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Upgrade your Lucid subscription to receive invitations to weekly live Q&As, subscriber-only posts, access to the full Lucid archive, and commenting privileges. https://lucid.substack.com/ A lawless vanguard infiltrated the U.S. government; now they are being institutionalized and will work with Project 2025's own democracy destroyers
__________________ America is now a laboratory of autocratic innovation, and it is vital for our nation’s future to be clear about what is happening. Here is a summary of the argument that follows. I have carefully considered every word because the language we use matters. The Donald Trump administration blends classic means of authoritarian takeover with something new: a power-sharing agreement between a president and a private individual, Elon Musk. This agreement allowed the latter to strike at the state via a lawless vanguard of technical experts under his command. That vanguard is now embedded in over 30 government agencies and programs. Far from ending its work, DOGE is expanding, and its lawless actions are being institutionalized as a second phase of action begins. DOGE and Project 2025’s own armies of democratic destruction will work together under Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought’s guide. Some say DOGE was a failure; I say it has been all too successful. History shows that once a vanguard of rogues and lawless individuals gets a hold on government, it is difficult to eject them. Rather, the changes in government applied with force by this vanguard become normalized. And that is what is happening here. This trajectory is all too familiar to me from my work on Fascism and coups, which is why I was able to call this out on Feb. 2.
_________________ The ultra-wealthy have often had a fateful and outsized influence in politics. We need only to think of the Russian oligarchs who promoted Vladimir Putin to run for President in 1999. The U.S. 2025 case is different. Here, an authoritarian bargain gave the richest man in the world the appearance of co-leader status in return for a massive investment in helping Trump get elected and lending Trump credibility in the lucrative cryptocurrency sector. Speaking authoritatively at Cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office, meeting with foreign heads of state on presidential property, Musk complicated a strongman brand built on the domination of one man over all, to the point that TIME depicted him as president just a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration.
The real action, though, happened behind the scenes, as the “Department of Government Efficiency” —an entity of dubious official status and legality— was created as a mechanism for Musk to infiltrate the government of a sovereign power. Trump allowed DOGE to take over the United States government’s administrative and financial systems, capture the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, and decimate numerous essential government agencies. In the short term, this project re-engineered government to protect Musk’s businesses from investigation and fines and steer domestic and foreign government business to his products (and cancel contracts with competitors). But the bigger prize, for Musk and his partners such as Peter Thiel, head of Palantir, is information capture. The long-term goal is to create “a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents,” as the Washington Post has reported. Not only is there evident potential for authoritarian surveillance, as Olga Lautman has argued, but the possession of such a database is priceless for anyone wishing to train AI systems or have leverage with foreign governments. Getting this data requires a total disregard for Congressional approval and laws regulating privacy, which is why the coup tactics were necessary. To this end, Trump and his Cabinet allowed Musk to create a de facto private civil service that answers only to Musk, is staffed by people who had worked for Musk or his ally Thiel in some capacity or are his associates in the tech space, and empowered them to use authoritarian methods. They occupied and locked out members of Congress from government buildings, installed themselves physically in those spaces, remaining there 24/7, fired many thousands of government employees after barring them from their own computer systems, physically removed officials who sought to stop their seizures and infiltrations, shut down and defunded whole programs and agencies, and in general acted like a revolutionary vanguard, updated to include digital as well as physical shock troops.
The result is shocking. DOGE is now embedded in over 30 United States government agencies and departments, including the General Services Administration, the Treasury Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the United Postal Service, and the IRS (which has lost almost 1/3 of its tax auditors after just 2 months of DOGE cuts). They have also breached the Social Security Administration, which guards banking and other details for more than 87 million Americans and thus is a prime target for plunder. The tech billionaire Antonio Gracias is now working there as a DOGE staffer, and the Trump administration recently asked the Supreme Court to give DOGE access to its records. Far from closing up shop, DOGE is expanding its power, “digging in like a parasite,” as an IT specialist at the Department of Agriculture told WIRED. Like coup conspirators throughout history, they are also operating in a highly secretive manner, using Signal groups to communicate and isolating themselves physically from career staff in buildings they have occupied. “We have no idea how many people have been hired,” said an official for the American Federation of Government Employees, but whatever the number, DOGE is apparently recruiting more. That is why WIRED tech journalist Brian Barrett, in a superb article published on May 29, concludes that “the reality is, the whole government is DOGE now…Removing DOGE at this point would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water.” So don’t believe the talk about Musk stepping back. Trump himself has commented that “Elon’s not really leaving.” Musk wishes only to distance himself from the fallout his coup tactics have created for Tesla and his corporate profile. The truth is that the second wave, when the lawless vanguard is normalized and fuses with the establishment, has started. Office of Management and Budget head Vought, who has been a point of convergence of Project 2025 and DOGE from the start, is now pledging to “use all of our executive tools” to make DOGE’s wrecking-ball actions permanent. The shock events and vanguard actions will be institutionalized, as has happened many times in the history of authoritarianism. This hostile takeover of the government of a superpower is astonishing and should be front-page news every day. Yet denial, cowardice, and normalization have affected media coverage of this catastrophe. Too many have focused on the supposed “failures” of DOGE to meet its fraud quotas, rather than the fact that DOGE’s legality is uncertain and it has no business being in government at all. There has also been an unfortunate glamorization of the villains of this shock attack on our democracy, as when the Atlantic calls Vought –one of the most damaged and dangerous individuals in government today—a “visionary.” There is nothing visionary about the rapid hollowing out of federal agencies and the engineered departures of scores of career officials so that institutional memory and expertise will be destroyed. There is nothing forward-looking about the mass firings of talented and dedicated people so they may be replaced by Trump or Musk or Vought loyalists –or not replaced at all. As the coup enters a new phase, let us take Barrett’s May 29 warning about the fusion of DOGE and the U.S. government to heart: “It’s no longer useful to think of it as a separate entity, as a tech billionaire’s personal strike force. It’s a means to an end, one part of a larger project to gut the federal government and redefine the social contract….Never lose sight of that project. A fool with a chain saw is nothing compared to the full power of the state.” |
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