The Department of Government Efficiency – The Reign of the Billionaires

When you hear the boss saying “efficiency,” it means we need to watch our necks! So when Trump announced the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” it’s no different.

When Trump announced the creation of DOGE, he said it “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” This means eliminating a huge section of the federal workforce through mass layoffs and slashing almost all corporate regulations along with many critical social services.

Along with its equally evil twin – Project 2025 – it's part of the developing plan to dramatically restructure, canabalize, and ultimately dismantle much of the federal government. Despite their attempts to appeal to working people with this plan, this isn’t about Trump saving our tax dollars from going to wasteful government spending or combating state corruption. It’s the billionaires attempting to fully take the reins of the federal government.

They’re even calling it this century’s “Manhattan project” – the WWII government initiative to create the first atomic bombs – and basically it aims to be just as destructive. They have promised to cut $2 trillion dollars out of the $6 trillion dollar budget. This has raised major questions about where those cuts will come or if this would even ultimately be possible.

Who’s at the helm?

Who has Trump called on to lead this effort? He’s appointed two billionaire cartoon villains to take the helm – Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Musk – the world’s richest man and #1 parasite – has just bought himself a president. He spent nearly $280 million on Trump's campaign and immediately after the election Musk got $70 billion richer. Now he’s going to be playing a direct role in the federal government – the same government that has provided nearly $20 billion in contracts over the last 16 years to his companies, SpaceX and Tesla, and the same government that is supposed to ensure companies like his don’t break the law. There couldn’t be a more textbook example of a conflict of interest.

Then there’s Ramaswamy – another tech billionaire. Formerly a political rival of Trump’s, Ramaswamy jumped fully on the MAGA bandwagon to become a Trump cheerleader after dropping out of the Republican primaries. He made his money as a pharma CEO and finance capitalist. He’s especially made a name for himself by recently appealing to billionaires like Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman who want to use their position as shareholders to pressure companies to drop “woke” policies. Somehow in their minds even finance capitalists are just too progressive. Ramaswamy is so anti-democratic that he’s said he wants to raise the voting age from 18 to 25 – which would disenfranchise nearly 10% of the total electorate and the most progressive block of voters.

Essentially, Musk and Ramaswamy are here to rep the billionaires who think society has “gone too far.” Usually the country’s wealthiest prefer to stay out of the spotlight and pull the strings of their bought-and-sold politicians, so it’s surprising to have two billionaires front and center to nakedly pursue their agenda.

The billionaires’ agenda

Simply put, they want to make sure the government is never able to challenge corporate power. And this isn’t just out of some ideological commitment to “small government” or in any way to help the average working family. It’s in direct service to their interests alone. They want to make sure that they never need to worry about the government checking them in the name of public interests, so that their companies can freely exploit workers, pollute our communities, and conduct their shady business however they please. Essentially, they’re aiming to make sure that the law only works for them and they operate above it. And of course they’ll always take another tax break.

To make that happen, the right-wing will aim to roll back every progressive victory of people’s movements from the last century, including the victories of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the LGBTQ movement, and anyone else who has stood against oppression and exploitation of working people.

It’s the same billionaire agenda behind the many recent Supreme Court decisions by an increasingly right-wing court. Many of the judges have been hand-picked by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation – which is the same group behind Project 2025.

The court has been breaking down any role of the federal government – like ending federal protections for abortion access, disempowering the Environmental Protection Agency, undoing key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, undermining anti-discrimination laws, and gutting any oversight of Wall Street. Each of these steps has left workers with less protection for our rights, while leaving corporations and capital with more freedom to act with impunity.

Setting a deadline of July 4th, 2026 – the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – Musk and Ramaswamy say they want to “deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.” Since the vast majority of the “Founding Fathers” built their wealth on land theft, slavery, and exploitation – we should take them at their word that they hope to return to a time when only wealthy white men had any rights the government was bound to respect.

Cuts for the people, plunder for the rich

They try to mask this agenda by saying it’s all about “fiscally responsible government” and ending wasteful and corrupt state spending. But when you look at what’s on the chopping block, it’s clear who is going to feel these cuts. Initially, they are targeting an initial $500 billion of federal spending – including programs like housing assistance, Pell grants for low-income college students, affordable childcare, food stamps, Planned Parenthood, and even veteran’s healthcare. They’re even considering cutting funding from near universally popular programs, like social security.

