Speed Up the Breakdown

For the last month, the US opinion-making class has stared agog as Elon Musk and his minions have stormed the engine room of the federal government. Young men with smirking profile photos and scandalously thin curriculum vitae have become the shock troops of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). They are strolling through the halls of power, messaging federal staffers en masse to stay home and accessing internal intelligence reports. According to Wired’s reporting, one DOGE staffer who later resigned over his racist social media posts had both read and write access to the Treasury’s payment systems for at least a day. Three years ago, as a sixteen-year old intern, another had been fired by a data-security firm for allegedly leaking information to a competitor. Like the QAnon Shaman at the senate rostrum on January 6, this is Grand Guignol, a spectacle both serious and ridiculous. For the second time in five years, people are forced to ask: can you cosplay a coup?

Buffaloed onlookers have groped for precedent. The tech critic Cory Doctorow has described these men as “broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts,” fighting enemy institutions as a sort of Tesla Jugend. The sociologist Ho-Fung Hung suggested they were Red Guards of a Great Github Cultural Revolution, storming the headquarters and confronting the party in the name of a purer reading of the master’s texts. The economist J.W. Mason compared their actions to the dismemberment of the former Soviet state in the 1990s—private looting under foreign supervision. Musk himself referenced a beloved far-right meme when he posted that “not many Spartans are needed to win battles.”

None of the analogies are very persuasive. This is because we are witnessing something new: the convergence of three strains of politics that have never simultaneously been this proximate to power. Those projects come from different but related places: the Wall Street–Silicon Valley nexus of distressed debt and startup culture; anti–New Deal conservative think tanks; and the extremely online world of anarchocapitalism and right-wing accelerationism. Within the new administration, each strain is striving to realize its desired outcome. The first wants a sleek state that narrowly seeks to maximize returns on investment; the second a shackled state unable to promote social justice; and the third, most dramatically, a shattered state that cedes governing authority to competing projects of decentralized private rule. We are watching how well they can collaborate to reinforce one another. The future condition of the government—and by extension the country—depends on how far the dynamo spins.

The clearest precedent for what is happening today in Washington is what happened in Twitter’s headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco two and a half years ago. When Musk was compelled to turn what had likely been a gag into a large and cumbersome business acquisition, he walked into the lobby of the social media company carrying a sink—a dad joke about how they ought to “let that sink in.” Multiple books have been written about what followed. The short version is that he laid off most of the platform’s employees, leading to prognostications of its imminent collapse. He scaled back content moderation in a way that greatly increased the amount of hate speech on the platform, monetized the algorithm into a subscription model, opened the floodgates to pornbots, and generally frightened away a large number of crucial advertisers. And yet the scroll never stopped. Twitter didn’t go dark.

The Twitter deal—bad business on paper—both contaminated a site of (already often contentious) public conversation and gave Musk a megaphone for his own political positions ahead of the election. Though the company’s value sharply declined, it also added to the mercenary mystique that Musk had built up over the past decade by managing at least a half dozen businesses under the principle that you can keep services running even as you “delete” (his favorite word) many of the humans involved. 

Versions of this practice—known as “rightsizing”—have been standard in American capitalism for some time now. It involves acquiring a business, then stripping out and selling all its valuable parts, including real estate and intellectual property, so that it runs at minimum capacity. The 1980s, when Donald Trump made his name, were the high point of such corporate mergers, leveraged buyouts, and hostile takeovers. Private equity took off at this time too. When he was mulling a first run for president in 1987, Trump told Larry King that if the US “were a corporation, it would be bankrupt.” “If a company or a country ever ran the way the United States is running,” he said in another interview the same year, “forget it.”

The first Trump cabinet featured veterans of the distressed debt sector, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross—who was dubbed the “King of Bankruptcy” by Fortune Magazine—and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. This time around, the second in command at the Pentagon is billionaire Steve Feinberg, cofounder of the top private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. Bill Pulte, whose private equity firm invests in housing and development, has been nominated as top housing regulator. Departing FTC head Lina Khan warned of private equity running wild in a new Trump term, pursuing “roll-ups” and “strip and flips” in the health care sector, leading to “worse quality care and higher prices.”

