BURSTThe thing that will stick in my head most about the (first? last??) “Elon in the White House” chapter, now that it is ostensibly drawing to a close, won’t be the more headline-generating carnival antics—not Trump and Musk hawking Teslas on the White House lawn, not Musk hosting a press conference in the Oval Office while his son taunted the president—but a handful of lines that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson liked to trot out in the peak DC Elon days of March:
“Elon has cracked the code,” Johnson said as part of a sound bite he delivered a few times in press conferences and on Fox talk shows. Whereas previously the deep state was hidden, Johnson said, Musk had “created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data,” finding fraud and waste. He made a little spidery gesture with his hand to emphasize the point. “As he told me in his office, the data doesn’t lie.”
This was all disingenuous of course. You did not need AI-powered algorithms run by the CEO of Tesla to look up line items in the USAID budget, or to then declare the expenses you found part of a Democratic deep state conspiracy. I am aware of no legitimate fraud that was uncovered by DOGE. But that idea—that a heroic tech titan was turning his entrepreneurial acumen to the business of modernizing the government, rescuing it from bureaucratic capture with cutting edge AI technologies—was extremely useful to the GOP, for a while.
It empowered DOGE to do mass firings, gave the GOP an air of being future-forward, and helped the Trump administration dodge accountability. It was a big job. Sadly for Elon, after successfully creating the framework through which the GOP can accomplish those goals without him, he has been pushed out in ignominy. He lost his job, and has, you might even say, been replaced by his own AI.
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There are clearly many factors leading to Elon’s exit from the White House, as his 5-month term as a special government adviser is over. There’s the dire state of some of his companies, notably Tesla, whose reputation and stock price alike have been sullied by widespread backlash to his political activities; Musk’s own story is that he’s returning to focus on them. (Whatever else Elon’s exit is, it’s a victory for organizers in the Tesla Takedown movement.) There are also the widely reported tensions between Trumpworld and Musk: In one particularly juicy anecdote, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Musk are said to have clashed so heatedly over DOGE that they got into a shoving match, and now Elon is literally leaving DC with a black eye. A lot of Trump insiders were tired of Elon’s unpredictability and bad jokes, and maybe all the drugs, and they wanted him out.
And all that was before Trump and Musk went nuclear on each other, with Musk taking to X to call Trump’s signature bill “disgusting” and Trump saying he was “disappointed in Elon” at a press conference and Musk posting that Trump is in the Epstein files and Trump threatening to cancel Musk’s billions in government contracts and who knows what else by the time you read this. Until then, a lot of the discussion has focused so far on how much power Musk will retain in Washington, and how much damage he inflicted over the last five months.
Analysts calculated that while DOGE claims it has cut $160 billion from the budget by cancelling programs and laying off workers, it has also incurred $135 billion in costs, via lost productivity, bungled layoffs, and damage incurred to digital systems and infrastructure; to say nothing of the mounting legal costs related to allegations of illegal firings. What DOGE has “saved” in labor costs, in other words, has all but been cancelled out by new costs incurred. Dismantling USAID and cutting off PEPFAR, meanwhile, have almost certainly led to tens of thousands of deaths by preventing people who relied on the agencies to fund medical clinics from getting it. And the layoffs have upended and ruined lives.
And whether or not this is the end of the road for the Trump-Musk alliance, we do have to understand that the damage is continuing and will continue to be done via DOGE, via those frameworks Musk set in motion. That basically, Elon’s job has been automated. After he put in all that work for the GOP, donating to Trump’s campaign, then validating DOGE mission and even taking the flack for it, and accomplishing some key political goals—well, now Trump and the GOP don’t need him anymore. Especially if he’s going to be a pain in the ass around the White House, lose them elections in Wisconsin, and get in the way of passing their tax cuts. The system he hyped and set in motion can function without him—you might even venture to say that Elon has lost his gig to DOGE’s AI—or at least a fantasy of AI—that he helped construct himself.
One of Musk’s top deputies in DOGE, Thomas Shedd, has thrust an “AI-first strategy” onto a number of federal agencies, an effort Musk has pushed. Musk’s a big believer in the power of AI to automate jobs, after all: Last year, at a tech conference, Musk said that pretty soon, “Probably none of us will have a job.”
Many on the right have of course long dreamed of downsizing the federal workforce, ridding offices of civil servants, and installing more partisan ideologues. In the recent New Yorker profile of the tech-right thoughtfluencer Curtis Yarvin, Ava Kofman notes that, ‘In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance… cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,’ and ignore the courts if they objected.” This was also an arch goal of the famed Project 2025 policy document that has animated much of Trump’s early agenda. Musk and his DOGE project made it possible.
This was Musk’s job: to use his tech billionaire mythos to give technocratic cover for an expansive and widely unpopular political project. To provide the spark, the justification, and the narrative to render the act of firing tens of thousands of federal employees if not palatable, then at least thinkable and actionable. Under DOGE, this was no mere heartless mass layoffs of public workers, no, it was an “AI-first strategy” that was necessary to right-size the government and run it efficiently, like a business. Musk’s job was to imbue the proceedings with a sense of futurity, to make a show of promoting AI tools that are supposed to replace government workers—and to impart the logic that federal offices are to be hollowed out, mined for data, and automated, onto DOGE and the Republican party.
