If you’ve paid even a speck of attention to the news since January 20th, you know that Elon Musk, the centibillionaire head of Twitter (I still refuse to call it X), Tesla, and SpaceX, is now also a special government employee by virtue of being the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE, a reference to an ancient meme and a worthless cryptocurrency) which, despite its name, is not an actual cabinet department of the executive branch. So what is it, exactly? 

Well, the charitable answer is that it’s a collection of lawyers and tech experts who have been charged by President Donald Trump with evaluating the spending habits of the federal government to identify waste and conflicts of interest. The less charitable – and from my perspective more accurate – description is that it’s a collection of unqualified tech bros who have been given improper access to the Department of the Treasury’s payment system in an attempt to whip up scandal out of nothing, all in the name of punishing Trump’s enemies and executing on his agenda without having to involve Congress. But zooming out a bit, I’d further argue that, more than a mere attempt to subvert the separation of powers, DOGE represents the malign encroachment of one of Silicon Valley’s most frustrating trends into the realm of government: namely, solutionism. 

Technology is a wonderful thing that’s no doubt made our lives better and, dare I say, more efficient. Anyone with a smartphone and a data plan can now easily find their way around an unfamiliar city, Bluetooth has made devices more mobile, and literal encyclopedias worth of information are instantly accessible via the Internet. But for all of these genuinely useful technological advances, there are plenty that present themselves as solutions to problems that do not actually exist. Nobody needs a refrigerator that connects to WiFi, or a subscription-based juicer, or the Metaverse. But when you’re a world-changing hammer, everything looks like a re-codeable nail. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, when Silicon Valley sees something they can apply their tech-based solutions too, they’re so preoccupied about whether they can that they don’t always consider whether or not anyone actually cares. 

The term “solutionism” was coined by researcher Evgeny Morozov in his 2013 book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. As described by Evan Selinger, Morovoz’s theory of solutionism is best described as “the mistaken belief that we can make great progress on alleviating complex dilemmas, if not remedy them entirely, by reducing their core issues to simpler engineering problems.” Selinger goes on to explain that solutionism is “seductive” for three core reasons: it’s “psychologically reassuring,” “financially enticing,” and “reinforces optimism about innovation.” In other words, rather than fully consider the context of why a certain, imperfect system may exist or the repercussions of radically redefining it, solutionism peddles a somewhat utopian idea that things can be optimized with the right level of technical know-how. 

While most people encounter solutionism in the form of unnecessarily complicated consumer products and services, in both his book and subsequent work, Morozov has discussed solutionism’s implications for government. In an interview with The New Yorker’s George Packer, Morozov critiqued the altruistic efforts of Silicon Valley billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, saying that “they think anything that helps you bypass institutions is, by default, empowering or liberating. You might not be able to pay for health care or your insurance, but if you have an app on your phone that alerts you to the fact that you need to exercise more, or you aren’t eating healthily enough, they think they are solving the problem.” In that same article, Packer himself writes that technology in and of itself “has little to say about larger issues of justice and fairness, unless you think that political problems are bugs that can be fixed by engineering rather than fundamental conflicts of interest and value.” 

It’s not difficult to see how this “solutionist” view might be informing the approach of Musk’s DOGE. It’s rather telling that a significant slice of DOGE’s staff seems to be made up of developers devoted to rooting through the code of various agencies to “uncover” fraud and wasteful spending – to them, any situation where numbers look higher than they should be is evidence of inefficiency at best and corruption at worst. But Morozov’s criticisms of the way solutionism encourages consumers to look at themselves can be applied to DOGE’s approach to government, as well. In an interview with Natasha Dow Schüll, Morozov rails against the “Quantified Self (QS) movement,” a suite of tech-enabled habits that allow people to track their diets, exercise regimes, work patterns, and other measurable aspects of daily life all in the name of optimizing their health and output. The pitfalls of this approach, according to Morozov, is that it reframes the self as a “black box with an input and an output” where the “user has no idea how the input relates to the output.” 

It’s difficult to conjure up a better way to describe the apparent philosophical approach of DOGE and the second Trump administration writ large over the course of the past few weeks. When DOGE discovered that USAID was sending money to Politico, they claimed that this was evidence that the government was “subsidizing” news to curry favorable coverage. But these were actually subscription payments for Politico Pro, a news and information platform for policy professionals that, one would assume, helps make the jobs of the people working at USAID and other government agencies more efficient. Because DOGE does not understand the relationship between the input (payment to Politico) and the output (the benefits of a Politico Pro subscription), they assume that there’s something nefarious afoot, prompting a government-wide slashing of its media subscriptions. In true solutionist form, DOGE had identified a problem that did not exist and took aggressive, destructive, and nonsensical means to “correct” it. 

Of course, this approach threatens more than the profits of the beltway press. Perhaps the most egregious example of this solutionist thinking can be found in the administration’s approach to the aforementioned USAID.  If you’re a solutionist like Musk, USAID is inefficient – it sends American tax dollars to foreign countries in the form of health, poverty, and disaster relief that produces little evident financial benefit to the United States. But beyond the moral argument that the world’s richest and most powerful nation should use some of its wealth to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate, USAID is also an effective outlet for soft power – or, put more bluntly, an excellent propaganda tool. Drop bombs on a country, and they’ll probably come to hate you – hand out food, vaccines, and other aid instead, and they’ll probably come to like you. USAID’s importance is only further highlighted by attempts from adversarial nations like China and Russia to develop their own spheres of influence in other developing economies, particularly in Africa. A drastic drawback in funding for USAID might save the American taxpayer (an ultimately insignificant amount of) money, but it’ll cost the United States as a whole an invaluable level of influence and esteem. 

If one were to follow the solutionist mindset to its logical conclusions, you’d wind up in some absurd places. Take the military, for example. The Department of Defense clothes, houses, feeds, equips, and pays millions of people across the world, and once those people retire, the Department of Veterans Affairs ends up paying for all or some of their healthcare for the rest of their lives. It is in no way shape or form “efficient,” and represented $803 billion of federal discretionary spending in FY 2023. But considering there hasn’t been a foreign military attack on American soil since World War II and the fact that we’re very good at killing people we don’t like, the military is clearly “effective” even if it isn’t always “efficient.” America’s return on investment in the men and women of its armed forces may not be reflected in dollars and cents, but it is reflected in terms of the safety of the American homeland, deterrence of America’s enemies, and the safety of its citizens abroad, to say nothing of the technological and scientific advances that begin in the military before trickling down into our everyday lives (for much more on this, Mariana Mazzucato’s research and book dubbed “The Entrepreneurial State” are worth a read).

But no matter how much Silicon Valley sheen is applied to DOGE’s efforts, at the end of the day, they’re simply seeking to implement one of the conservative movement’s most pervasive and damaging fallacies – that the government “should be run like a business.” This is a foolish line of thinking – the government is not a business, or a household, or a private citizen, or any other entity that has to find ways to minimize their expenditures and maximize their profits. Instead, it is a uniquely powerful institution that, whether conservatives like it or not, is responsible for keeping the very fabric of our society intact by keeping its citizens safe from physical harm and material destitution. This isn’t to say that there aren’t areas of life where I think government regulation can be burdensome or its operations streamlined and simplified. But when a group of unelected tech barons decides to “move fast and break things” in Washington, they aren’t breaking a company’s ability to produce widgets – they’re breaking the government’s ability to protect and provide for its citizens. 

As evidenced by Trump’s current approval rating, the irresponsibility of DOGE’s actions doesn’t seem to have sunk in on the American public just yet. If their actions are limited to organizations like USAID and NIH, whose work doesn’t directly touch the lives of most Americans, it may not sink in at all. But if, as promised, DOGE begins to root around in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in search of “fraud” and keeps beneficiaries from receiving checks and accessing healthcare, Trump and the Republicans could soon find themselves reaping the whirlwind. In searching for problems that don’t exist, they may just end up creating ones for themselves.