The Work of Cutting the Budget

History tells us that the DOGE days of austerity likely won't amount to much

Do the work

William Greider's "The Education of David Stockman" stands as perhaps the greatest examination of how budget-cutting dreams die in Washington. Published in The Atlantic in 1981,¹ it captured Stockman's journey from true believer to disillusioned realist. His candid confessions about the Reagan revolution's contradictions eventually got him "taken to the woodshed" by the president.²

The man who now wants to fix everything spends his days on X, posting bawdy memes about buying the wretched morass that is MSNBC and sparring with critics while his followers cheer each reply. Between jokes about pronouns³ and media bias, Elon Musk has a plan — he would remake the federal government the way he remade Twitter, this time via something called DOGE. The Department of Government Efficiency won’t really be a department at all, just an advisory commission, but that doesn’t matter to the true believers.

Look at that weird “G” in DOGE — that’s some AI work right there, and I love to see it

Like Stockman before him, who admitted that "none of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," Musk now leads another crusade powered more by faith than facts — though he promises us that AI, which made the senses-shattering header for this very article as well as the DOGE logo itself, will make all the difference this time.