In the 2024 presidential campaign, one of the toughest matchups pitted entrepreneur Elon Musk and conservative activist Charlie Kirk against an established and experienced Democratic field operation. 

The Democrats had history and, based on recent elections, higher-propensity voters on their side. Their analytical prowess in other endeavors notwithstanding, the people getting out the vote for the GOP presidential ticket had never done it before at that level and were relying on people who voted less frequently.

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Musk (and Kirk) won. The Democratic smart set, some with national track records dating back to Barack Obama’s two successful presidential campaigns, lost. Donald Trump returned to the White House with a clean sweep of the battleground states and, for the first time in three tries, a plurality of the national popular vote.

Trump began his second term at the zenith of his political power. More than a month later, the polls are painting a mixed picture of whether that is still true. Overall, things generally look better than during the first term.

But Trump is once again betting on Musk to deliver a big win where all the Democratic smart set says he has no chance. The Department of Government Efficiency could make or break the 47th president.

On one level, DOGE is consistent with the larger Trump project. Democrats and their allies have for decades enjoyed asymmetric advantages in the permanent bureaucracy, media, and academia. Even the few Republican dissenters in these entities and institutions are disproportionately anti-Trump. Trump is committed to tearing down, or at least mitigating, all these advantages.

But Trump, though still well to the right of most Democrats on economics even on purely Reaganite terms, has never really run as a government-cutter. Not even in Republican primaries against conservative competition like Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis. 

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In fact, sometimes Trump’s perceived unwillingness to shred the social safety net—except insofar as it is being used as a hammock by the indolent or illegal immigrants—has redounded to his electoral benefit. Trump carried voters making less than $50,000 a year, according to exit polls. That doesn’t sound like a mandate for unbridled techno-libertarianism, even with Trump’s mostly successful libertarian outreach.

DOGE was a Trump campaign promise. But it now seems to loom larger in his governance than in his campaign, with the even richer billionaire Musk a less sympathetic face for austerity than the blue-collar-friendly president himself, in no small part due to attention from Trump’s enemies in government, media, and academia (and the Tesla titan’s erratic communications strategy).

A dozen years ago, I wrote a book about the political prospects of limited government. I’ve often since joked that it could have been a lot shorter based on today’s political conditions. But $2 trillion in relative peacetime, post-pandemic annual deficit spending and a $36 trillion national debt test the truism that if something cannot go on forever, it will eventually stop.

DOGE is doing some of the things I recommended back in those heady Tea Party days. It is highlighting wasteful spending, things that are inefficient or even just absurd, to showcase the problems of a swollen federal government. But that has to be a means to an end, not the full extent of a serious fiscal conservatism.

The risk of DOGE is that it launches an indiscriminate attack on government, by people who don’t fully understand what they are cutting, breaking things the voters want to work. This is especially acute under Trump, whose agenda requires the government to work effectively, at least in its core functions. 

If commercial flights had been grounded or worse repeatedly crashed after Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, his presidency would be remembered much differently today.

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Under the worst case scenario, the cuts are painful enough to elicit an electoral backlash but too small or poorly targeted to alter the country’s basic fiscal trajectory, especially in conjunction with congressional Republican reconciliation efforts, ensuring that nobody ever tries this again before major entitlement programs’ trust funds reach their breaking point.

This also tests the Republicans’ new, increasingly working-class coalition and to what degree can Trump and the party deliver tangible results for their new voters.

Musk played a role in Trump’s historic political comeback. Time will tell whether his DOGE mission and out-front persona can help produce further Trump victories.