For all their talk of “small government,” no one benefits more from government spending and “state welfare” than corporations and billionaires, who get propped up by endless government spending. Musk is one of the largest recipients of government spending with all sorts of subsidies, tax breaks, and just straight up handouts to him and his businesses.

Musk is no anomaly though. In fact, almost all billionaires pay a lower tax rate than teachers and retail workers, with some of the richest paying almost nothing at all. And these giant corporations themselves typically pay a lower tax rate than most working families. That’s all money that should pay for our schools, housing, and healthcare!

Of course, we’ll also never hear them mention how the Pentagon just failed its 7th consecutive audit of the defense budget. Tens of billions of dollars of defense spending is literally impossible to track down, and it ends up making the weapons manufacturers and war profiteers filthy rich. Estimates suggest that nearly one third to one half of the entire military budget goes directly to arms manufacturers who will upcharge and price gouge knowing they can.

At the same time, the wealthy know they can count on the government to get bailed out too. Whenever the rich make bad bets we all pay the price for it. Like when the rich crashed the economy in 2001, 2008, and 2020. With the Great Recession in 2008, working people across the US faced immense hardship for years – with nearly 9 million jobs lost, a $16 trillion drop in household wealth, and a sharp rise in poverty.

Meanwhile, the rich got a golden parachute paid for by taxpayers and many even came out richer than before. Then during the pandemic working people either lost their jobs completely or risked their lives on the frontline to keep the economy functioning while trying to stay above the rising tide of record inflation. Meanwhile, America’s billionaires saw their wealth increase by 70%, profiting from everyone else’s suffering. They got bailed out. We got sold out. Same story every time.

Similar to the billionaire-backed charter school movement which has aimed to privatize education, DOGE could move to privatize a wide range of social services and government functions that it feels can’t be cut entirely. Despite the rhetoric that this is intended to avoid wasteful spending, charter schools have hundreds of millions in federal funding for schools that never opened or closed soon after opening and those that stay open have higher costs for management. Teachers unions like the CTU and UTLA have vigorously opposed charter schools as a direct drain on already underfunded public schools, and have won with support from families, students, and communities.

The move to privatize federal programs and agencies would also mean the private corporations that take their place would rack in more taxpayer dollars with the goal of getting rich. Whenever government services or public ownership are handed over to the private sector, the rich and privileged have found a way to cheat the country and get even more disgustingly rich. This is the real government corruption.

Federal workers on the front line

Clearly this attack will have broad ranging implications, but the front line will be the federal workers themselves – who face mass layoffs and privitization of entire agencies. This attack against federal workers is meant to scare people straight to get in line with carrying out this agenda or leave. If the threats don’t work, they plan to make the job miserable enough that many may quit altogether.

For instance, Musk and Ramaswamy said they would end remote working policies across the federal government, upending people’s lives. For the people who still don’t leave at that point, they say they’ll start cutting regulations and programs to justify firing even more people. However, federal workers and their unions have already made it clear that they won’t let this happen without a fight.

Over one million federal workers are unionized, about 1 in 4, with unions like the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), and the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE). While these workers are legally denied the right to strike under federal law, that hasn’t stopped them before when they have been pushed past their limits, like in the Great Postal Strike of 1970 or the PATCO strike. Backed into a corner by the threat of mass layoffs, anything could happen.

This attack will unfold in months and years to come and we need to be ready to fight back. We can’t simply wait for the midterms and try to vote in Democrats to be the opposition to Trump and certainly not to the billionaires’ agenda. The Democrats lost precisely because of their loyalty to the billionaires and corporate interests over any commitment to representing the interests of the people. The only effective opposition we can build to the billionaires’ agenda is by building an independent people’s movement, rooted in our unions and organized labor, to resist.

Part of the reason the wealthy are acting so aggressively is because they are scared too, afraid of the rising strength of the labor movement and more and more young people demanding serious change. Now it’s time to get organized, fight back, and win.