The DOGE days have just begun

I once wondered whether law enforcement might stop Elon Musk’s power grab. About a month ago, I got my answer: no.

On March 17th, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency broke into the nonprofit, congressionally funded US Institute for Peace, according to court documents filed by the USIP’s board of directors. By allegedly threatening to “cancel every federal contract” of a private security firm that had worked with USIP until a day earlier, they convinced it to let them into the building — where, told by institute staff they were trespassing, the fired security firm headed for the USIP gun safe. That’s when the USIP called the cops. The DC police arrived to escort DOGE into the building. USIP head of security Colin O’Brien, along with two of USIP’s lawyers, was detained.

Any reasonable reading of these court documents shows that a fired security firm broke into the offices of a nonprofit agency, under a dubiously legal executive order and what, as described, sounds like straightforward extortion. Police officers elected to help the people who were breaking and entering. USIP’s board of directors has sued DOGE and assorted other parties in Trump’s administration, but should the courts rule in its favor, it’s unclear who would enforce the ruling. Certainly not the brownshirts at the DC police department.

That’s hardly all. Let’s take a horrible trip through the last 100 days! DOGE destroyed USAID, leading to widespread devastation and dead children. It may have taken sensitive data from the National Labor Review Board. It’s infiltrated the US Treasury. It’s fired the people working on nukes — then struggled to rehire them; fired the people working on bird flu— then struggled to rehire them; suspended the TSA’s ability to buy food for its bomb-sniffing dogs; and has been dicking around inside the Department of Homeland Security.

The resulting uproar has given Musk cover to eviscerate the agencies that regulate his companies. DOGE targeted the EPA, which had been trying to crack down on Musk’s violations of the Clean Air Act. The NLRB, from which DOGE took data, had said Musk was union-busting. Musk wants to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would have overseen the digital payment offerings that he wants to bring to X (The Senate is trying to help Musk). NASA is being nudged into assisting SpaceX. The FDA staffers charged with reviewing Neuralink’s devices were fired by DOGE.

Musk has consolidated a great deal of power, a great deal of influence, and a tremendous hold over the government in just three months through DOGE, which is staffed with Musk’s dorky Herrs Knock. It’s stunning.

And yet, it turns out that there’s one thing that can bring these losers to their knees: mockery.

There are at least two major times DOGE was effectively repelled. One, a plan to shut down phone service helplines for Social Security recipients. The other is eliminating healthcare services in the Department of Veterans Affairs. Because while the police might help DOGE break and enter, no one has yet figured out how to get people to stop complaining.

Now, old people and veterans are core Republican blocs, and fairly well-represented to boot. DOGE also hasn’t stopped its attacks on Social Security. But DOGE’s sensitivity to criticism is bigger than that — and if other groups can organize and yell loudly enough, it might be possible to grind DOGE to a halt.

Take, for instance, DOGE’s “wall of receipts,” ostensibly a webpage listing the “waste, fraud, and abuse” DOGE has found and slashed. The numbers, astute visitors quickly pointed out, were often nonsense — for instance, cutting a contract worth $8 million at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and saying it was worth $8 billion. DOGE quietly deleted them — and the “wall of receipts” now lists a number of items that are described as “unavailable for legal reasons.”

As for those “legal reasons:” DOGE is flailing in court. DOGE has spawned lawsuits at a pace that would embarrass a pair of breeding rabbits. Is it actually a federal agency, subject to Freedom of Information Act requests? Can it really freeze Treasury payments? Is DOGE’s access to the sensitive information of millions of Americans even legal? On whose authority is it firing people, anyway?

Government lawyers were pretending they didn’t know who runs the service — we all can see Musk is in charge, but who are you going to believe, government lawyers or your lying eyes? Eventually, the government came up with a plausible-sounding fall gal: Amy Gleason, who found out she was in charge at basically the same time as the rest of us.

