The ever-mounting hysteria over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seems to largely be coming from that large sector of Americans who work for, or in other ways feed from, Washington’s seemingly bottomless trough. As government employment and spending have cascaded in recent years, this has created not so much a ‘deep state’, as the right-wing paranoids suspect, but a huge and expanding protected class of people who are anxious to defend their livelihoods.

Most anti-DOGE jeremiads avoid questions of class or self-interest. Predictable Democratic allies, like the Atlantic, accuse Musk of presiding over a ‘reign of ineptitude’ and waging war on defenseless civil servants. Some suggest that this reflects a deep-seated desire by GOP neanderthals to remove objective ‘empiricists’ from Washington – presumably the same ‘experts’ who led the nation into mounting debt, high inflation, increasing class divisions and a chronic inability to get things built at reasonable cost.

Many have resorted to the tired, old ‘fascist’ meme. Anne Applebaum sees Musk’s disruption of the federal bureaucracy as nothing less than the arrival of authoritarian ‘regime change’. As if auditing the bureaucracy is now the first step towards totalitarianism. Even some populist conservatives have warned that the fallout from DOGE’s cuts will ultimately harm vulnerable working-class people the most.

The class dynamics at play in DOGE are not as straightforward as some would have it. It’s not simply a case of Musk, the billionaire oligarch, ruthlessly attacking the lowly administrator. The impetus for DOGE is primarily driven by a conflict within the middle class. On one side are public workers whose pay, and pensions, well exceed those in the private sector. On the other, there are millions who pay tax and feel harassed by regulations, particularly among Trump’s base of small business owners. Millions of middle- and working-class families not sucking the federal teat are falling ever behind the affluent elites, who seem to control the state whichever party is in power.

Throughout the Biden years, government employment and related sectors, notably in health services, have emerged as the only consistently growing high-wage sectors, a pattern evident both in the last month of his administration and Trump’s first. In contrast, material sectors, like manufacturing and mining, have slumped. In the first three years of Biden’s presidency, the ranks of government workers, at all levels, expanded by 1.5million. In 2024, the federal government reached its highest worker count in two decades. President Biden’s budget for 2025, signed in March last year, envisaged total spending to be more than 60 per cent higher than it was in 2019.

This public-spending surge has sparked the growth of a ‘new class’, to adapt former Yugoslav communist theoretician Milovan Djilas’s term for the elite bureaucrats of the Soviet system. Another useful analogy is the ‘clerisy’. Indeed, America’s version operates much as the pre-revolutionary French clergy did. This was a powerful and protected segment of society, but it was not monolithic. It had its bishops, but also parish priests, who often barely lived any better than their parishioners.

Once, US government employment was modestly paid but well pensioned and secure. Now government workers tend to be more white-collar than blue, paid at levels largely justified by their college credentials. In some states, like the progressive stronghold of California, government workers constitute the only high-wage class that is growing, unlike IT, manufacturing or mining, once sources of high-wage employment. In deep-blue California, government workers make roughly twice the average private-sector wage.

DOGE is upsetting this apple cart. But it’s more than just paid government workers who are threatened. The Musk-led effort has revealed the degree of largesse granted to mostly progressive non-profits, often closely associated with Democratic politicians. Big beneficiaries include the ever-agitated Stacey Abrams, or the wife of Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse. The rise of the clerisy has also been bolstered by progressive billionaires and their spouses, or ex-spouses, who don’t have to worry about economic realities, acting much like aristocratic patrons of the church of yore.

The government class was once fairly divided between the parties. But in recent years the bureaucracy has become ever more clearly aligned with the Democratic Party. Between 1997 and 2019, the percentage of federal workers who identified with the GOP, according to a recent UC Berkeley study, dropped from one-third to a quarter. Twice as many identify as Democrats. Particularly notable has been the growing radicalisation of teachers’ unions, who seem to have lost any pretense of even listening to parents who might be conservative or who care about merit.

For much of the elite bureaucracy, Musk and Trump must be as welcome as the Goths were in imperial Rome. Washington, DC voted 90 per cent for Kamala Harris in 2024. Most Americans may not have embraced the Harris ‘vibe’, but federal employees certainly did, giving her roughly 84 per cent of their donations. The left lean is particularly evident in departments like the now threatened Department of Education, where not one dollar of donations went to Trump. Generally, Harris romped in virtually every part of the apparat by wide margins. The main exception was the military, one part of the government that’s now again ‘hot’, attracting large numbers of recruits.

