Elon Musk has left his position as head of the federal Department of Government Efficiency, voicing differences with President Trump over federal budget priorities as outlined in the latter’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” But DOGE has already set into motion massive cuts in government spending. Perhaps not surprisingly, programs to help the poor here and abroad have been especially hard hit.
The E in DOGE is supposed to stand for efficiency, but not everyone sees it that way. For example, when the Trump administration laid off the entire staff of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat from Maine, asked, “What ‘efficiency’ is achieved by firing everyone in Maine whose job is to help Mainers afford heating oil when it’s cold?”
It’s a good question. Eliminating a government function doesn’t make it more efficient. DOGE makes no pretext of feeding more people or finding more efficient ways to serve those most in need. Instead, Mr. Musk wielded a chainsaw on stage and bragged about feeding government programs “into the wood chipper.” These antics have nothing to do with “getting more with less,” or any of the other appealing phrases we commonly associate with efficiency. Instead they use the language of efficiency to impose a radical change in how we view helping others.
DOGE reductions to programs for the poor, both here and abroad, come justified with a different kind of language. Regarding the virtual elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “We are reorienting our foreign assistance programs to align directly with what is best for the United States and our citizens.” He would soon use similar language to defend the U.S. government’s virtual non-response to the catastrophic earthquake in Myanmar: “We will do the best we can, but we also have other needs we have to balance that against.” Resorting to the language of national interests, aside from being shockingly cold-blooded in this case, also has nothing to do with efficiency.
The ominous roar of DOGE’s chainsaw will remain with us for some time. In late April, The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump’s new budget proposal would further “fray the nation’s social safety net” and that “the draft budget slashes many federal antipoverty programs.” For example, Head Start, one of the programs on the chopping block, would no longer be able to serve its role of providing early education and child care for the nation’s poorest children.
I spent some of my best years in academia under the mentorship of colleagues who helped guide our food policies during the Kennedy and Johnson years. Granted, politics and the Cold War played their parts in food programs, but when my colleagues from those days talked of Food for Peace and the food stamp program, it was with genuine concern for people here and abroad. Farm groups proudly proclaimed that they were “feeding the world.”
We have fallen a long way from the heyday of progressive food policies. Looking back, the seeds of today’s callousness were sown during the Reagan administration. Government began to be seen as a problem, not a solution, something to be downsized wherever possible. In other words, something that should be “run like a business.”
In late March, a Trump-appointed labor official announced that U.S.-backed efforts to combat labor abuses throughout the world would end immediately because of a “lack of alignment with agency priorities and national interest.” At first I found it difficult to understand that statement in the context of a government concerned with the well-being of all. But I kept coming back to that phrase “run like a business.” Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk spent their formative years in private business, not public service. They are no doubt aware of the 1919 Michigan Supreme Court ruling in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.: “A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders.” When I think of a government run like a business, ignoring labor abuses makes perfect sense.
Since the days of the New Deal, the United States has had a mixed economy of private and public functions. As noted above, private companies grow, process and sell food for those who can afford to pay market prices, while those who cannot are served by public food assistance programs. Government provides a safety net for the poor and protection for the environment when private business cannot, or will not, do so. But as DOGE flings government programs into its woodchipper, the government that remains is not only run like a business; for all practical purposes, it is a business, one that benefits its billionaire shareholders at the expense of the poor here and abroad.
What can we do when those who are not counted as shareholders in America First Inc. are left to suffer? During the Covid-19 crisis, Pope Francis said, “That is what we need to do: Go back, turn back to God and our neighbor, no longer isolated and anesthetized before the cry of the poor and the devastation of our planet…. We need to be united in facing all those pandemics that are spreading: that of the virus, but also those of hunger, war, contempt for life and indifference to others.”
What an insightful and powerful diagnosis of our national condition. We have let ourselves become “anesthetized before the cry of the poor and the devastation of our planet.”
Business ideology is a powerful anesthetic, one that gift-wraps cruelty in promises of efficiency and appeals to cost-benefit analysis. Pope Francis exhorted us to wake up and look to our faith, not the markets, to guide us in a world where the cry of the poor becomes louder by the day.
In contrast, DOGE represents a truly dark side to the America First movement. It is time we rethink the E in DOGE and begin calling the new office what it really is: the Department of Government Elimination.