Musk’s hirelings by these lights are less latter-day squadristi than radicalized management consultants. Instead of brickbats and lugers, they wield red pens to mark layoffs and offload inventory. We can take Musk at his word when he said in 2021 that the government is a corporation, but a special one that has a monopoly on violence and cannot go bankrupt. If, as he has claimed, private actors are better at allocating resources than public ones, it stands to reason that a state should be shorn of redundant staff and services. 

One could stop here and conclude that Musk simply wants to turn the government from being an exceptionally bad corporation to one that is marginally less bad—a managerial dictatorship, but a temporary one. This is the version of the story that convinced Democratic lawmakers and financial columnists, who have long promoted the analogy between citizens and consumers, that DOGE could be a good idea. “Streamlining government processes and reducing ineffective government spending should not be a partisan issue,” announced Congressman Jared Moskovitz (D-FL) when he joined the DOGE caucus in December. “If Doge can actually unleash digital reform in the US government, and in a non-corrupt manner, that would be an unambiguously good thing,” Gillian Tett wrote last month in the Financial Times. This model is also consonant with the Singaporesque sovereign wealth fund announced last week, and with the federal backstop announced two weeks ago for enormous AI infrastructure funds like the Stargate Project, involving OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. Musk would attack the state to save it.

The second way to understand the DOGEstorm is not through Musk but rather through the more systematic approach of Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose operations he ground to a halt this past weekend, firing dozens. The founder of a right-wing Christian think tank called the Center for Renewing America, Vought wrote the chapter on executive power in Project 2025—a composite effort by stars of the think tank firmament like the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, and the Pacific Research Institute, along with newer entities like Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA, and the CRA. Vought and his coauthors see the state as a terrain of struggle dominated by leftists. They believe that the modern US government has been coopted by the left to secure what he calls its “cultural reign thru [sic] the bureaucracy” and “a regime weaponized against their enemies [to] keep the dollars flowing.” 

To the conservative think tankers, the hypertrophy of public demands since the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the 1960s has amounted to what Vought calls a “quiet revolution” dividing federal revenues among social groups through entitlement programs, affirmative action, and all manner of special pleading. The state is crawling with nonproductive special interests: liberal elites, minority rights advocates, undocumented immigrants and their allies, all animated by the desire to sustain themselves without effort of their own. The government has transformed into a monstrosity that exsanguinates private entrepreneurial wealth and enthrones a managerial class devoted to secular deracinated homogeneity. Vought has said that America is in the “late stages of a complete Marxist takeover” that needs to be reversed aggressively by putting government employees “in trauma,” treating them as “villains,” and sending “power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.” Trans rights are a particular trigger: Vought has denounced the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions.”

Data scientists are ringing alarm bells about potentially irreversible damage to federal databases. If the think tankers have their way, the state will no longer be able to collect information and allocate tax dollars to socially desirable goals. Their notion of an ideal government is not a streamlined complement to the private sector. Rather it is a Leviathan in chains, restrained from fully responding to the demands of its populace. A balanced budget amendment becomes obsolete if you fire career employees, nuke institutional memory, and wipe their hard drives. Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk (2018), about the necessity of anonymous unglamorous civil servants, could, it turns out, be read in reverse as a cookbook.

The point, as Steve Bannon has stressed for years, is to deconstruct the administrative state, leaving in its place a government that rules intensively but not extensively. This project has had a fairly stable intellectual lineage, from the philosopher James Burnham through the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist to the political scientist Mancur Olson, who in the 1990s described the state as a stationary bandit, taxing a population for its own enrichment and providing stability and protection in exchange. (Musk is also inspired by this fear of the ever-expanding state. He frequently reposts Milton Friedman memes, makes alarmist statements about the federal debt, and claims that rules and regulations harden “the arteries of civilization”—a metaphor drawn straight from Olson, who invoked “sclerosis” to describe the way democracies erode economic freedom.) It has continued through Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, the duo who designed Trump’s tax cut in 2017, and up to the present administration.

