Our Best Stuff From the DOGE Days of Winter

Elon Musk takes Washington.

Elon Musk looks at his phone during the inauguration of Donald Trump at the Capitol in Washington, D.C, on January 20, 2025. (Photo by Kevn LaMarque/AFPGetty Images)

Published February 8, 2025

Hello and happy Saturday. A common refrain in our business, when we risk being consumed by the latest online outrage or dispute playing out on social media, is that “Twitter isn’t real life.” It serves as an important reminder that we in the media spend more time than we should online, and the dramas that play out there are often irrelevant to people in the “real world.” Rushing to respond to the latest controversial post by a public figure takes attention away from the national debt, our dysfunctional Congress, or any other significant cultural issue or policy challenge.

Well, Twitter isn’t even Twitter anymore, it’s X. That was just one of many changes Elon Musk made when he bought the platform in 2022. He laid off thousands of employees and changed its business model and content moderation policies. And now Musk, the wealthiest man in the world and the largest donor to Donald Trump in 2024, is applying the tactics he used to remake X to Washington, D.C., where he’s serving in the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Musk has effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), appointees aligned with him have taken over the Office of Personnel Management, and DOGE employees were granted access to sensitive information at the Treasury Department (though a federal judge issued a restraining order blocking that access today). And he’s still finding time to tweet, elevating conspiracy theories and attacking politicians he deems insufficiently loyal to Trump. As Michael Warren wrote Tuesday:

Musk’s DOGE foot soldiers are stomping their way into the bureaucracy to smash it up while Musk himself, in his role as President Donald Trump’s consigliere, continues to use his massive social media platform X to target perceived enemies, from Republican members of Congress to recalcitrant civil servants. And few in non-MAGA Washington—from Congress to K Street—seem to know what to make of Musk’s role. One Republican lobbyist described it succinctly: “Wild sh-t.”

The terminally online Musk is flexing his new power as a bruiser for Trump and the MAGA movement, fueled by the feedback Musk’s superfans feed him on his own platform. He then takes those half-baked or conspiratorial ideas that he can escalate to the widest possible audience with a tap of his fingers, which has become its own source of drama in Trump 2.0.

The purpose of DOGE is nominally to tackle our crippling debt and wasteful government spending, but in Boiling Frogs on Thursday, Nick Catoggio wrote that the nominal quest for fiscal responsibility is just a cover: “DOGE isn’t a fiscal project,” he writes “It’s an ideological project. And from that standpoint, it’s been pretty successful.”

Nick demonstrated how Musk used X to elevate disinformation about USAID, claiming that the agency had “funded” the media outlet Politico to the tune of $8 million. It hadn’t, and the truth is much more complicated than the simple false claim. The money wasn’t a handout and very little of it came from USAID. Government agencies including the departments of Health and Human Services, the Interior, and Energy (not to mention the offices of a bunch of House Republicans) had paid for subscriptions to Politico Pro, which offers some editorial content but also is an “advanced technology platform that includes legislative and regulatory tracking tools, government directories, transcripts, outreach trackers and more.” Nick wrote:

“If … you’re focused on penny-ante Politico, what you’re actually doing is exploiting a universally appealing aspiration like ‘fiscal responsibility’ as a pretext to justify carrying out ideological purges of your cultural enemies. Elon and his populist admirers don’t care about balancing the budget; it’s a mathematical impossibility absent cuts to entitlements, as I’ve said, and it’s out of sync with big-government nationalist priorities. What they care about is demagoging and ultimately defunding any entity that might impede the postliberal cultural agenda.”

As I mentioned above, a judge issued a restraining order against DOGE access to sensitive information. Another judge put the brakes on the Trump administration’s sweeping deferred resignation program for federal employees, and other moves by DOGE and the Trump administration face legal challenges.

While it feels like Twitter is indeed becoming real life, there’s still a whole big world out there. We’ll be doing our best to keep up with both. Have a great weekend, and thanks for reading.

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The State Department’s New China Schizophrenia

John McCormack

“It was strange and surprising … that the same week Rubio the China hawk was heralding a diplomatic win over our chief adversary, Darren Beattie was named acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Beattie is an all-around crank who was fired in 2018 from his job as a White House speechwriter in the first Trump administration after revelations he had spoken at a conference attended by white nationalists. Since then, Beattie has promoted wild January 6 conspiracy theories about government officials planting pipe bombs and has viciously insulted Rubio’s former Senate colleagues with race-baiting and gay-baiting tweets. But perhaps what made the appointment most shocking of all is that the man named to a senior diplomatic post—whose primary mission is advocacy—has spent the past several years arguing that life in America is worse than life under the yoke of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”

The Democrats’ Dilemma

Jonah Goldberg

“Let’s assume a whole generation of Democratic and progressive activists, academics, and journalists can wean themselves of wokeism. That’s a Herculean task for people trained to speak in the language and shibboleths of intersectionality. It’s what they know. It’s their comparative advantage. It’s what got them jobs and tenure. But let’s assume they can do it. What’s their new theory of the case? What’s their new categorical imperative, their ideological framework, that they can pitch to American voters? It’s not nationalism. That’s taken. It’s not really patriotism either. That would require a wholesale reorientation toward the founding, the Constitution, and a rejection of all sorts of narratives that define progressivism. I’m not saying that progressives are unpatriotic, by the way, I’m saying that the deep language of patriotism is a dialect that requires practice. It’s not socialism. The only thing I can think of is a return to the old-style FDR-LBJ party of government approach.”

Born Against

Kevin D. Williamson

In spite of its evangelical and at times apocalyptic character, American conservatism is not so much born again as born against. Whereas most national traditions of conservatism have been directed at the maintenance of the social consensus and its major organs—think of the British Tories and the monarchy—American conservatism was born at the end of World War II and has made a career out of opposition to the status quo: It is, in that sense, the baby boomer of political movements.

And here’s the best of the rest: