DOGE: Dangerous Oligarchs Grab Everything

What Marc Andreessen revealed about the tech-industrial complex

President Biden ended his term in office warning of a “tech-industrial complex”:

Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.

The shape of the America that Biden describes is revealed in a variety of ways. Trump has assembled a Cabinet of the very rich. The three richest men in the world sat in the front row of his inauguration. He has authorized the very richest man to reorganize American government.

Julia Demaree Nikhinson, AFP

There is so much we still don’t know about DOGE is, and what it will do. We will learn more in the coming weeks and months, but the prism that the media, good government types like me, and those working in government apply to DOGE matters. Because DOGE will hold no direct office, its power is the power to persuade: Trump, his appointees, and Congress. That power is tied to how it is presented and understood by the public. If it is seen in vaguely positive terms (a government commission, a disrupter, an importer of private sector know-how), its proposals are given a patina of legitimacy. If it is seen as an effort to assert oligarchic control or to cut popular programs, fewer in Congress will support its ideas.

I hope DOGE becomes the best version of itself, fixing real problems. I’m not alone. Smart people who want to government work better and have a good read on its problems want DOGE to succeed. But at this point, DOGE has not earned the benefit of the doubt. So, I am going to spend some time conceptualizing both what DOGE is, and what DOGE is not.

Here is a factual description of DOGE: it is a group run by right-wing billionaires who oppose government regulation of their businesses, and benefit from government contracts. It avoids accountability standards that we expect of other groups who seek to influence government. It is not run by people who have a deep knowledge of the function of government, or have much patience with the procedural requirements that flow from laws.

I will draw from Marc Andreessen’s recent interview with the New York Times, since it was more revealing than anything Muskaswamy have offered. Andreessen is a venture capitalist and one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley. He made news by supporting Trump, and is involved in DOGE, though holds no official position, a pattern that reoccurs.

DOGE as a hero’s journey

A couple of years ago, Andreessen wrote a “techno-optimist” manifesto. It included…a lot, ably dissected by Dave Karpf. Andreessen wrote:

We believe in adventure. Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.

Ok, yes, this is sort of silly. But it also reflects the story that a group of (mostly) middle-aged men who have amassed unthinkable wealth tell about themselves. Beyond a certain point, money becomes a means of keeping score rather than a motivator. The motivation is personal, not societal. We do great things as part of our heroic conquest, for our community. And for a hero to exist, there must be villains to vanquish. Who are these enemies?

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition…Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing – blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness. Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

You don’t have to squint too hard here to see government and the universities, or really anyone thwarting their progress, as the villains in this hero’s journey. The “hero’s journey” offers a comforting rationale for those involved in DOGE. It allows them to present their efforts, if only to themselves and their peers, in noble terms. Any who oppose them are part status quo and entrenched interests, the enemies of progress. And perhaps some of them will be! But if you are going to engage in radical action, one that allows you to dismiss people with more knowledge than you have, it helps to have philosophy to justify ignoring your blind spots.

The Times also interviewed Curtis Yarvin, the Silicon Valley writer who advocates for monarchy instead of democracy and wants to fire all government employees. Of course, what Yarvin does not want is an actual hereditary monarchy. He wants a model of absolute control — a dictatorship. Yarvin is only relevant because powerful men, including many in Silicon Valley and the new Vice-President, agree with him. Andreessen is someone that he talks to. And you can see how he makes the pitch appealing to his audience. Hey, FDR and Lincoln were dictators, right? And aren’t dictators and CEOs the same, really? George Washington was basically running a start-up with the US government. And Alexander Hamilton was a tech-bro, the Larry Page of his day! (I promise you, he really said all those things, and that smart people still take him seriously).

Yarvin offers people like Andreessen and Vance an appealing narrative that presents democracy as so fundamentally broken as to invite dictatorship. In common with the hero’s journey, it makes an assault on democracy not just justified, but noble. Yes, the little people might not understood the hidden truth revealed to us heroes, so lets not get too hung up on their objections.

DOGE is not a government commission

Andressen went on to suggest that DOGE was the natural heir to Al Gore’s Reinventing Government commission, which he described as “DOGE 1.0.” Andressen’s claim here is that DOGE should be seen as a “normie Dem thing” because Dems cared about efficiency in the 1990s: “And somehow now that’s turned into ‘Oh, my God, it’s fascism.’ So it’s another one of these crazy inversions that’s taken place.”

I reached out to John Kamensky, who worked on Reinventing Government to get his take.

I wouldn’t claim the Reinventing Government effort to be “DOGE 1.0.” The Reinventing Government effort did have a focus on efficiency, but it also focused on effectiveness. It’s mantra was “create a government that works better, costs less, and gets results Americans care about.” And because the Reinvention team was comprised of career public servants, the focus was on “how” government should work, not “what” government should do. The DOGE effort seems to be a mix of both, maybe with a heavier emphasis on “what” government should do. That was seen by reinventors as the purview of political leaders, not career public servants.

Indeed. There is a pretty large difference between a group of knowledgeable public servants seeking to make government work better, and a group of hostile outsiders seeking to make government smaller.

Andreessen’s unwillingness to recognize that DOGE promises to be fundamentally different in its goals and structure relative to prior government reform commissions reiterates a recurring theme in his interview: I stayed normal as I became a billionaire; its the rest of the world that radicalized.¹

Another reason I know that DOGE is not a government commission is because Muskaswamy said so in the Wall St. Journal: “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons.” This was not a throwaway piece of bravado. They don’t want any formal roles that come with accountability. The mention of “advisory committees” is a reference to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which calls for such committees to have a balanced membership, provide transparency and minimize conflicts of interest. Such mandates do not sit well with a homogenous group of tech billionaires who oppose government regulation and oppose transparency.

DOGE is also not a registered non-profit, or a registered lobbyist, which would generate other accountability rules. At a time when federal employees cannot accept gifts worth $20 because of conflict of interest rules, a group of secretive billionaires are getting a free pass.

DOGE is not a sideshow

It is tempting to believe that DOGE is a sideshow, a distraction by which Trump keeps Musk and Ramaswamy occupied without giving them any real power. Indeed, Ramaswamy is already gone; the only federal job he cut was the make-believe one that he was occupying. Musk supporters criticized him. Trump suggested he should seek elected office. Ramaswamy was expendable enough to be nudged to the exit even before the inauguration. Musk and company are not.

DOGE has employees, with plans for up to 100 in total, including the wife of Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s closest advisors. The goal is to have one or two DOGE representatives in each major agency, identifying potential cuts. Those employees have engaged with federal employees as if they are part of Trump’s federal transition team.

Who are the employees? How many are being paid? What is their motivation? We don’t know. Some DOGE members, including Musk, will likely be Special Government Employees, a class of temporary employee that still requires conflicts of interests requirements. You can be sure that the best legal minds in the new administration are looking for ways to eliminate those requirements to give Musk free rein. Or to pretend they don’t exist, deal with the lawsuits, and plan to implement DOGE recommendations that cannot be undone.

Andreessen emphasizes the connections between the White House and DOGE. Scott Kupor, a managing partner at Andreessen’s company, will lead the Office of Personnel Management, an important position in an administration that has made public employees a central theme of their re-election narrative. Silicon Valley appointees are embedded across government. Musk will work in the White House compound, DOGE will have an office in the Office of Management and Budget, and employees will be placed in the US Digital Service.

I will say there is a lot of support from the administration for the program and if you look at the people being put into positions, like O.M.B. and O.P.M., they’re very aligned with it. So at the very least, it’s starting out with a lot of coordination and shared ideas.

And just so we know what DOGE is: There are actually three kinds of threads that they’re pulling on. There’s the money side, but there’s also the head count and staffing side, which is related but not exactly the same to the money side, and then there’s the regulation side. They have plans on each of those three threads. They have plans on how to do it that are, I would just say, light-years beyond anything I’ve ever heard of before.

Andreessen knows what these plans are, but the rest of us don’t. DOGE staffers, working out of SpaceX headquarters in DC are sworn to secrecy and working on Signal, a private messaging app. So much for transparency.

DOGE is a propaganda machine

Because you cannot separate DOGE from Musk, it comes with the power that he brings to the table. This includes extraordinary media power: Musk owns what is (still) the most influential social media platform in the world. How might he use this power? Andreessen provided one clue, which is that DOGE will become a propaganda machine, doing for government programs what LibsOfTikTok has done for school teachers: amplifying negative messaging to undermine public support.

This is the most interesting part of the Andreessen interview for me, since it articulates a theory of change to address a seemingly intractable problem for DOGE — to make cuts on the scale they have promised will be unpopular. So I am going to quote this section at length. Andreessen starts by pointing out the the decline of traditional media, and the rise of social media, will make it eaiser to “shine a light on what’s actually going on.” Speaking of prior government commissions he said:

The prior attempts to do this all happened under the old top-down media machine, and everything that happens now is going to happen in the full light of social media. And say what you will about social media, but one of the things that it is really good at is when somebody like Elon or somebody like Trump wants to take a message directly to the people. And Elon’s already doing this. The administration’s already doing this. There’s an ability here to take this directly to the population and shine a light on what’s actually going on.

