsibly managed, and rooted in contempt for democratic process. Its goal wasn’t to make government better — it was to make government smaller, weaker, and easier to sell off to the highest bidder. There’s a deep and dangerous pattern here: use populist rhetoric to erode public institutions, replace them with privatized systems controlled by political allies, and call it “efficiency”. That’s not innovation. That’s autocracy with better branding.
We don’t need billionaires to save us — we need Constitutional governance.
The government isn’t a startup. It’s not supposed to “move fast and break things”. It’s supposed to serve everyone, with fairness, stability, and accountability. That’s messy, slow, and hard — but that’s democracy.
Real reform requires Congress to do its job, not just vote a straight partisan cultural perspective. Under the Constitution, Congress appropriates the funds with which the government functions and the laws by which the machinery of government operates. Congress has the constitutional duty to oversee the operation of the executive branch which includes the government departments and agencies the DOGE was supposed to reform.
If anyone is to blame for the current state of government affairs, it is the Congress — and the people who voted for the currently sitting senators and representatives. We’ve allowed ourselves to be fixated by phony partisan culture wars — funded by the ultra-wealthy to distract us from the real causes of accelerating wealth inequality and the demise of the American Dream.
Actual reform means improving those systems with integrity — not handing them over to billionaires who answer to no one. When Gore reformed government, he did it as a constitutional officer, bound by law and guided by evidence. When Musk tried, he did it with impunity and profit motives — and left chaos in his wake.
We can’t afford to fall for this fantasy again. We’ve seen the damage. We wrote it down. And it’s time to say clearly: DOGE was a mistake. A costly, dangerous mistake.
The real lesson of DOGE is what we must never allow again
Let’s not romanticize a program that gutted benefits, bypassed oversight, and awarded sweetheart deals to its director’s companies. Let’s not mourn a missed opportunity to “restructure” government when that restructuring meant deregulating accountability and automating harm.
The real opportunity is still ahead: to restore belief in public service, to modernize without privatizing, and to protect the public good from those who see democracy as an obstacle, not a foundation. Because if we don’t learn from DOGE, we’re not heading toward sanity — we’re spiraling into a place that is far darker and more dangerous.
