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Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping effort to purge and reshape the federal government is underway.
Federal employees have arrived at a “fork in the road,” the new administration proclaimed in a Tuesday night announcement. Their offer is that employees can choose to voluntarily resign effective September 30, but receive full pay and be exempt from return-to-office requirements before then. Or, employees can choose to stay — but they’ll be subject to higher expectations and no guarantee of job security.
The announcement comes after a week in which Trump’s team has instilled “fear and confusion” into the federal workforce. They’ve fired some employees (including in legally dubious ways), put others on administrative leave, and demanded government employees fess up to any effort to hide DEI programs by changing their names.
All of that now seems intended to “encourage” many federal employees to quit — saving Trump and Musk the trouble of pushing out employees with legal protections against firing. However, the administration also begun the process of trying to rip away those protections for many positions. This would let them hire more political appointees who the president would unambiguously be able to fire at will.
And keep in mind that this has all unfolded in just nine days; there is likely much more to come. It’s rapidly becoming clear that this will be the most ambitious and extensive effort to radically remake the federal government in our lifetimes.
In part, this is Trump’s effort to get revenge on what he calls the “deep state,” prevent future investigations of himself, and sweep aside checks on his power. It’s also, in part, the fulfillment of long-held conservative ambitions about sweeping aside federal bureaucrats and reducing spending.
But Musk and others in what’s become known as the “tech right” have their own grand ambitions — to “disrupt” a federal workforce they view as bloated, incompetent, and ideologically unsympathetic to them — and build something better in its place.
Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist close to Musk and involved in the Trump transition’s planning, recently argued that the current federal government was basically built by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and ’40s, but had since become an “out-of-control bureaucracy” without its “founder” around to lead it.
So, Andreessen argued: “You need another FDR-like figure — but in reverse. You need somebody, and a team of people around them, who’s actually willing to come in and take the thing by the throat.” That, he said, “is a lot of what this administration plans to do.”
But it’s far from clear whether the ambitions of Trump and the tech right are truly in alignment beyond hostility to a common enemy. The tech right claims to want a government that can help the country achieve great things and a workforce that prizes merit and talent. Yet Trump’s chief concern is political loyalty, freedom from checks on his power, and the ability to better wield federal power against his enemies. Who is using who?
Musk has big plans for transforming the federal workforce. We’ve only seen the very beginning of them.
Many factions on the right have long hoped to drastically overhaul the federal government, cutting spending and dispensing with bureaucrats. But GOP presidents — including Trump in his first term — generally haven’t wanted to rock the boat that much. In 2017, Steve Bannon, during his brief tenure in Trump’s White House, called for “deconstruction of the administrative state.” But he and Trump’s other appointees didn’t seem to know how to actually make that happen.
So the post-election announcement that Musk would head some sort of ill-defined thing called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was met with widespread scoffing in Washington. Everyone knew that such efforts to overhaul the federal government always fail, bogged down with red tape, legal requirements, and political caution.
When Andreessen recently told a skeptical interviewer that DOGE had specific plans that were “light years beyond anything I’ve ever heard of before,” and added that Musk, “the conceptual genius of our time across multiple domains,” has “put all of his intellect into this,” more scoffing ensued.
But what Trump’s team has done with its first week-plus in power suggests we are indeed seeing just the first steps of a highly ambitious and aggressive plan — perhaps not a plan that will actually cut government spending by $2 trillion, as Musk suggested, but a plan that will reshape the federal workforce in consequential and enduring ways.
Indeed, Musk and the tech right have far more experience at actually bringing about major change in the real world than any of Trump’s first-term appointees. The Silicon Valley founder mindset is to think in terms of action and power, not law and procedure. They view legal constraints as pesky annoyances – think about how Uber (whose founder advised DOGE transition planning) disregarded local taxi requirements to establish itself in various jurisdictions.
There is much we still don’t know about Musk’s plans with DOGE. But already I’ve been struck by their effort to reinvent the US Office of Personnel Management.
OPM has historically been a sleepy, process-oriented office overseeing hiring, benefits, and HR for the civil service. But Trump’s team is now using it as an instrument of control over the federal workforce. It was OPM that quickly ordered federal employees working on DEI be put on administrative leave – and asked them to snitch on any colleagues who’d been renaming such programs. OPM also sent out the “fork in the road” email asking for voluntary resignations, which resembles an email Musk sent to Twitter employees after he took over that company.
Indeed, while a colleague of Andreessen’s awaits confirmation as OPM’s director, several Musk allies appear to be effectively in charge of the office, and Musk himself visited its building on Friday. The Tech Right is indeed running the show.
Do Trump and the tech right have the same goal?
Yet one major question is whether Trump and the tech right actually want the same thing — or whether their goals will inevitably clash.
Trump wants to sweep aside constraints on his personal power and to be freed from any pesky investigations —hence his ordering the firing of 17 inspectors general, the appointees in charge of unearthing fraud and abuse at agencies. He, as ever, wants “loyalty.”
What the tech right wants depends on who you ask. Some are likely more interested in clearing away regulation of their businesses. But others at least claim to envision a remade federal workforce full of talented high-achievers that will help America build again, make things actually work, and accomplish amazing goals like going to Mars.
But the tech right’s diagnosis of the problems in the existing system is important to understand. They point the finger at a permanent “managerial” class of elite-credentialed bureaucrats and middle managers, blaming them for both the “Great Awokening” era of social justice politics and for holding back brilliant capitalists from achieving great things.
In an X post quoting that Trump’s term ends the “long 20th century,” Andreessen said that that period’s “unifying theme” was “managerialism. Systems at scale, run by expert managers credentialed by elite institutions. A method now increasingly exposed as ineffective, corrupt, moribund, stagnant, rotten. Demoralizing and demoralized. Time for change.”
Several tech-right figures, including Andreessen, have also cited the influence of the blogger Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin, who I profiled in 2022, claims that US democracy has grown bloated and incompetent, with the president basically powerless to achieve his agenda, constrained by the deep state bureaucracy and laws that tie his hands.
The extreme solution Yarvin advocates for is the overturning of American democracy and its replacement with a monarchical dictatorship. None of the prominent right-wing figures who praise Yarvin’s work have gone so far as openly advocating that. But Yarvin argues for it in terms that sound appealing to the tech right — saying, shouldn’t the federal government be run more like a business? and aren’t companies essentially monarchies accountable to a CEO?
This is the Venn diagram overlap between Trump’s self-interested desires and the tech right’s diagnosis of what’s ailing America — both concur that the president should take more power away from institutions that currently check his authority, like the career civil service, Congress, or existing laws.
But the similarities quickly start to vanish. The tech right loves to talk a big game about hiring only based on “merit,” but Trump demands total political loyalty above all. Many of Trump’s firings seem mainly designed to let him get away with corruption, and he hopes to turn the Justice Department against his political enemies.
The tech right has done quite well for themselves in the system we have, yet they seem set on helping Trump smash its safeguards and eliminate its checks on authoritarian power — on moving fast and breaking the guardrails. Though dealing with woke critics and government regulators was surely unpleasant, perhaps they should dwell on what can befall CEOs in China and Russia, where politicized investigations and prosecutions have been normalized.
The tech right might also be advised to dwell on how Trump treats one-time allies he’s soured on. Do they want a system where their continued wealth and freedom depends on the favor of the sovereign? But perhaps the groveling of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos to Trump, in hopes of avoiding politicized payback, shows that we’re already there.
