A Year On: The DOGE Disaster - by Don Moynihan

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A Year On: The DOGE Disaster<br>A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly of your government

Don Moynihan<br>Jan 16, 2026

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The day after Christmas gave rise to one of the most remarkable social media posts you are likely to see.

Elon Musk attacked the appointment of the new head of the New York City’s Fire Department, on the grounds that “proven experience matters when lives are at stake” in public services. (Mamdani clapped back, pointing out that the appointee had decades of experience working in emergency services).<br>To get new posts in your inbox, consider supporting “Can We Still Govern?” as a free or paid subscriber.

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It is hard to fathom anyone on the planet less qualified than Elon Musk to opine on the value of public service experience when lives are at stake. And yes, I know that pointing out that Musk is a hypocrite is like pointing out that water is wet. With DOGE, he held extraordinary public power. How did he use it? Across the government Musk put people with zero experience of government services in charge of those services, determining what contracts would be maintained, which employees would stay or go. At one point they fired the guys taking care of nuclear weapons, before rehiring them after some members of Congress got very nervous. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have died because Musk ignored the people with real experience.<br>So a year on from its creation, its time for a reckoning: What did DOGE do? Lets dig in.<br>The effects of DOGE were predictable

It is important to distinguish between the formal mission of DOGE (“modernizing federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity”) and the reason for its creation. It is especially important to remember that Musk pushed DOGE on Trump, not vice-versa. DOGE is best understood a political project of an increasingly politically active and right-wing broligarchy.<br>The day before Trump took office I laid out out what we might expect from DOGE. I wanted to be hopeful. The idea of DOGE was not a bad one. But having watched Musk cook his brain on social media, and listen to the stated goals of the people sponsoring DOGE, it was hard to maintain such optimism. So my bottom line was this:<br>Here is a factual description of DOGE: it is a group run by right-wing billionaires who oppose government regulation of their businesses, and benefit from government contracts. It avoids accountability standards that we expect of other groups who seek to influence government. It is not run by people who have a deep knowledge of the function of government, or have much patience with the procedural requirements that flow from laws.

A year later, I feel pretty happy with description. I argued that DOGE would not be like traditional government commission or a sideshow — it would not deliver a report of recommendations that would be summarily ignored. I also argued that DOGE would serve as a propaganda machine to justify an assault on government that would otherwise be deeply unpopular:<br>Evoking norms like “efficiency” or cutting “fraud and abuse” serves to abstract real cuts to real programs that people depend upon. But with a sophisticated enough messaging operation, maybe you can change the policy before enough people realize what has been taken from them.

Again, this proved fairly accurate. DOGE immediately promised to cut fraud in government. This proved to be a mirage, used to justify cutting services while reducing trust in government. It turns out that 40% of calls to Social Security were not fraudulent and armies of the dead were not collecting benefits. US AID was not distributing condoms to Hamas. Such claims were grounded in internet rumors, fueled by the man who controlled the means to amplify those rumors.<br>When a case of actual, albeit exaggerated, fraud arose in Minnesota, Musk, Vance and Trump jumped right back on the bandwagon, using it to stop payments to other safety net programs in other states. In this way, what is happening to many public services is what happened to US AID, and what DOGE tried to do across government: claim fraud, cut services.<br>DOGE as state capture

My main prediction about DOGE is that it would operate as a form of state capture: a means by which the owner class of Silicon Valley protected their businesses, as well as created new business opportunities to work with government. Their major business complaint against Biden is that he was regulating the growth of crypto currencies and AI. For example, Marc Andreessen’s explanation for supporting Trump was “They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That’s really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics.”<br>To assess the evidence, we need to look not just at DOGE but the also the broader tech coalition that lined-up behind Trump and benefited...