Feb. 18: Two Ways of Thinking About DOGE

Bibas family likely dead; U.S. and Russian diplomats meet in Riyadh; Will an asteroid wipe out a city?

Feb 18, 2025

The Big Story

We, like everybody else, are doing our best to keep up with the pace of the Donald Trump/Elon Musk war on the federal bureaucracy. Over the past several days, for instance, Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency appear to have their sights on the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). On Sunday, Musk began posting data on X that he claimed was from the “Social Security database” showing tens of millions of people over the age of 100 receiving Social Security checks; the same day, the acting commissioner of the SSA quit over what The Washington Post described as a “clash” with DOGE “over its attempt to access sensitive government records.” Last night, The Wall Street Journal reported that DOGE was seeking access to similar records at the IRS ahead of an anticipated attempt to lay off “thousands” of IRS employees later this week. These reports come after “thousands” of probationary employees across the federal government were fired at the end of last week. And that’s just what’s happened since Friday.

The endless details, splashy headlines, claims, and counterclaims all make it somewhat difficult to wrap one’s head around the big picture. According to Musk, DOGE is in the business of identifying federal waste, fraud, and abuse on the way to saving the U.S. government trillions of dollars. Some of Musk and Trump’s allies characterize the effort more as a war on the entrenched “deep state,” or the Hydra of federal and nongovernmental bureaucracies that serve as a permanent power base for the Democratic Party. The left is confused as to whether to regard DOGE’s efforts as part of a looming “constitutional crisis” and/or incipient fascist takeover or as, essentially, bullshit without much practical effect. Something big seems to be happening, but what?

Like the effects of the French Revolution, the definitive answer to that question won’t become clear until later. But here are two recent stabs at it that we thought we’d share.

DOGE is a tool for bringing the federal bureaucracy under the control of the president.

Here’s Richard Hanania in his essay “DOGE as a Control Mechanism of the Trump-Musk Co-Presidency”:

I don’t know if [strengthening and unifying the executive branch] was Musk’s plan, but efficiency and reducing spending serve as excuses for the top of the executive branch to shape the federal bureaucracy. Focusing on firing people and reducing the number of workers makes little sense as a priority if those are your goals, since any impact on the deficit will be minimal. In fact, putting workers on leave is a terrible way to improve efficiency, since you’re still paying them even though they’re not doing anything. But if you want to control executive branch employees, getting inconvenient workers out of the way, whether you are paying them or not, is an excellent method to achieve that end.

Set aside the idea that Musk is “co-president,” which is not true. The basic argument is that firing government workers minimally reduces the overall federal budget. Hanania quotes from an article in The Economist, which notes that of the government’s expected $7 trillion budget this year, nearly two-thirds is spent on mandatory expenditures like Social Security—which Trump has long promised to protect—and health insurance and 10% on interest payments. Only one-quarter is discretionary, and half of that is defense spending. Even if DOGE fired a quarter of the federal workforce, Hanania calculates, that would reduce the budget by only about 1%. The total elimination of USAID would save about the same.

What DOGE can do, however, is seek to avoid a rerun of Trump’s first term by ensuring that federal bureaucrats are sufficiently scared and/or motivated to follow the president’s orders. Writing of the late January retirement of David Lebryk, a career Treasury official who fought with DOGE over its access to Treasury payment systems, Hanania concludes, “Those who play ball keep their jobs, while those who object to DOGE’s mission are fired, placed on leave, or, as in this case, nudged into retirement.” Agencies likely to be implacably opposed to the president, meanwhile, can be shut down.

DOGE is the spearpoint of a blitzkrieg on rotten state infrastructure.

That’s military and media theorist John Robb’s theory, as laid out in a (paywalled) Monday Patreon post titled “Blitzing the Hollow State.” Hollow state is a Robbian term of art, initially coined to describe the Western response to the global financial crisis of 2007-08 (emphasis ours):

The hollow state has the trappings of a modern nation-state (“elected leaders,” membership in international organizations, regulations, laws, and a bureaucracy), but it lacks any of the legitimacy, services, and control of its historical counterpart. It is merely a shell that has some influence over the economy’s spoils. The real power rests in the hands of corporations, criminals, super-empowered individuals, and guerrillas (tribal networks) that vie with each other to control sectors of wealth production. For the rest of us, life goes on within a hollow state, but it is debased in myriad ways. The shift from a marginally functional nation-state to a hollow state occurs through a series of crisis events.
With each crisis, corporations and connected individuals systematically loot the nation-state of financial assets and natural resources in a series of insider/no-cost deals. These deals are made to "save" the nation from collapse. Meanwhile, guerrilla and criminal groups ruthlessly exploit the vacuum it creates.

In Robb’s telling, the hollow state cannot do anything to address the series of crises it faces but can only use the crises as further pretexts for “looting,” i.e., redirecting spoils to connected insiders (think: the Global War on Terror, the upward redistribution of wealth during the COVID-19 pandemic). This incapacity is a product of insiders’ inability or unwillingness to fix underlying rotten assumptions—which either are false or were once true but no longer apply to changed circumstances—because these assumptions are what protect and justify the insiders’ status and thus their access to spoils. Robb cites the example of USAID, which was built on the assumption that the United States needed a soft-power “development” organization to compete with Soviet influence in the Third World. That assumption died with the collapse of the USSR, at which point USAID money was simply redirected to insider causes.

What we are seeing with DOGE and the Trump administration more broadly, Robb writes, is the arrival of “networked governance”—i.e., the seizure of power by a guerilla “tribal network,” which is now making war on the establishment and its rotten assumptions by combining the techniques of “open-source insurgency” with the power of the U.S. executive branch. Here’s Robb again (emphasis ours):

The Red tribe has appointed many well-known people with powerful networked ledgers (‘truth tellers’ with large followings online and a history of challenging the establishment) to lead the fight, allowing the president to act as a facilitator (authority and executive orders). This decentralization of responsibility has created an open-source dynamic where each leader attacks rotten assumptions in different but complementary ways (from Elon’s DOGE to [Robert F.] Kennedy’s [Health and Human Services] to [Attorney General Pam] Bondi’s Justice [Department] to [Tom] Homan as Border Czar).

While that may be jargon-heavy, the key point is this: There is no master “plan,” but rather a distributed series of attacks all working toward roughly the same goal—that is, dethroning the establishment, discrediting its rotten assumptions, and disrupting its power centers. Trump provides the authority and the general direction, but the specific means are effectively crowdsourced, as various MAGA leaders (agency heads, influencers) experiment and iterate in real time and then copy what works.

Structurally, this makes the “Red tribe” significantly more agile than its opposition, which operates on the basis of traditional vertical authority and consensus. So we should expect to see Trump continue to score victories until the Democrats can innovate a response, perhaps by becoming more decentralized themselves. On the other hand, as Robb notes, discrediting the enemy’s assumptions is necessary but not sufficient for establishing a sustainable new form of governance. For that, you need “a new mechanism for adjudicating the efficacy of new assumptions, measuring their effectiveness over time, and assigning responsibility for failures.”

Or, to put that in plain English: At some point after the fire, one needs to rebuild.

Read Hanania’s essay here:

Richard Hanania's Newsletter

DOGE as a Control Mechanism of the Trump-Musk Co-Presidency

Ostensibly, the goal of DOGE is to cut government spending. Elon Musk asserts that it is eliminating $4 billion in spending a day. There appears to be no evidence for that claim, other than Elon fans putting up a clock that automatically records that number no matter what happens in the world…

4 months ago · 103 likes · 42 comments · Richard Hanania

Read Robb’s report here: https://www.patreon.com/c/johnrobb/posts

The Rest

→Hamas appeared to confirm Tuesday that Shiri Bibas and her two young children, Ariel and Kfir, taken captive on Oct. 7, are dead. In an announcement, a spokesman for the terror group said that Hamas would return the bodies of four Israeli hostages on Thursday as part of the ongoing cease-fire arrangement, and that “members of the Bibas family” would be among them. Hamas did not say whether all three members would be among the bodies, and Israeli authorities have neither confirmed the deaths of the Bibas family members nor identified the bodies to be returned—technically leaving open the slim possibility that one of them may be alive. Hamas also announced it was increasing the number of living hostages to be released this Saturday to six from the previously agreed upon three, apparently in exchange for Israel agreeing to allow temporary housing units and heavy machinery into Gaza, according to The New York Times.

→U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff met with a high-level Russian delegation in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday to discuss a “reset” of relations between the two powers. According to a State Department press release, the two sides agreed during the more than four-hour meeting—the first of its kind since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago—to “appoint high-level teams” to discuss ending the war and to “lay the groundwork for future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities.” Washington and Moscow also agreed to restore staffing levels at their respective embassies, according to Rubio’s remarks to the press. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who last week rejected a U.S. proposal that would have granted Washington a 50% stake in Ukraine’s mineral resources, expressed his displeasure with what he called the “surprise” meeting by postponing his own planned visit to Saudi Arabia, which had been scheduled for Wednesday. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, on the other hand, seemed pleased. “We weren’t just listening to each other, but we heard each other,” Lavrov said, as reported by The New York Times.