Russ Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and an author of the Project 2025 document, had made it clear long before DOGE that terminating career federal workers was a priority. This may be why, unlike other White House officials who butted heads with Musk, Vought got on board with his project.
“Musk has helped to create a permission structure for the kind of cuts that Vought and his fellow budget hawks have long dreamed of making,” Politico noted in an article about the “quiet alliance” between the two men. Now Vought is largely seen as Musk’s successor at DOGE, picking up where Elon left off. He’s already taken over as the acting head of the gutted Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFRB), effectively shutting it down. And DOGE is, per WIRED, who interviewed a number of government employees impacted by the agency, “busier than ever.”
Readers of this newsletter know that automation often is not about efficiency at all, but control—and that automation technology, AI or otherwise, doesn’t actually have to work to be activated by management. Automation is a story. It’s one of the most powerful permission structure-generators for layoffs out there, and one of the most reliable ways for bosses to consolidate control. Russ Vought and JD Vance don’t much care whether the AI chatbots DOGE is touting in the federal government can replace jobs effectively or not—their goal is to winnow non-loyal federal workers from the government, and if the logic of “AI-first” or “automation” help them do that, so be it.
Musk conceived and launched DOGE, imbued it with its Silicon Valley-adjacent operating mythology, made himself its avatar, and animated its mission. He succeeded in firing thousands of people, hollowing out government agencies, and opening up departments to data mining operations. That operation is now free to be run by lower-profile Trumpworld denizens like Vought, where, arguably, it can do just as much if not more damage without attracting the headlines and attention it otherwise would have with Musk’s involvement.
And so, that will likely be his legacy: a semi-autonomous DOGE, empowered to foist its “AI-first” logic on departments to justify layoffs and cuts, to be replaced by brittle AI systems operated by Silicon Valley firms. Now that Musk is out, the baton can and will be picked up by Vance and Vought and whoever else needs to use it. At least in its efforts to carve up the federal government, the GOP doesn’t need Musk anymore—in fact, he may be a liability. (There’s a reason that most oligarchs don’t run around with chainsaws onstage taking open delight in the misery of others—people start to fucking hate them.)
No, they just need the made-up algorithms they told everyone Elon created, the ones that are “constantly crawling through the data.” In reality, of course, those algorithms are just a bunch of DOGE guys like Big Balls ransacking federal offices and making lists of people to fire.
“Was it all bullshit?” Trump asked his advisers about DOGE’s project recently, per the Wall Street Journal. And of course it is. Trump doesn’t understand, as some of his staffers do, as Vought does, that a lot of automation is exactly that—a bullshit story that serves management nonetheless. They may not get the $2 trillion in cuts Musk promised, but they are consolidating control of the bureaucracy—tearing up privacy protections and ramping up surveillance in the process—and reshaping it in their image. Musk may be out of the picture, but he leaves behind a powerful imperative that the party can exploit long after his gamer chair has been wheeled out of the White House.
CRITICAL AI REPORT 6/5/25
How to resist AI in 2025
It can be a daunting question, to say the least. Big tech is all-in on AI, firms like OpenAI have amassed historic amounts of venture capital, and Silicon Valley AI products are inundating and often eroding our institutions, our workplaces, our daily lives. So how do we fight back?
The AI Now Institute—where I hold a journalist in residence honorific—issued its 2025 landscape report this week, and I could not recommend spending some time with heartily enough. It does a deft job of breaking down the key harms inflicted by AI companies, and the biggest threats to society if the current trajectory Silicon Valley is taking holds.
The report, parts of which I reviewed, and parts of which I contributed to, explains how AI is entrenching power for big tech and the oligarch class, speeding deregulation, dislodging human expertise and threatening workers—and how there's still time to refuse all that. It delves into the recent history of “AGI” and how it’s wielded by AI companies—a topic I investigated at length in my last AI Now report, too.
From the executive summary:
it’s not just market power we need to be concerned with: These tech oligarchs are counting on a wholesale rewriting of our social and economic foundations, using AI as the justification. From breaking apart the US federal government and raiding citizen data under the guise of efficiency, to redesigning workflows to devalue human labor and creativity so they are AI-ready, to redirecting our entire energy infrastructure to prioritize their technology over people’s basic needs, the vision promulgated by tech oligarchs requires, as a foundation, the unraveling of core social, political, and economic fabrics.
Across our information ecosystem, from science to education, healthcare, culture, and art, AI is being positioned as a disruptive new infrastructure and a mediating force. In truth, though, it rehashes an old playbook, helicoptering in solutions built on the extraction of expertise and value from all corners of society—solutions that always, eventually, amount to the further degradation of life for the most marginalized among us.
The report provides a roadmap for labor, community organizers, and policymakers to take on AI firms. I’m biased, sure, but it’s absolutely worth a read.
The Washington Post seeks to pair cheap content with an “AI writing coach”
It’s rare that a corporation comes along and announces an effort openly intended to deskill workers with technology, but, well, Jeff Bezos’s Trump-era Washington Post