Defending against all those legal challenges is a significant drain on government resources and taxpayer money, as is firing people itself. It does give the game away, doesn’t it? The savings aren’t real. The goal is power — gathering as much sensitive personal information as possible, maybe even leaking it to our adversaries, and solidifying Musk’s central place in the Trump administration. But don’t say that out loud, or you’ll hurt those poor DOGE employees’ feelings.

The whole thing has been totally haphazard, which is why DOGE will back down in response to loud enough outcry. Take the plan for shifting all communication for the Social Security Administration to X. Shortly after Wired reported the communication shift, the Social Security Administration denied it on X (arguably not the strongest denial!); since then, there’s been no indication they’ve pursued the plan. Senator Tina Smith sums it up nicely: “So maybe this isn’t real, or it WAS real until a grownup found out about DOGE’s latest.”

Sure, they might be evil, but you can’t accuse DOGE of being competent. Machiavelli’s popularity among a certain segment of “dark triad” techbros notwithstanding, it appears no one at DOGE has read The Prince. Of note, in particular, are instructions for when you have obtained a state through wickedness: do all your crimes at once, and then move forward with governing. To continually enact outrages upon the citizenry is to render oneself unsafe.

DOGE’s resulting unrest has mostly hit Musk in the pocketbook and ego. Tesla’s shares — upon which much of Musk’s wealth is based — have nosedived, as have its sales, down 20 percent in the first quarter from the year before. Its net income sank 71 percent. Its dealerships are facing constant protests; individual drivers are complaining about how often they get flipped off. At this point the DC police — yeah, them again — have decided that anti-Musk graffiti is now a hate crime.

Now Musk, who is getting relentlessly cyberbullied for being bad at video games, is saying he’s going to step back because leftists are big meanieheads.

But he also said he was open to staying with DOGE for the whole Trump term. Previously, DOGE’s “expiration date” was July 4th, 2026. (Also, as a general rule, Musk says a lot of shit: remember the swappable batteries, or, more recently, full self-driving?) Since Musk bought the presidency, there’s no way he’s going to stop trying to meddle. He’ll just be less public in his interference, if only to spare Tesla, which is suffering for Musk’s sins.

DOGE has been enacting continued and repeated wrongs for sure — from attempting to dismantle multiple federal agencies, to carelessly creating remarkable security risks, to threatening to collapse the Social Security Administration through sheer incompetence, to marking living people as dead for funsies, to threatening the safety of the banking system. Far from saving Americans money, DOGE is charging $1.3 million that we know of so far, as well as commandeering a $500 million office building for free; they may also get the $20 million that used to belong to the Institute of Peace as their reward for their recklessness. Plus, of course, the cost of all the fucking lawsuits.

It also, however, has started setting its sights lower. Musk claims that DOGE will cut $150 billion this year, quite a drop from the $1 trillion he’d promised. One senses that number could be dropped further. DOGE’s actions, legal or not, are real until they aren’t. They’re real until people are mad. They’re real until Musk’s reputation takes a hit. Honestly, it is bizarre to see someone so thin-skinned who is also so allergic to doing anything that might be popular.

The Trump administration has started a larger public conversation about nonviolent public resistance. Even David Brooks, noted clueless centrist, has effectively called for a general strike. But it’s fascinating that even in this overwhelmingly doom-and-gloom climate that just being mean to Elon Musk and his acolytes is enough to make them back off.

The Institute for Peace has lost its $500 million headquarters to DOGE even as the lawsuits continue. Right now, the lawyers representing DOGE are requesting a summary judgment of the suit. Even if the USIP wins its legal battles, the damage is done — there and elsewhere. Relying on the courts to save us means continuing destruction. You’d need the modern equivalent of the New Deal to repair the wreckage.

This is tremendously instructive. Musk has a long history of ignoring the law, because the consequences for doing so have been minor. But he hates being yelled at. I don’t think audits will stop him, but the total destruction of the reputation he worked so hard to cultivate might. Most of us are in favor of “eliminating fraud and abuse,” as Musk puts it — and at this point, that means eliminating DOGE.