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What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodyan. Read by Vincent Lye.

In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the Department of Government Efficiency, he declared that governments were poorly configured,

big, dumb machines.

To the Senator Ted Cruz, he explained that,

the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers.

Muskism came to Washington, soaked in memes, adolescent boasts, and sadistic victory dances over mass

firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers, drawn from his suite of companies,

Musk aimed to enter the code base and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within.

He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy, kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century,

scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets, and feeding the data into a single interoperable system.

The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management,

shot through with the sensibility of gaming and right-wing culture war.

To succeed, he would need God mode, an overview of the whole.

If the mandate of Doge was to modernize federal technology and software

to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity, in the words of the executive order that

launched the initiative on January 20, 2025, the reality was a strengthening of the state's

surveillance capacities.

Over time, Musk had become convinced that the real bugs in the code were people,

especially the non-white illegal immigrants,

...