Is the DOGE populist?

In this post, I wrote about the tension within the MAGA movement between the business faction led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and the hardcore populist faction. My post dealt mainly with the way this tension manifested itself on the issue of legal immigration. But, stating the obvious, I said that it is bound to give rise to struggles on other issues, as well.

Trump took the business faction’s side in the immigration skirmish and Steve Bannon, populist par excellence, was not amused. Stating that Musk “should go back to South Africa,” Bannon has vowed to “do anything” to limit the billionaire’s access to the White House.

The cynic in me says that based on what we saw during Trump’s first term, neither Musk nor Bannon will remain in Trump’s orbit for more than a couple of years. In fact, Bannon, who was influential enough to help write Trump’s over-the-top “American carnage” inaugural address, lasted only seven months the first time around.

Musk is riding higher than Bannon ever did. It helps to have contributed more than $275 million to Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s influence will be exerted in considerable part through the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency which he heads. Trump expects the DOGE to slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, restructure federal agencies, and eliminate large numbers of federal employees.

That agenda is certainly populist in nature. Populists want to “drain the swamp.” Cutting regulations and firing government workers is part of what that slogan entails.

But Yuval Levin sees tension between Musk’s DOGE and populism:

The case for the DOGE, as it is taking shape, is basically a case for elite expertise dressed up as a case against bureaucracy. And as such, it is remarkably unconcerned with the challenges of legitimacy that are so central to populism in our politics.

It’s being structured as if we haven’t just lived through two decades of increasingly intense populist conspiracism about billionaires using their influence to pull the strings of American government. Without intending it, perhaps without quite seeing it, the DOGE is setting itself up to be the subject of endless [conspiracy theories] to come, on all sides of our politics.

Stated differently, Musk, Ramaswamy, and their fellow business executives who volunteer to serve in the DOGE may come to be viewed as the new swamp — billionaires with conflicts of interest running the federal government. Levin writes: “They might as well just call this thing the Trilateral Commission and start talking in hushed tones about a new world order.”

Levin isn’t saying that the DOGE would be anything like the Trilateral Commission; nor do I understand him to be saying that conspiracy theories about its work would necessarily have merit. My takeaway from his post is, instead, that the DOGE could easily come to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as a vehicle for making government work for billionaires, not the “forgotten man.”

Accordingly, it seems to me that Musk’s enemies within MAGA world now have a ready target with which to undercut him and his work. Steve Bannon must be licking his chops.