DOGE Is a New Way to Talk About an Old GOP Aim: Attacking the Poor

[berniesandersmittens]

For all the talk of a new class-conscious GOP, the Republican Party sounded much like its old self when, in December, Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the mission of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,” Ramaswamy complained. “The dirty little secret is that many of those entitlement dollars aren’t even going to people who they were supposed to.”

There it is again: “entitlement” reform. Drawing from his own presidential campaign pitch, Ramaswamy urged Donald Trump to deploy DOGE as a beachhead in a war on spending, arguing for using executive powers to slash “wasteful” federal expenditures without congressional approval. (Although Ramaswamy has since departed—reportedly rather messily—as co-lead to run for Ohio governor, President Trump officially established the temporary entity within the White House on Monday through one of his many day-one executive orders.)

DOGE apes the language of a Silicon Valley slide deck, but it has so far presented little more than a memeified version of well-trodden right-wing austerity politics.

Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—now DOGE’s sole leader—have pushed cuts in the corporate speak of “efficiency.” But what they offer makes little sense. Musk has talked of slashing $2 trillion. How would such a change not destroy programs Trump has promised not to kill? The billionaire does not have an answer, later backtracking his goal to consider $1 trillion to be “an epic outcome.”

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/doge-entitelement-reform-elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-austerity/