Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have laid out their plans for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a currently nonexistent entity they say will “cut the federal government down to size.” Though DOGE isn’t a real department — and may in fact just be President-elect Donald Trump’s way of placating Musk by giving him the appearance of a real job — it represents a long-running right-wing attempt to gut the civil service, a plan the incoming administration fully supports.

DOGE could be a mechanism for a Musk shadow presidency, a nonsense job designed to keep Musk busy without giving him real power, or a curious mix of the two. In any case, Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed cutting “thousands” of federal regulations and determining the…

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