US Media's Credulous Depiction of 'DOGE' as a Good Faith "Efficiency Panel" Has Aged Poorly

New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN took a pathological liar with a clear ideological agenda at his word for the sole reason he’s rich and powerful.

By all objective metrics, a Seig Heil-ing, stimulant-addled mega-billionaire, who no one elected, is now personally running a blatantly illegal assault on the administrative and liberal state. I won’t take too much space recapping what has transpired over the past two weeks, but Musk and his team of cultish zoomer flunkies have thus far threaten to shut down, or are in the process of shutting down, in whole or part, USAID, Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), General Services Administration (GSA), Small business Administration (SBA), and a host of potential federal government agencies. And they have reportedly gained access to the sensitive personnel information of millions of government workers and average Americans alike.

According to Caleb Ecarma at Popular Information, who cites an OPM staffer, Musk and his hand-picked agents “have illegally installed a commercial server to control federal HR databases that contain sensitive personal information, including SSNs, home addresses, and medical histories.”

It’s a total bloodbath, wholly illegal, and potentially will––and in some cases already has-–thrown tens of thousands of people into destitution and disarray. It’s a nightmare scenario and one developing so rapidly that, by the time you read this, it’s likely gotten much worse. Especially since Democratic leadership seems to be, at least for the moment, more checked out than the dad from Home Alone.

There is a lot of good, real time-reporting on what’s going on—the bulk of it not in mainstream media, of course. Rolling Stone, Wired, several independent, user-supported outlets are properly conveying the stakes (forgive me if I left anyone out). I won’t attempt rehash their work, which you should definitely follow, but rather take time out to recap how major outlets failed to—or deliberately set out not to—convey the far-right ideological agenda that was “DOGE” in the run up to Trump winning the election and taking office. Repeatedly, time after time, Trump and Musk’s explicit, well-documented anti-liberal, racist, anti-trans, anti-worker, anti-woman, anti-disability justice agenda was outright ignored, and The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN ran with the framing that “DOGE” was some good-faith, post-ideological effort to “cut costs,” “find savings,” and “increase efficiencies”

Let’s take a look at a sampling of their coverage:

New York Times

• Musk’s Slashing of the Federal Budget Faces Big Hurdles (11/27/24)

  • “Savings”

  • “budget-cutters”

• Musk Cost-Cutting Effort Is Being Guided by Health Entrepreneur (12/06/24)

  • “Cost cutting effort”

  • “efficiency panel”

  • “the cost-cutting project”

• Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs (1/12/25)

  • “cost-cutting”

  • “potential savings”

Washington Post

• Elon Musk’s wish list for DOGE (12/21/24)

  • “government efficiency commission”

• Musk’s DOGE weighs recommendations to cut federal diversity programs (1/16/25).

  • “the nongovernmental fiscal-efficiency group”

  • “the efficiency group”

  • “Proposed savings”

CNN

• Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ in Trump administration (12/24/24)

  • “a government efficiency commission”

  • ​​”reducing waste in government spending”

  • “combating waste, fraud and abuse”

• DOGE vs. DEI: Republicans’ promise to purge government diversity initiatives could be wide-ranging, and hard to pull off (12/19/24)

  • “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the two billionaires tasked with slashing government waste”

  • “Republicans looking to cut spending across Washington”

Words that are not used at all in any of these articles: “right-wing,” “ideological,” “conservative,” or, most important of all, any mention, even implicitly, of Musk’s personal far-right ideological disposition. One could read all of these articles and come away with the distinct impression that, while the actors in question are vaguely Republican, their motive is the post-ideological streamlining of “waste.”

One particularly egregious article that was published long after it was clear what Musk was doing was “Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines” (1/30/25) by Michael D. Shear of The New York Times. The article tried, and failed desperately, to situate Musk’s illegal far right coup as simply a more extreme version of bipartisan “balance the budget” politics.