This is largely why conservatives tend to look at the whole federal government as arrayed against them. Yet the bureaucracy’s rise is not so much an expression of a will to power, but rather a product of the total incompetence and fecklessness of congress. Rather than debate the major issues and find a compromise, they allow the bureaucracies to impose unpopular regulations, such as EV mandates and initiatives like DEI.

Then we have to consider the changing nature of the government workforce. Losing a government job means, for many, the best or last chance to earn decent pay for graduates in fields like gender studies, DEI and environmental science. This educated class has expanded globally, with college enrollment growing by almost 80 per cent between 1970 and 2010, yet opportunities for graduates have actually been in decline. As members of what one socialist scholar described as ‘the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vice of low-paying jobs’, they will resist any attempt to cut off their last reasonable hope for a healthy career.

The bureaucrats are waging their own class war, too. The clerisy sees the rise of MAGA as the ascendancy of what HL Mencken might have called ‘the boobacracy’. On a recently broadcast episode of The Breakfast Club, Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett called Republicans ‘less educated folks’, who ‘literally don’t want to read and enlighten themselves on facts’.

Given these attitudes, it’s not surprising that large sectors of the private-sector economy are fed up with the clerisy’s accretion of wealth and power. People who work with their hands and small business owners tend to be on the receiving end of the bureaucracy’s sometimes draconian regulations. These groups support the GOP by wide margins. Few environmental activists, librarians or medical professionals (outside surgeons) are Republicans, while oil drillers, truck drivers and small-business owners lean heavily towards the right.

In that sense, you can compare DOGE to the tennis-court parliament set up by the French Third Estate at the beginning of the revolution. It’s a disruption of the existing order. It reveals a deep division in terms of economic function that runs all the way from Elon Musk and Trump’s rogue investment bankers to the denizens of Main Street.

Today, Democrats scorn the oligarchs, who they formerly allied with, now that some are withholding their donations or even jumping on the Trump train. They attack Musk, but they had little to say when Google executives essentially camped out at the White House during the Obama years, or when people like Mark Zuckerberg funded their get-out-the-vote campaign in 2020. Much is made of the idea that Musk may benefit personally from DOGE, but it’s just as likely Tesla, in particular, will suffer under plans to remove unpopular EV mandates.

The battle over DOGE is really about how much power and money the government class should have, and in whose interests it should operate. Historically, the US favours the private sector, notwithstanding its abuses and the need to rein in its excesses. The effort of the Trumpistas to cut away at the clerisy is a clear effort to shift back to a more traditional US model, although some Republicans will want to shun the knife if it affects their districts.

Whether this will work or not depends a lot on how Trump and his minions approach streamlining the apparat. Massive staff cuts, which most Americans fear may hurt the economy or simply perceive as cruel, are a sure way to erode support even from those sympathetic to DOGE’s aims. To make this work, Musk needs to find common ground with Democrats. Moderate Democrats, after all, once embraced Bill Clinton’s initiatives for ‘reinventing government’. Even some former Obama people rue the fact that they did not do more to streamline the lumbering bureaucracy. Others rightly point out that by defending the status quo, Democrats risk alienating an already angry segment of the public. ‘Part of the problem for the Democratic Party is that it has become a stalwart defender of institutions at a time when people are enraged at institutions’, warns veteran strategist David Axelrod.

We may all wish godspeed to DOGE, but the effort must be rooted in a genuine drive for efficiency rather than simply an exercise in Trumpian revenge. Rather than wipe out whole departments, it first should prune absurd and bloated programmes. Government workers should not be dismissed automatically as villains and perennial slackers, either. The focus must be the cost of government and the power of the bureaucrats, not just the number of government employees. It’s not the people at the post office or manning military bases who should be its targets.

The real problem lies at the higher levels, and in the intertwined interests of the state and its favoured allies in business as well as the non-profit world and the hopelessly corrupt education establishment. Like in revolutionary France, America’s clerical class needs to be curbed, its power and its autonomy reduced, but perhaps let’s pass on the guillotines. Do this more judiciously and with less rancour, and most Americans, even many Democrats will get behind the DOGE agenda.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.