→The National Aeronautic and Space Administration said on Tuesday that a major asteroid, 2024 YR4, now has a 3.1% chance of colliding with Earth in 2032—the highest probability ever recorded. The estimated chances of an impact have been steadily rising over the past month, according to LiveScience.com. NASA raised the chance of impact from 1.3% to 2.3% on Feb. 7, then to 2.6% before raising it to its current level today. Previously, the highest impact probability ever recorded for an asteroid wider than 30 meters was 2.8%, in 2004. But don’t worry: While the 300-foot rock has about a 1-in-32 chance of slamming into Earth at 40,000 miles per hour, creating an explosion 500 times the size of the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, it won’t end human civilization. “This is not the dinosaur killer. This is not the planet killer. This is at most dangerous for a city,” Richard Moissl of the European Space Agency tells Agence France-Presse. So, you know. Keep paying your taxes.

For those curious, here’s a time-lapse projection of 2024 YR4’s projected orbit, cribbed from Wikipedia:

→Quote of the Day:

“I believe the USA is entirely over as the kind of political project that lends itself to your work,” wrote Mr. Mehlhorn, who will not be around to directly experience the consequences of Democrats’ defeat.
He has moved to Canada.

The direct quote comes from a January email to a “political list” sent by Dmitri Mehlhorn, a former Democratic donor adviser and ally of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman who briefly went viral over the summer for suggesting that the Trump assassination attempt was a false flag. The broader passage is from a Sunday article in The New York Times about how progressive megadonors have reduced their giving to the Democratic Party and liberal advocacy groups following Trump’s election. While Mehlhorn appears to be alone in both declaring the United States “over” and fleeing to Canada, the Times notes that others in the donor class have been hesitant to give freely due to a mixture of frustration with the Democratic Party, desire to curry favor with the new administration, and fear of retaliation, particularly if Congress passes legislation to remove the tax-exempt status of nonprofits found to be supporting terrorist organizations. Jeff Skoll, a Silicon Valley billionaire and friend of Elon Musk’s who has donated “tens of millions to Democratic candidates and causes,” told the paper that there was an “awful lot of pressure” among the ultra-wealthy to side with Trump. Skoll posted a picture of himself with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on X and told the Times that he’d recently lunched with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who floated the idea of using Skoll to “back-channel ideas to the president.”

Read the full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/us/politics/donors-democrats-trump.html

→One progressive billionaire who isn’t discouraged? Laurene Powell Jobs, owner of The Atlantic. According to a report from Semafor’s Maxwell Tani, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs offered the offices of her investment company, Emerson Collective, for a meeting last week among “Democratic operatives,” “activists,” and “left-leaning media members” to “discuss how the left’s well-funded digital media ecosystem failed in the 2024 election.” Sadly, the report is somewhat scarce on details about the private event; apparently, part of the point was to connect major donors with “some of the liberal media organizations that are positioning themselves as vessels to help liberals regain digital ground they’ve lost to the right,” but the only media organizations named are Courier Newsroom (an astroturf outfit funded by George Soros and Reid Hoffman, among others) and Crooked Media (home of Pod Save America). We’re curious if The Atlantic was on the list and, if so, whether the magazine’s postelection pivot from Trump = Hitler scoops to sex-party etiquette is part of a broader digital strategy for the 2026 midterms.

→New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Monday floated the idea of removing New York City Mayor Eric Adams from office—a power granted to the governor under the state constitution. In a Monday statement following the resignation of four of Adams’s top deputy mayors over allegations Adams had offered a quid pro quo to officials from the Trump Justice Department, Hochul said that “overturning the will of the voters is a serious step that should not be taken lightly” but that “the alleged conduct at City Hall that has been reported over the past two weeks is troubling and cannot be ignored.” Allies of the governor have indicated that she will wait until tomorrow’s hearing in federal court, where a judge will hear the DOJ’s case for why the corruption charges against Adams should be dropped. If she’s unsatisfied, she’ll have the option of serving Adams with charges—which has happened once in New York history, in 1932 under Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt—and then dismissing him. The only problem with doing that is that everybody knew Adams was corrupt back in 2021. But they voted for him anyway, since he was the only candidate to make the issue New Yorkers cared about—crime and public safety—the centerpiece of his campaign.

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