What do you think of the irony that Musk, who made his empire on the back of federal spending, tried to annihilate federal spending through DOGE — and then failed at it.

Ben Tarnoff: DOGE, on its own terms, certainly failed. Musk came into the White House promising $2 trillion in cuts and only a small fraction of that number was ever realized — and then those cuts were essentially erased by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

But looking at it at face value, as a project attempting to eliminate waste, is perhaps one of the least helpful ways to understand what they were doing. If we descend into a bit more detail and look at what the DOGE operatives did, one of the primary objectives they had was to break down data silos both within and across agencies and to integrate data across the federal government. This means taking data from different sources in different formats and putting it in repositories such that it would be collected together. And when you do so, you can query those databases, you can plug them into AI models that could use them both as training data, but also as data that can be automatically processed by those AI services.

So it was a data grab?

Quinn Slobodian: That seems to have been part of it. There’s now a whistleblower who says that someone left the DOGE team with a thumb drive with all of the social security administration’s files of people both living and dead on it. That is part of it.

But I think it’s more of a three step process of reformatting the state: delete, integrate, automate. He’s taking the factory floor model he has for understanding the world and bringing it into government, and then ultimately trying to scale that to society at large. And in doing so, running into all kinds of obstacles of actual existing humanity.

His fixation on the vampires leaching off of the federal budget is actually a sign of the desperation at the heart of his inability to understand why people would understand themselves as part of society. He assumes that if people are opposed to him, then they must have been infected by a mind virus or they must be themselves people out of place. The idea that people might have a sense of civic belonging that extends beyond their own personal self-interest — that they might operate out of empathy — are for him just bugs in need of fixes.

If you’re an opponent of “Muskism,” one should take heart at the fact that his impoverished understanding of human nature will actually be his own undoing.

‘His lack of empathy could be his undoing’ sounds like a very Marvel-movie way of thinking about that. Do you think that is actually possible?

Quinn Slobodian: That was literally the case in the DOGE experiment, right? We recently learned that the Germans have this lovely phrase, “biting granite,” which is when you’re shoveling or digging, and then you finally hit bedrock and you have a problem. You can’t go any farther. And that’s what happened to Musk when he hit Social Security and Medicare, when he tried to make the cuts there that really would be necessary to deliver anything like the kind of promises that he was making. But what happened there is in his lack of empathy, he overestimated the ability of the state to run roughshod over the arrangements that arguably sit at the basis of the fragile social contract that is American life. It turns out that people having contributed for their entire working life or people living already in high levels of precarity need those survival infrastructures to get by, and Musk’s inability to understand that actually ended up producing the precipitous drop in popularity that then led him to exit the White House literally with a black eye.