There is going to be a recap of what occurred with Musk and DOGE this week

The Failure of Elon Musk, DOGE, or How the Government Wants to Make Sense of the Media and the Courts: A Case Study with the U.S. Government

This is the logic of a consultant. This is an engineering sprint whose inevitable finish line is the unwinding of the social contract. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness after all; it dies in JIRA tickets filed by Palantir alums.

And then, what? This is the question that Elon Musk and DOGE have failed to answer, because there is no answer. Does the United States government need to become a profit engine? To return shareholder value? Does Medicaid need to demonstrate a product-market fit in time for the next funding round?

This is how you get an executive order declaring that “each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart,” an arbitrary ratio with no regard for actual staffing needs. It’s how you get hundreds of federal government buildings on the auction block no matter how fully occupied they are. The race to empty the well is extreme and ill- thought out.

The speed is strategy, of course, flooding the zone so that neither the media nor the courts can keep pace. The slash-and-burn approach is different to lawsuits and court orders. The Supreme Court won’t get a chance to weigh in on the issue until after DOGE has tapped into every government server. But it’s also reflexive. The first order of business in a corporate takeover is to slash costs as quickly as possible. If you can’t fire people, try to give them a retirement package. If they won’t take the buyouts, find a way to fire them anyway. Keep cutting until you hit bone.

These are spreadsheet cruelties, executed with a click. Despite what people in the know will tell you, the loss of jobs and lives doesn’t matter compared to the tighter balance sheet.

Three weeks ago, a 19-year-old who calls himself “Big Balls” online didn’t have access to government personnel records and more. The keys to the Treasury systems which pay $5.5 trillion each year had not been handed over to a 25-year-old with a closet full of racist rants. The Oval Office was not turned into a romper room for Musk’s son.

Fresh incursions are brought every day. The United States believed in humanitarian aid three weeks ago. It helped people who had been ripped off by big corporations. The infrastructure was funded to make America a beacon of scientific innovation. The United States Agency for International Development was gutted, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on ice. So much for all that.

Elon Musk and the First 100 Days of the Trump Administration: What We Need to Know About the US Government, How We Can Identify Where We Are, And Why We Shouldn’t

As President Trump seeks to roll back the size, scope and spending of the federal government, a key figure in those plans has been tech billionaire Elon Musk. Musk leads the Department of Government Efficiency, an idea conceived as an outside review of how the government operates but has now become an entity based inside the White House with virtually unfettered access to federal agencies and wide-ranging permission to eviscerate purchases, programs and staff to achieve its goals.

The thing about the takeover of key US government institutions by the world’s richest man and his strike force of former interns is that it’s happening so fast.

We’ll be recapping what you need to know every Friday morning for the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Get more updates and analysis in the NPR Politics newsletter.

Last Friday, we told you about the recent activities of the DOGE, which encouraged federal workers to resign, demanded a shut down of the US Agency for International Development, and sought access to agencies’ records. This week’s pace was the same. So let’s sift through the continued onslaught of headlines: about how the world’s richest man is wielding the power given to him by Trump to help remake the United States, the lack of transparency into his actions and the ongoing concerns that his companies stand to benefit from many changes.

Representing “America, Inc,” Musk said during the World Governments Summit in Meydan, that he was helping the company engage in a type of “corporate turnaround” that should include deletion of entire agencies.

“If you leave a weed without removing its roots, then it’s easy for it to grow again,” he said. It doesn’t stop weeds from growing back if you remove the roots of the weed.

The US DOGE Service: Why did President Donald Trump Leave? A Memorino from Dickerson, the Technology Transformation Services, and the US Department of State

“It’s beyond debate that a more aggressive approach was necessary if we were ever going to make any progress in our lifetimes,” says Mikey Dickerson, who was the founding administrator of the United States Digital Service, which has now been refashioned into Musk’s US DOGE Service. Before the inauguration of Trump, he left. On day one of Trump’s second term, his executive order establishing the temporary organization DOGE as a temporary organization within the government was something that Dickerson would have liked to see in the charter of the agency. He particularly liked the paragraph that forced agencies to give USDS teams access to systems and records. “That wouldn’t have been a magic bullet, but it would have created a strong presumption that they needed to cooperate,” he says. “We didn’t really have that, so it was pretty much optional whether anybody wanted to work with us.”

Ann Lewis, who headed the Technology Transformation Services, an agency devoted to using modern tech to make government accessible to its citizens, tried to view the DOGE takeover in a positive light. It didn’t take long for that light to dim. “The model of bringing in private-sector people who have a fresh perspective and skills and who want to help is a great idea,” she tells me. “But we’re not seeing people from the private sector with lots of experience who want to understand how everything works.”