Rule by Contractor: DOGE is not about waste and efficiency--it's about privatization.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/power/2025-04-03-rule-by-contractor-doge-privatization/



Elon Musk spent more than $290 million on last year’s elections, most of which benefited the candidacy of President Donald Trump. The world’s richest man was richly rewarded for his support: a position as presidential adviser and the de facto head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

DOGE has been marketed as an organization aimed at cutting wasteful spending and increasing government efficiency, but it has quickly become apparent that this is not its primary function. Instead, DOGE has spent the first weeks of Trump’s second presidential term haphazardly dismantling the civil service, politically targeting spending that Musk and Trump dislike, centralizing decision-making power in the White House, and causing major disruptions to government operations that will decrease their overall efficiency. Still, one important aspect of this strategy has gone largely unexamined: the elevation of government contractors like Musk into government policymakers.

Musk has acquired much of his tremendous wealth from the government he is now dismantling. Tesla Motors relied on significant support from the Department of Energy, which was criticized as government waste by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. SpaceX continues to receive billions of dollars each year in contract awards from NASA and the Defense Department, representing one of the company’s largest streams of income. Overall, Musk’s business ventures have benefited from more than $38 billion in government support, not including a new contract from the Federal Aviation Administration to upgrade its information technology systems.

To hear Musk describe it, he is part of the solution, not the problem. He has argued that “there’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the … president and the Cabinet,” and thus that there is a need for a “thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.” In this understanding, Musk is not a money-motivated billionaire riddled with conflicts of interest, but rather a selfless entrepreneur bringing private-sector efficiency to a sclerotic, wasteful government and “the Parasite Class” that depends on it.



snip

[Easterncedar]

1. It's not just here

Brexit broke Britain and the Royal Mail has just been sold to a Czech billionaire.

The rich are eating everything.

[malaise]

2. Ding ding

Rec

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. Kick!