The third program that underpins the present moment is often described as a project of right-wing accelerationism. That term is usually associated with Curtis Yarvin, the former computer programmer and amateur poet who was graced with a long interview in The New York Times just after the election (His idea of RAGE—Retire All Government Employees—looks a lot like that of DOGE). Characters like him and the British philosopher Nick Land are freefloating intellectuals without institutional bases beyond their episodic newsletters, articles, and blogs. Yarvin has questioned his own influence, suggesting that his ideas make their way into the Republican ecosystem through staffers who swim in a “very online soup.” Yet even if their direct impact cannot be tracked in a simple flow chart, their work more accurately captures the tech right’s spirit than Burnhamite conservatism, C-suite vampirism, or the Jesus-dipped language of millenarian struggle. 

What do they see? Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet. Yarvin expressed the essence of the worldview recently when he enthused over Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and rebuild it as a US-backed colony securitized as an asset and sold to investors—as he called it, “the first charter city backed by US legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock symbol: GAZA.”

Accelerationists do not want merely to make government more efficient, nor simply to prevent it from pursuing redistribution or propagating progressive values. “Speed up the breakdown” is the mantra. Their objective is not to tame or starve the beast but to kill it. Adherents to this extreme ideology are obviously a minority, and it’s not clear at all that Musk himself shares it, let alone Trump. But even if they don’t, DOGE’s actions are helping to unsettle the division between public and private authority. Libertarians have long seen gated communities as laboratories of private government and reminisced about the law and order of the supposedly stateless Western frontier. Musk’s move to reboot the company town by incorporating Starbase, Texas could be seen as a first step toward a world where private actors make laws and jurisdictions that fit their personal needs. 

Will Greenland, Panama, and perhaps even Canada become new hinterlands for fortified outposts and experiments in private law and private investment? Trump’s ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery, is a member of the “PayPal Mafia”: he and Peter Thiel cofounded both the payments system and the venture capital firm Founders Fund, and he was reportedly drawn to the position because of the prospect of the Greenland acquisition. “Help America gain Greenland,” Musk posted when Howery was appointed. As industry insiders have pointed out, Palantir’s recent partnership with Voyager Space suggests that polar ground stations could make the Arctic more important for commercial satellite downlinks.

In the paradigm of empire-by-contractor, the state grants concessions to mining or satellite enterprises. This would be a throwback to the nineteenth century, when the freebooter William Walker invaded Honduras, The Englishman James Brooke became the “Raj of Sarawak,” and, as Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has described, the Michigander John Munro Longyear staked out a patch of Arctic and fashioned himself as the “King of Spitsbergen” in what is now Svalbard. “Countrypreneurship” already has a foothold in the private enclave of Próspera in Honduras. The former Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan has sketched blueprints of “the Network State” for his 1.1 million followers on X, describing “startup societies” as opt-in collectives with votes defined by share size and CEOs as leaders. He has praised Trump’s early executive orders as “a fusillade of legal cruise missiles” that were “meticulously planned to strike every single source of blue power, simultaneously, both in the US and abroad.” 

US state sovereignty will be eroded to some degree by the time the dust settles on Silicon Valley Leninism and the computers of the bureaucracy boot up to a blank screen. This prospect will rightfully concern those who believe in constitutional constraints and the need for a state that does more than fund weapon systems, finance AI data centers, and cut paychecks for border police. For sympathetic observers, however, the goings-on in Washington are inspiring the same exhilaration that the anarchocapitalist economist Murray Rothbard felt when he watched the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was, he said, “a particularly wonderful thing to see unfolding before our very eyes, the death of a state.”