As the Democratic Party struggles to find a coherent message and flounders in the abyss that voters condemned it to after the 2024 election, the party has made one unified decision: make Elon Musk its primary villain.
And there is some indication that doing so is a good idea, politically speaking. It is hard to think of any nonelected government official who has so visibly wielded such influence over policymaking as Musk has since President Donald Trump invited him to lead the Department of Government Efficiency.
The DOGE project is as unconventional as it is effective. The federal bureaucracy, nominally contained within the executive branch, has long operated as an unaccountable leviathan. The federal government, a vast, sprawling organization, employs over 2 million people, yet each presidential administration is only afforded 4,000 appointees across the entire federal government, who are then charged with enacting the elected president’s agenda.
On paper, the career federal workforce is supposed to work on an apolitical basis, serving Democratic and Republican administrations alike with a nonpartisan zeal for public service. The career employees work to implement the elected administration’s agenda without concern for personal and ideological preference.
If only that were true.
In practice, this has meant that the bureaucracy’s stable workforce has wielded an enormous amount of influence over the implementation of policies. Directives can be slow-walked or outright defied, and actions can be taken independently of the administration’s priorities. At the same time, the extensive lack of oversight of the federal workforce, which is largely protected from dismissals, has allowed it to grow exponentially, further inhibiting accountability. With no fear of reprisal, this bureaucracy, nominally accountable to the presidency, has instead operated as an effectively independent branch of government.
That was until the Trump administration came in and gave DOGE a mandate to go to war with the bureaucracy. Instead of waiting for the bureaucracy to carry out the policy directives of the administration, thus empowering the career workforce to stonewall any changes, DOGE, which is contained within the White House, has parachuted into every agency and has begun to outline plans for massive, across-the-board cuts to the workforce, government programs, and even the billions of dollars doled out each year to contractors. This has put the entire career workforce on its heels and finally brought some accountability.
But because DOGE is contained within the White House, there is an inherent friction that is created when an independent entity that answers to one person engages with another entity that answers to another person. Such is the case with DOGE, which answers to the White House, while the agency answers to the agency head, which answers to the White House, creating a greater degree of separation.
Typically, the chain of command works like this: The president makes a directive to the agency, and the agency head then directs leadership within the agency’s various organizations to implement the president’s order. Of course, this comes with major caveats. There are some agencies that exist specifically to coordinate across agencies, establish rules for other agencies to follow in their day-to-day operations, or ensure that an agency has the resources it needs to function.
For instance, the General Services Administration is the government’s operations hub. It ensures that each agency has the real estate, office space, and other facilities and services necessary to function. The Office of Personnel Management, on the other hand, serves as the government’s human resources department, handling everything from employee healthcare benefits to life insurance and retirement pensions.
DOGE has effectively taken over OPM and GSA, but its day-to-day functions have included extensive operations in the various departments whose leaders comprise the president’s Cabinet. And that’s where DOGE has bumbled its way through the bureaucracy and the administration has seen some friction.
In a couple of recent meetings, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Musk have reportedly had serious but convivial disagreements over DOGE’s efforts at the State Department. After the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the earliest days of the administration, Rubio had concerns that Musk’s operation planned to rip through his department without careful consideration of what was being cut or restructured. In turn, Musk has been frustrated at what he sees as Rubio’s lack of action to reform the functions of the State Department.
While Rubio is hardly the only secretary who has voiced these frustrations, his position is more complicated than many other Cabinet secretaries because his job requires him to spend more time away from the agency he leads. Since being sworn in the morning after Trump took office, he has jetted across the globe to Latin America, to Saudi Arabia twice to meet with Russian and Ukrainian officials to negotiate a peace deal between the two nations, to Israel, and most recently to Canada for a G7 summit of foreign ministers.
To improve the lines of communication and clarify DOGE’s role, Trump called all of the members of his Cabinet to a meeting at the White House in which he reaffirmed the traditional chain of command. Trump said each Cabinet secretary is in charge of his or her respective agency, while DOGE and its operatives fanned out across the government exist in an advisory capacity to guide each agency in its plans to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.
This is important for two reasons. First, it provided clarity to the Cabinet on how to cooperate with DOGE and ensure that the project to root out waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the federal government is orderly. The agency heads know how each department operates and what its needs are, including what is an appropriate staff reduction to ensure the agency continues to operate.
Second, and equally important, is the political optics of this effort. The Democrats have latched on to Musk as their primary Trump administration villain, and polling has indicated it is paying off. Musk’s favorables are down significantly, with a recent CNN poll showing 54% of people have an unfavorable opinion of the world’s richest man. Trump reminding his Cabinet secretaries that they are in charge, not Musk, also serves to remind people that the president they voted for is the one making the decisions for the administration, rather than the billionaire bogeyman the Democratic Party is eager to shove in their faces.
The week after the meeting, it was not Musk nor DOGE that announced mass layoffs at the Department of Education but Education Secretary Linda McMahon. DOGE had been in the building for weeks, identifying what parts of the agency’s operations should be eliminated or slashed, but the final and orderly decision to lay off half the agency’s workforce was made by the agency’s leader.
“Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” McMahon said.
ELON MUSK SAYS MESS IN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS WORSE THAN EXPECTED
Time will tell if the layoffs will affect the agency’s ability to operate, but the process that the department took to enact its layoffs was far more orderly than what has been pursued in other departments, such as the State Department.
As other agencies propose their own reduction-in-force programs in the coming days and weeks, the leaders of each department are always better off following the established chain of command. And when that chain of command is followed, the work that DOGE is doing for the federal government is no bumble at all but a very welcome blessing.