Gideon Lichfield, former editor-in-chief of Wired, is writing in "Foreign Policy" that "Elon Musk was Donald Trump's useful idiot.", and it looks like Musk got played.
According to Lichfield the puppet master was Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who through Musk achieved what he wanted to get done while being able to stand in she shadows.
Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist, was one of the masterminds of Project 2025, the far-right reform plan so toxic that Trump disavowed it on the campaign trail, before appointing Vought to the OMB to effectively execute it.
In a
speech two years ago, Vought said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.” His overarching goal was to weaken federal agencies that he saw as a “deep state” overrun with obstructionist lefties and to put more power in the hands of the president.
Details of the relationship between Musk and Vought emerged last month in a
report by
Bloomberg journalist Max Chafkin, who wrote that Musk was “in regular contact with Vought” after the election and was “seen by Vought’s allies as the public-facing arm of his agenda” and by Vought himself as a “force multiplier.”
We don’t know to what extent Musk’s methods at DOGE—such as
firing probationary federal workers (those with the fewest labor protections) and
seizing control of federal data systems—were his own invention versus Vought’s. Perhaps the OMB director simply recognized that nobody could match Musk’s forcefulness and encouraged him to bring the same blitzkrieg mentality to government that he had used with his companies.
Convinced as he was that the government was a cesspool of waste and fraud, Musk may well have truly believed that he could trim it just by firing as many people as possible and giving a bunch of young loyalists AI tools and access to data. (In fact, it
should be possible to cut a huge amount of government spending, but mostly by ending what are essentially subsidies to industries including defense, finance, and health care—something that would require major policy changes, not just some streamlining of government operations.)
Musk may also believe that any conflicts of interest he has are irrelevant: After all, if his business ventures are all in the service of humanity, isn’t it good for humanity if they get more government contracts?
But in the process, Musk certainly achieved Vought’s aim of traumatizing bureaucrats. And the consolidation of all government data, which
continues apace even as Musk steps back, could now be used by the White House to target political opponents or undocumented immigrants, as well as recalcitrant government workers.
It seems obvious in retrospect that tighter control of the federal bureaucracy—always Vought’s stated goal—was the real purpose of DOGE, and the cost-cutting was secondary. By hogging the limelight with his antics and making it seem like it was all about “government efficiency” (who, after all, doesn’t want that?), Musk served to distract from that purpose, as well as to divert criticism away from Trump.
It’s looking increasingly likely that the world’s richest man got played.
foreignpolicy.com
...now Vought only needs to found Vought International and create Homelander. /s
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