His interviewer, Ross Douthat, inadvertently begins to sound like Isaac Choitner by asking some reasonable questions about how political support for public programs work.

Douthat: Let’s say you have tons of dead wood in a particular federal agency. Well, you’re going to get rid of that dead wood. But in fact, you’re going to need to hire better people to replace those people. And you’re going to need to pay those people appropriately and so on. And all of this is in the shadow of Social Security, Medicare and a range of federal commitments. There is no magical argument on social media that will suddenly make cutting those commitments popular. But this is, of course, the traditional, institutional, cynical Washington view.

Andreessen: I was going to say, but this is the traditional, institutional, cynical Washington view. And the way that reads to a normal person is absolute contempt for the taxpayer. Absolute contempt for the taxpayer by saying, “We can sit here in Washington, and we can ladle out $50 billion here and $100 billion there, and when we’re challenged on it, the answer is, ‘Eh, it’s a rounding error.’” Right?

Douthat: No, no. The answer when we’re challenged on it is: The actual spending that the federal government does is either big-ticket things that the average taxpayer supports or smaller things like funding for students with disabilities across public school districts or something that if the average taxpayer doesn’t support it, at least a very vocal and influential constituency supports it. Those are the two groups. It’s not dripping with contempt for the taxpayer. It’s the taxpayer that because of their desire for large amounts of federal spending tends to support.

Andreessen: I will just tell you that what you just said comes across as total contempt for the taxpayer. Just absolute contempt.

Just to pause here. Douthat is right on the numbers. You can’t cut government spending without cutting popular programs. Also, it is hard to take Andreessen’s concern for the “normal taxpayer” too seriously, especially given the explicit discussion of Social Security and Medicare here, which are popular because they provide some financial security and health insurance for old people. The historian Rik Perlstein, who dined with Andreessen reported him saying: “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet" when referring to the small town rural Americans.

Douthat presses Andreessen again on the failed record of efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare. Andreessen switches the topic to disability in schools.

Douthat: But who is the taxpayer? I wrote many, many columns in support of various versions of Paul Ryan’s plan to cut Medicare or reform Medicare and reform Social Security. And the reason those plans went down to defeat was not that federal bureaucrats had contempt for the American taxpayer. It was that the American taxpayer, in election after election, likes and supports and votes in favor of Medicare and Social Security.

Andreessen: They’re not exposed to it. This is a big part of the bet. And look, maybe it’ll work, and maybe it won’t. But this is a big part of the bet, which is that the American taxpayer doesn’t experience it that way because they don’t actually have the insight into it. Take what you would think would be a bulletproof program, like child disability in schools. It’s far from clear to me that the median taxpayer would support that if they really knew what that was. As you and I both know, what that has become is basically a medicalized mental illness. To the point where students in schools now are basically using fake diagnoses of mental illness in order to get drugs and in order to get extra time on tests. That whole program has run completely out of control, and everybody with kids knows that, but it’s not a discrete thing that people can wrap their heads around and understand. And it’s not a thing that gets exposed in the bright light of day.That’s precisely the kind of thing where I think it’s if it’s aired in public, I think you might find that there’s a lot less support for it than people think. We’ll see.

The basic claim here is that an effort to include kids with disabilities in public schools has become a giant and wasteful fraud, one what the public will recoil against if only they knew. Its a remarkable and telling choice. First, schools are a relatively transparent public function. Parents interact with schools more closely than most public services, though the past few years has proven that you can convince at least some of those parents that educators do not have their kid’s best interest at heart. Second, for Andreessen’s plan to work, it will effectively work to limit services to the disabled, or resegregate them from public school classrooms. Third, the federal government spends a tiny amount on education. This is not about making the federal government more efficient, but eliminating federal oversight of schools.

Andreessen's argument is that if people really understood government programs like Social Security — the way that some very online tech billionaires who don't understand government do — they would not support them. And the billionaires will use their social media make the public misunderstand these programs the way they do.

In doing so, DOGE will bypass normal policymaking processes or rebuttals by experts. Years of carefully developed policy compromises will be portrayed as corrupt and broken. Andreessen proposed that “of course you want efficiency, and of course you want cost cutting wherever you can get it, and of course you want to eliminate fraud and abuse and all these things.” Evoking norms like “efficiency” or cutting “fraud and abuse” serves to abstract real cuts to real programs that people depend upon. But with a sophisticated enough messaging operation, maybe you can change the policy before enough people realize what has been taken from them.

