Why DOGE Failed
by Andy Smarick
For many Gen Xers, the greatest Saturday Night Live sketch of all time is “Sprockets,” a recurring piece in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It made genius use of our vague notions about the bleakness of German popular culture during the twilight of the Cold War. The sketch had black turtlenecks, celebrations of the macabre, and an inexplicable pet monkey. I remember reading that one of the sketch’s writers had never seen German television, but Sprockets is what he imagined it was like.
And that confident ignorance is what made it. None of us knew a lick about German television. Our sense of it was based on fragments of actual information stitched together by uncharitable speculation. The result was classic parody: Take something real, grossly simplify most of it, and ludicrously exaggerate the rest.
It’s time to admit that DOGE was the “Sprockets” of government reform. Elon Musk seemed genuinely enthusiastic about cutting government, but he didn’t know a lick about governing. He took bits of information, added some uncharitable speculation, and created a caricature of policy and public leadership. In the end, what he offered America was comic theatre. Sadly, too many conservatives gleefully tuned in, thinking this farce was real.
We will miss the most important lessons from DOGE if we look at it as a clumsily executed effort at cost-cutting. Instead, we must understand it as simply the latest failure of technocracy—another instance of the high price we pay for trusting supposed technical experts to do the work of republican governing. As I’ve written, there are two kinds of technocrats. The better-known variety comes from the left. They claim expertise because of their elite schooling and smarts. They promise to apply “scientific” methods and dispassionate judgment to make government rational and efficient. They almost always seek a larger role for this newly sensible, streamlined government; under their care, they believe, the wise state can expertly manage schools, the economy, social services, housing, and so on.
The less-discussed variety comes from the right. These technocrats typically claim expertise due to their private-sector chops. They’ve been consultants or run businesses. They are sure their organizational expertise, strong backbones, and agility with numbers can whip the government into shape.
All too often, what unites the two is confident ignorance. Neither type really knows anything about governing. They’ve generally never served in any meaningful governing capacity before, and they are unaware of most of the history, rules, and duties of the entities they presume to fix. When made aware of such things, they routinely dismiss them as hindrances. If pressed, both types of technocrats will betray skepticism about democratic decision-making and the habits, practices, and mindsets that generally go along with it (like humility, incrementalism, accommodation, and compromise). Technocrats believe they know best; that process stuff merely gums up the works. In sum, they lack practical wisdom in governing—the knowledge and disposition that come from years of time on task and accountability for results. Worse, they often believe their inexperience is a virtue—they have fresh eyes, they haven’t been corrupted, etc.
The life cycle of technocrats, whether from the right or left, is well documented. They enter with self-assurance and titanic promises. They bring along a cadre of like-minded (and like-limited) supporters to execute the plan. They swiftly alienate people. Others quickly see the technocrats’ shortcomings. But the technocrat perseveres, unwinding old ways and chalking up the growing opposition to others’ inadequate vision and skills. Results disappoint. Dysfunction grows. Eventually, the technocrats retreat, muttering that they would’ve succeeded but for the recalcitrance of the system.
That pattern was on full display during the rise and fall of DOGE. Elon Musk knew virtually nothing about governing, our system, its institutions, its history, or its practices. Like the Sprockets’ writer with German television, he had a vague sense of what it was based on snippets of information, and then he filled in the vast gaps with uncharitable speculation: It’s all waste and abuse. Bureaucrats don’t do real work. These jobs and tasks are meaningless. Civil service rules can be ignored. And so Musk applied the right-technocrat’s playbook. “I know business. I know numbers. I have backbone,” he may have said. “I’ll cut and fire and whip this behemoth into shape.”
It should have been obvious from the start that this wouldn’t end well, that DOGE would suffer the fate of other high-modernist initiatives. I predicted this repeatedly. In fact, my biggest surprise early on was that so many conservatives believed Musk and DOGE were a godsend. Of course, we should reduce the power and reach of Uncle Sam, I thought, but that won’t happen via a hastily assembled, short-term project led by someone whose only meaningful experience with government was getting contracts. Moreover, Musk’s experience downsizing X—reducing a social-media company’s workforce by a few thousand people—wasn’t exactly a cognate of overhauling the federal government’s roughly $7 trillion budget and 3 million-strong workforce. But many on the right bought in fast. Maybe it was their longstanding anger about big government, or maybe it was their sense that this moment called for a congenital disruptor. Whatever the explanation, DOGE fever suppressed conservatives’ natural skepticism and prudence and rendered them unusually susceptible to a charlatan’s pitch.
