DOGE is exactly what neoliberals wanted
Don't let them distance themselves from the culmination of their entire political project.
Fareed Zakaria, last November, on Why DOGE is an essential and important idea:
Of Donald Trump’s recent announcements, the one that intrigues — even excites — me the most is the establishment of DOGE, the misnamed “Department of Government Efficiency”... the federal government has clearly become too expansive and its writ too cumbersome. There are more than 180,000 pages of federal regulations. Surely it’s worth taking a close look at them and retiring many.
Fareed Zakaria, today:
The Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE…has gleefully taken a chainsaw to the federal government, dismantling agencies and firing workers with abandon…a good part of it is performance art, playing into the fantasies of the MAGA movement to crush the establishment and its elites in the most humiliating way possible.
What changed, of course, is that since its launch DOGE became the least popular agency in the country. And when you look at the polls, it’s not hard to see why. Most Americans think that DOGE’s cuts to the federal government will do “more harm than good”, according to Marist; a majority also believe that “most federal government employees are essential to the functioning of the United States”. A recent poll from Hart Research goes into detail:
Voters express the greatest resistance to making large cuts to Social Security (85% unacceptable), Medicare (85%), and Medicaid (82%), while more than seven in ten voters say it is unacceptable to offset tax cuts for the wealthy by cutting K-12 education (77%), food and nutrition programs (76%), transportation and infrastructure (75%), Head Start and childcare programs (75%), and affordable housing programs (73%).
Remarkably, words like Social Security and Medicaid don’t come out of Zakaria’s mouth even once in his latest segment. In fact, he goes out of his way to praise the fact Bill Clinton’s campaign to “reinvent government” cut over 400,000 federal jobs. Instead, what we get are about six minutes of procedural complaints. DOGE isn’t properly consulting with agencies about how to make cuts, DOGE is overstepping its legal authorities, DOGE is going about its firings disrespectfully, and so on.
Pay careful attention to DOGE’s neoliberal critics — be they Third Way Democrats or hard-right libertarians — and you’ll see this kind of flailing over and over again. The polls have made it clear that Americans primarily object to firings and the end of specific government programs, but that isn’t why neoliberals in the discourse dislike DOGE. They dislike it because it’s making their anti-government agenda look bad.
Posts like this make a lot more sense when you remember that Sanchez was a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute and a contributor to the Federalist Society. He’s fine with “cutting government”; what he objects to is the fact that when you dismantle regulatory agencies that obviously allows oligarchs like Elon Musk to “consolidate power”. The effects are embarrassing, but the cause itself is fine.
What we are seeing from Sanchez and Zakaria is almost certainly the future of neoliberal rhetoric. DOGE is the culmination of their anti-government politics, but since it has proven wildly unpopular neoliberals have to come up with tangential pretexts to criticize it. Expect to hear a lot moving forward about how DOGE was an in-principle great idea that was tragically betrayed by reckless and mean-spirited implementation. When you see neoliberals complain about DOGE’s operational illegality while ignoring its assault on the welfare and regulatory state, you’ll know why.
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