Babes in DOGE Land
Photo by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0
Now passes the days of Vivek Ramaswamy; the Department of Government Efficiency hardly knew ye…
Except from a long Washington Post treatment of the matter:
Ramaswamy’s team steered clear of any lanes that Musk had made clear in his frequent posts on X, the social media site he owns, were areas of focus for him, one of the people familiar with the operations said. With a rough division of labor established, the DOGE co-heads set their sights on making Washington more efficient. DOGE amassed enormous interest, receiving tens of thousands of applications after an online callout for candidates.
Tensions soon emerged, though, that paved the way for the eventual split.
The men shared a radical vision for shrinking the government, but their strategies for reaching it diverged and were ultimately incompatible.
Ramaswamy approached DOGE from a constitutional perspective, exploring which agencies could be shut down without requiring congressional action, taking aim at the budgeting process within different agencies and examining legal pathways to strip regulations. He had conceived of DOGE as a nongovernmental body, almost akin to a think tank, that would push for major changes that could be codified by law.
Musk wasn’t interested in those processes, preferring to do things from a “technology-first perspective,” using the power of technology and data-mining to achieve DOGE’s aims, one of the people familiar with the group said.
“These were competing visions,” the person said.
Musk became increasingly convinced that DOGE should operate as a small team within the government, where it could get access to highly sensitive information and avoid lawsuits attempting to force disclosure of its meetings and minutes — several of which were, indeed, filed immediately after Trump was sworn in Monday.
The teams each man led were also vastly different in structure and scope.
Musk scouted his business empire for talent and established SpaceX’s Washington offices as a command center, where dozens of people worked on DOGE initiatives. Musk has been drawing on business resources to achieve his new government-focused aims. In a 2:24 a.m. post Tuesday, for example, one of his trusted security engineering deputies at X and SpaceX wrote: “An insane first day in DC. Just now leaving work. More to come!”
Ramaswamy, meanwhile, maintained a sparse team of advisers and staff members who operated from his home state of Ohio, many of whom had worked on his 2024 GOP presidential campaign or at his personal office, largely reporting to him on an ad hoc basis without a set schedule. What Ramaswamy’s team lacked in resources, it attempted to overcome through operational know-how, gathering expertise on how to maneuver in support of its aims in Washington and a rigorous understanding of its legal and policy obstacles.
Ramaswamy’s team initially probed policy areas from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to a Supreme Court precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, examining the administrative state and how to pare it back.
That quiet, meticulous work soon brushed up against the power of Musk’s massive online megaphone.
“Go on Elon’s Twitter and search the word ‘spending,’ and see how many tweets you get in the last six months,” said James Fishback, a Ramaswamy confidant who is head of macro at Azoria, an investment firm. “Then search the words ‘Chevron doctrine.’ It’s very clear by what they’re both posting what their priorities are.”
Tensions were further exacerbated by a controversy that spilled into public view on X. Soon after Musk and Ramaswamy helped whittle down a government spending bill in December, Ramaswamy ignited a furor among some members of Trump’s coalition — including some of Musk’s followers — with a long post on meritocracy. Both Musk and Ramaswamy were involved in publicly defending a visa program for skilled workers, a position that rankled some Trump allies.
Ramaswamy received the lion’s share of Trump supporters’ ire over the issue, particularly after he posted, “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” in a statement that was seen by some on the right as attacking everyday Americans. Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, and other influential officials in the MAGA sphere slammed Ramaswamy, with scores of social media accounts posting racist images about his Indian heritage.
There were also questions about whether Musk and Ramaswamy were really co-leaders. Within DOGE, Ramaswamy was Musk’s equal, but in name only.
Ramaswamy visited the SpaceX offices that hosted DOGE staff members on multiple occasions, but, unlike Musk, he didn’t have the power to direct their work.
“I don’t think Vivek would have signed up under any sense on paper he wouldn’t be co-lead,” said one person with knowledge of DOGE’s structure. “All the assurances were they were going to be coequal leaders.”
But that arrangement, the person said, was “probably doomed from the jump.”
Over time, Musk — with a singular focus on technology — lost interest in Ramaswamy’s contributions. Ramaswamy began to explore the idea of leaving DOGE early to launch his long-standing plan of running for governor of Ohio. Trump threw a curveball into the mix, with a sudden personal appeal for Ramaswamy to seek appointment to fill Vice President JD Vance’s Senate seat in Ohio, The Washington Post previously reported.
“They’ve been wanting Vivek to step aside so Elon could have more control,” one person briefed on the matter said. “There was tension, and then they had an out and kind of took the out.”
Once Trump decided to house DOGE within the government, Ramaswamy hastened his decision to leave, one of the people said: It would have been legally complicated for him to run for governor without departing because federal employees are barred from running in partisan elections.
Musk supported the decision, too, people said. The Tesla CEO was aware of Ramaswamy’s political ambitions and opposed to the idea that DOGE might be used as a campaign platform. He is expected to publicly support Ramaswamy’s candidacy. Still, Ramaswamy’s departure has had other effects: Draft executive orders favored by Musk were implemented, and those put forward by Ramaswamy’s team that Musk had ignored in recent weeks are unlikely to be issued, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Some longtime budget experts say it’s hard to interpret the revamped DOGE structure as anything but a recognition that the tech executives’ sprawling initial ambition crashed into the reality of Washington inertia.
“There’s no way it’s not a step down — the language includes an explicit statement that they are not to do OMB’s job, not to do budgetary things, and they had been talking about cutting trillions of dollars from the federal budget,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think-tank. “There’s no question this is at least on paper a real narrowing of their mandate. How it actually works out, I just don’t know.”