“There is a long, bipartisan history of attempts to rein in spending and address concerns about government inefficiencies,” The Times subheadline tells us, “though the parties have grown increasingly divided about what to cut.”

I’m the first person to criticize Democrats for pushing austerity measures and embracing right-wing framing on the issue of government spending. But clearly what Trump and Musk are unleashing on the federal government is light years beyond Obama era Bowles-Simpson or Biden’s “balance the budget” rhetoric. Musk is unilaterally slashing large sectors of the liberal and administrative state without any legal or congressional authority to do so. It’s not part of some normal, bipartisan continuum; it’s flagrantly illegal, insecure, motivated by white nationalist ideology, and completely outside the authority of Congress.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” Musk said on Twitter Monday morning, sounding like a 15 year old from 1998. Does this sound like someone genuinely concerned with “finding savings” in the federal government? Or does this statement, and his years of incendiary, manic, white nationalist posting, indicate someone who—perhaps—has an ideological agenda? An agenda that he wasn’t coy about despite the New York Times repeatedly attempting to pretend otherwise.

It’s worth noting that not all of Musk’s attacks on the administrative and liberal state are equally pernicious. There are real issues with USAID and its role as a soft power arm of meddling US imperial bureaucrats, as well as a political shield for U.S. atrocities, from Yemen to Gaza, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere. But USAID also does objectively useful work because many countries grow dependent on them, and it’s very clear that, based on recent statements made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, what is most likely going to happen is the sinister activity USAID does will simply be folded back into the State Department directly or the CIA (as it used to be) while the Incidentally Good Stuff USAID does will be be eliminated. Despite his faux libertarian posturing, Musk, of course, doesn’t care about the anti-imperialist argument. He hates USAID because he thinks it helps keep black and brown people alive, which—by virtue of the US being a largely unipolar empire—it very much does, regardless of motives.

The Times, Washington Post and CNN were not alone in having a blasé attitude about DOGE in the run up to Trump taking office. As I noted at In These Times, many Democrats indulged the patently false “cost savings” premise, and made no effort to paint it as a far right coup on the liberal state—which it clearly was. Pod Saves America’s Tommy Vietor treated DOGE as a good-faith effort that was simply misguided, and establishment journalists frequently mocked or downplayed its potential to disrupt our government.

This is part of a much larger media regime that, above all, must assume good faith from those in power, no matter their past lies, far-right ideological beliefs, or brash and illegal behavior. Let us call it the “Inverse Power-Skepticism Principle, which can be seen here:

There are simply different editorial standards for people like Musk, who can spend the better part of five years posting white nationalist memes, libeling and lashing out at critics, promoting racist conspiracy theories, and mocking trans people, but still is presented by Respectable Media Outlets, as someone concerned with deficits who would simply wants to “reduce waste” and “find savings.” Meanwhile, those far from the halls of power, Official Enemy States and activists are assumed to be inherently ideological and motivated by political ends. Take, for example, a Times report by Reid J. Epstein detailing some Democrats wanting to meaningfully reform the police in 2020. The word “progressive” is used five times, the word “activists” four times. They are presented—correctly and accurately—as ideological agents with an ideological agenda, not above-the-fray wonks seeking “efficiencies” in crime policy. No such ideological labeling is given to far-right, extremely wealthy political agents. Even those as nakedly ideological as Musk, even after he did a Sieg Heil three times on stage on live TV, the Times continued to orient his attack on the liberal and administrative state as just another attempt to “reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.”

And now we are seeing the result of this anodyne, cold, View From Nowhere coverage of Trump and Musk’s extremist agenda: liberal institutions and the population, more broadly, caught off guard by what is—and always has been—a far-right, illegitimate attack on workers, women, trans people, disabled people, seniors and the broader the liberal state. It would have been useful had major media made it clear months ago this is what was happening, rather than treating us as a post-ideological belt tightening project by patriotic billionaires.