Donald Trump has changed politics with his shock-and-awe assault on the administrative state, led by Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (DOGE).
The misnamed department, in reality a presidential taskforce, has barged into the US Treasury, seized control of the federal payment system and gone through spending items line by line, shutting down entire agencies despite lacking clear legal powers to do so. You would need to be dead inside not to find this an exciting revolutionary act, for good or ill – a storming of the bureaucratic Bastille.
By defunding USAID, the agency for international development, Musk’s young team has ensured its actions will reverberate around the world, our own corner included.
The US government has provided about half the income of the International Fund for Ireland, which has spent almost €1 billion since it was established in 1986. The fund has recently been under fire for providing more than €1 million to organisations and events involving convicted loyalist Winston Irvine. This included a peace conference he addressed while on bail over an arms find.
Most people in Northern Ireland have been through a decades-long cycle of hope, resignation and despair over these peace process absurdities. Initiatives that were meant to remove paramilitary influence from society have instead entrenched it by creating codependent networks of criminals, NGOs and public bodies. Stormont and other agencies have responded with ever-more elaborate strategies to “transition” paramilitaries towards lawfulness, but this only further entrenches the problem. It seems intractable, interminable, a complex fact of political life – until someone in Washington suddenly cuts off the money. Could the answer be that simple? Perhaps not, but the possibility has been demonstrated and the general question has been raised. How far could this revolution go?
DOGE is underpinned by radical political thinking. Its treasury takeover is not just about saving money – it is quite openly a decapitation strike against the liberal left and its Gramscian presumption that it can march into institutions and nobody will ever march it out again. However, trying to cut bureaucracies down to size is an utterly mainstream cause, where radicalism can arise from understandable frustration.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan established a commission with a similar remit to DOGE. It reached a similar conclusion: the federal budget could be cut by a third by eliminating waste and inefficiency. Almost none of its 2,500 recommendations were implemented. Musk is determined to avoid the same fate.
Going through spending items line by line is zero-based budgeting, a mundane business management technique and occasionally a fashionable idea to restrain public sector bloat. It involves justifying everything from scratch at the start of each year or accounting period, rather than continuing where the previous year left off. Zero-based budgeting falls out of fashion once it is realised it would require many more administrators, making bloat worse. It is not a practical annual exercise for the whole of government. Nevertheless, DOGE’s one-off guerrilla audit has taken the concept from theory to attempted practice. It makes similar resets thinkable as an occasional exercise, or as a promise from every new government.
When all else seems to fail, shutting down entire departments enters mainstream debate. Argentinian president Javier Milei has made this appear rather eccentric, albeit doable. But as Musk has pointed out, Reagan campaigned for the presidency in 1980 by promising to abolish the then newly-created department of education. He left office with the department larger than ever. Trump has made the same pledge and intends to act swiftly.
In England, closing the department of education became a popular cause among right-wing commentators in the 1990s. This was seen as the only way to reverse its capture by the left. Conservative MP Michael Gove took the opposite approach when he became education secretary in 2010, confronting what he called “the blob” inside the department. His reforms moved England’s school system up the international rankings but this was a rare success, and the blob reasserted itself after he moved on.
Frustration with immigration is increasingly leading to calls to abolish the UK home office. “Just start again with a new department of immigration, staffed by people who believe in the cause of sovereign independence,” Reform leader Richard Tice said in 2023. He has since become deputy leader to Nigel Farage, while Reform has topped several opinion polls.
Established parties around the world are under growing pressure to offer DOGE-type action. Australian opposition leader Peter Dutton, who is expected to become prime minister in May, is the most clearly inspired by Musk, so far.
When people see the political system is not responding to their democratic wishes, they will naturally welcome promises to sweep parts of the system away. Trump has transformed expectations of what can be done, even if his administration ultimately fails to deliver it.
