It was during the early months of the pandemic, and Donald Trump was vexed. Experts had told him that hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, was no good as a treatment for covid-19. He summoned Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, to put him straight, brandishing anecdotal evidence from 80-year-old ex-professional golfer Jack Nicklaus. Dr Collins, who discovered the gene for cystic fibrosis, tried to respond tactfully, explaining that only a double-blind randomised controlled trial could reveal whether a drug actually works. Mr Trump never summoned Dr Collins for a private meeting again.
To govern well requires finding accurate information and analysing it rationally. Mr Trump’s scorn for such principles has increasingly infected the federal government. During his first term, Dr Collins merely had to endure a lecture from Robert F. Kennedy junior about how vaccines cause autism. In his second term, Mr Kennedy is the health secretary, Dr Collins was pushed out, and measles is spreading among unvaccinated American kids. In the book Blockers, author Michael Lewis tells the stories of federal workers who tried to resist Mr Trump’s assault on the bureaucracy.
Mr Lewis concedes that waste in government is a real problem and that employees are too hard to sack. He shares the story of Maxine, an air force employee whose series of infractions led to a drawn-out administrative saga involving discrimination claims and backpay. Reform was and is needed, but Mr Trump’s hatchet men did not understand the machine they were trying to re-engineer. They thought in stereotypes, led by young techies dying to breathe the same air as Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, largely lacking a basic grasp of how the government functions.
Consequently, DOGE started slashing haphazardly. It tried to fire probationary staff—the recent hires who were mostly either young or possessed urgently needed skills—while permanent staff were offered hefty payouts to quit. A return-to-the-office rule was enforced mindlessly, and DOGE even killed a study on wildfire spread because the necessary computers were not in a government office. DOGE failed to make the state smaller, but it did make it dumber, censoring scientific grants for containing harmless technical terms that overlapped with political grievances.
The intervention also made government crueller and less accountable. After Mr Musk outed an informant supplying vital intelligence from the Taliban, the man's family was rounded up and tortured. When food subsidies for the poor were cut, a survey measuring hunger was scrapped to suppress evidence of harm. Most disturbing of all, Mr Musk's tech-savvy foot soldiers saw the law as an obstacle to work around rather than a guide.
This disregard for legal boundaries led to clashes over data privacy, such as when DOGE operatives demanded sweeping access to Internal Revenue Service systems and taxpayer data. Efforts were made to bypass privacy officers to secure personal data on millions of individuals who had filed tax returns, threatening long-standing guarantees that had encouraged tax compliance among vulnerable populations.