DOGE is a tool to enforce political discipline

DOGE holds a newsmaking capacity that simply does not compare to any prior government reform commission. It can generate social media outrage toward a specific public program (or employee) as a prelude to cutting it. Musk’s power seemed to be enough to kill a Congressional budget agreement (or at least delay it and remove some pesky constraints on investments in China). But it’s not just social media power. DOGE can also spend vast amounts of money on a political system that runs on money. Musk spent enormously on Trump and is now promising to spend in Congressional primaries to remove critics.

The target of his Musk’s ire in this case was Richard Neal. Neal is the picture of a moderate Democrat, consistently criticized by progressives. Neal asked: “Can you imagine what the next two years are going to be like? If every time the Congress works its will and then there's a tweet from an individual who has no official portfolio, who threatens members on the Republican side with a primary, they succumb?” Indeed. The prospect of the richest person who ever existed and his billionaire pals trying to unseat you from office in a campaign system where you spend hours per day phoning potential donors for money has to be sobering. Why pick the fight?

Trump has already mastered the art of using threats and attacks to enforce discipline. Musk adds more power and money to that equation. But to what end? Maybe whatever DOGE tries to do, or whatever Musk thinks is a good idea, or whatever Trump proposes. These may not be the same thing, and they may have only a passing relationship with government efficiency.

DOGE is state capture

DOGE was not Trump’s idea, it was Musk’s: “When he interviewed Mr. Trump on X in August, Mr. Musk brought it up three times — returning to the topic when Mr. Trump digressed into other subjects.”

As much as they want to believe the hero’s journey, it is worth asking why a group of very wealthy men with businesses regulated by government and with little prior interest in government reform suddenly decided this was for them? Musk and company want a smaller government to be sure, but a subservient one is even more valuable.

Musk’s net worth increased by about $170 billion after the election. His businesses did not fundamentally change in that time frame. But investors perceived that his proximity to Trump would allow him to increase the value of those companies, either by relaxing regulation, or increasing government contracts.

Capturing more of the procurement pie would have tremendous value. The federal government spends about $759 billion on contracts, more than twice of the cost of the federal civilian payroll that DOGE is promising to cut. Pushing more of that business toward Silicon Valley vendors like Musk, Anduril and or Palantir would not just increase their revenues, it is also a means to capture government operations. Musk is already such a dominant player in some spaces that government must work with him.

Andreessen is revealing about why he became a Trump supporter, blaming government regulation.

They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That’s really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics. The crypto attack was so weird that we didn’t know what to make of it. We were just hoping it would pass, which it didn’t. But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to A.I. that we realized we had to get involved in politics. Then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a second term.

Whether or not you agree that Democrats were too hostile to tech, it seems reasonable that the government should regulate AI and crypto, given their potential impacts on society, both positive and negative. Indeed, much of the regulation that Andreessen complains about occurred under Trump, whose once portrayed crypto as a scam before realizing the political and personal financial opportunities to deregulating crypto and launching his own currency.

Apart from deregulation, Andreessen (and Musk and Zuckerberg) would like the US government to use its muscle to prevent other countries from regulating them:

The E.U. is, as you know, regulating itself to death. And they’re damaging themselves mostly, but what they’re also doing is damaging our companies. And so we would like to work with the administration to help global markets open up and for American companies to win.

To be clear, America in 2024 is not 1990s Russia. And so, the use of oligarchy as a description has its limits. But in the weeks and months ahead, we should be willing to apply a critical lens to DOGE and its work, rather than taking its claims at face value. Unwilling to follow the rules, it needs to earn trust through its actions. And “oligarchy” seems like a reasonable if extreme alternative to the lens of “good government commission”.

I don’t know what the answer will be, but we should be ready to ask: Does DOGE work for the American government, or does the American government work for its sponsors?

1. This extends to Dem policy about tech, and the attitudes of employees. He even refers to the breaking of The Deal (he insists it has a capital D) which was that you got rich, people idolized you, and then you gave back. Andressen notes that he benefited greatly from government investments in supercomputers at public institutions, specifically the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. So to acknowledge benefiting from a system in a past, which you attack today, means either admitting you have changed or that system has become corrupted. For people whose wealth, power and actions are subject to ever-greater scrutiny, this is an easy choice.