Matt Bai writes:

[W]hat’s happened at USAID over the past couple of weeks is unfathomable. A $50 billion agency — funded by taxpayers, empowered by Congress and employing something like 11,000 people around the world — is now tightly controlled by a handful of 20-something software engineers who have never worked a day in government. They disregard promises from the American secretary of state while agonized policy experts stand by helplessly.

In the coming weeks, courts will have to decide if those engineers and their billionaire boss had the right to fire pretty much everybody who worked at USAID. If I were betting (admittedly, this would have to be one very un-fun gambling site), I would wager that a year from now the agency itself will have disappeared, with many of its programs and staffers continuing on at State. All of which probably could have been achieved in a more orderly and humane way had the agency been allowed to wind down more gradually under Rubio’s supervision.

Maybe this unsettles Farritor and Kliger on some level — maybe they toss and turn on leather couches in the Eisenhower Building, troubled by a suspicion that Musk has them doing things they will one day regret. But I doubt it. Like young revolutionaries everywhere, Musk’s former interns are probably swept up in the cause, reveling in the power to torture a bureaucracy they’ve been taught to loathe. Humiliating career public servants isn’t some accidental byproduct of the quest for efficiency. It seems to be the point of the exercise.

The swift sacking of USAID shook official Washington and set the tone for how DOGE would attack the rest of the government, starting with the Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For me, it raises a fundamental question about Musk’s work, and I don’t think I’m alone in asking it. Is it what Musk is trying to do that makes me recoil — or is it the way in which he’s doing it? Is it even possible to separate the substance here from the style?

After all, in the abstract, most critics of an ever-expanding federal bureaucracy — and I’m solidly among them — would be open to bold moves such as folding USAID into the State Department or padlocking the Education Department. If anything, as I’ve written, I’d like to see Musk take on even more controversial fights, such as modernizing the entitlement programs that are the drivers of unsustainable debt or overhauling the corrupt and outdated system by which the Pentagon gets its weapons. You don’t have to work hard to convince me that we have too many agencies and too many low-impact programs.

But does this really need to be done — can it be done effectively at all — by branding lifelong public servants as “criminals” and making them suffer for sport? What’s the perverse joy to be had in making some of the foremost experts in their fields prostrate themselves before a couple of grad-school-level coders who probably couldn’t find Congo on a map? [Continue reading…]