Under Musk’s guidance, DOGE demonstrated just how similar left- and right-technocracy are in practice. Left-technocrats have long seen government reform as a technical enterprise: Progressive Era “experts” believed they were utilizing scientific management; Great Society-era figures believed the principles of engineering could solve stubborn social challenges; Obama-era nudgers had great faith in the “scientific” benefits behavioral economics would bring to policy. Similarly, Musk’s DOGE team was chock-full of engineers, and they had great faith in AI’s ability to identify and drive needed reforms.
Left-technocrats—from Progressive Era “best men” to Kennedy-Johnson Era “best and brightest” to today’s administrative-state experts—have wanted to replace politics and politicians with tough-minded rationalism. Similarly, Musk repeatedly warred with the political leaders in Congress and the cabinet who had different priorities than DOGE’s algorithms.
But the most striking commonality is the lack of experience or even interest in republican government. Left-technocrats typically enter public service from foundations or academia. They’ve viewed electoral politics as messy, even unseemly. Speaker Sam Rayburn’s famous exasperation at the ostensible whizzes surrounding President Kennedy speaks volumes: “I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” It was the same with DOGE. Musk, himself astonishingly inexperienced in governing, filled DOGE with employees from his various tech companies and initiatives. These young whizzes brought experience in AI, start-ups, and finance, but none from the world of governing. Ultimately, DOGE’s senior leadership, empowered to rework key governing institutions, had no experience in key governing institutions.
Given all of this, it should have come as no surprise that DOGE would flounder. Very quickly, Musk crossed swords with several members of the cabinet—that is, those who knew something about their agencies and were ultimately responsible for that work. The president soon had to side with his secretaries and direct his chief of staff to better manage Musk. None of this, however, stopped DOGE from making a raft of ill-considered, even dangerous, cuts. A partial list includes air traffic controllers, NOAA scientists, staff at national parks, nuclear safety workers, and cybersecurity officials. Such decisions were so ineptly implemented that DOGE had to rehire dismissed workers several times, and the courts had to stop DOGE from abusing its authority.
But most damning is DOGE’s failure to accomplish what Musk promised: Unprecedented reductions in federal spending. He began by claiming that $2 trillion would be cut. This was laughable to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the federal budget: That figure would require Congress to decimate entitlement programs and defense spending. Indeed, Musk soon had to back down from those claims. But that came after repeated dubious claims about reductions and an error-riddled website. It’s still not clear how much DOGE actually saved. And contrary to the hope that this effort would shock Washington into a new era of parsimony, Musk’s blow-up with Trump about the “big beautiful bill” demonstrated that Uncle Sam will continue to spend to the hilt.
DOGE demonstrated just how similar left- and right-technocracy are in practice.
There is, however, one noticeable difference between DOGE and past left-technocratic efforts. Those progressive engineers may have been smug, but at least they were sober-minded. They were generally the humorless, green-eyeshade type. They saw their project as technical, often giving the impression that politics and publicity were beneath the work. DOGE, however, from the very start, had a juvenile air about it. Not only was it full of very junior staff—recall the 19-year-old “Big Balls”—Musk himself engaged in petty name-calling, went teenage goth with “dark MAGA,” wielded a chainsaw for laughs, and bounced around childlike on stage during a political rally. His reported drug use is undisciplined at best. Even President Trump, seldom the most measured person in the room, privately described Musk as “50% genius, 50% boy.”
As we seem to close the book on DOGE, it’s worth asking why Trump chose someone so unqualified to run such an important operation. If the President really wanted to reduce spending and streamline the federal workforce, he could have selected a host of experienced people who knew how to get the job done: for example, steely-eyed former directors of the Office of Management and Budget who’ve worked on these issues or scholars at Cato who’ve studied this for ages. They would have understood what to cut, what not to cut, how to avoid lawsuits, how to work with cabinet secretaries, how to draft rule changes for agencies, how to work with congressional appropriators on future rescissions, and much more. Why would President Trump go with Musk instead of one of these experienced hands who knows policy and governing?
For the same reason that Saturday Night Live didn’t hire someone who actually knew about German culture and entertainment to write “Sprockets.”
That wouldn’t have made for good television.
