INDIA IPPON DESU
Monday, March 31, 2025
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Monday, March 24, 2025
Quantum Breakthrough in IIT Madras
IIT-Madras Achieves Quantum Breakthrough in Ultrasound Imaging
Chennai, March 24, 2025 – Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-Madras) have announced a major breakthrough in ultrasound imaging technology, utilizing advanced metamaterials to enhance imaging precision. This innovation has the potential to revolutionize medical diagnostics by offering higher resolution, deeper tissue penetration, and reduced noise interference compared to conventional ultrasound systems.
What is the Breakthrough?
The research team has developed a quantum-inspired metamaterial that significantly improves the efficiency of ultrasound waves. By controlling how sound waves propagate through tissues, this material reduces distortion and enhances clarity, making it easier for doctors to detect tumors, organ abnormalities, and vascular diseases with greater accuracy.
Why is it Important?
Traditional ultrasound imaging is often limited by signal degradation, especially when scanning deep tissues. The use of metamaterials, which are engineered to manipulate sound waves at a microscopic level, allows for sharper and more detailed images. This could lead to early detection of diseases, better prenatal screenings, and improved diagnostics for cardiovascular and musculoskeletal conditions.
Impact on Healthcare
More Accurate Diagnosis: Enhanced imaging will help doctors detect conditions at an earlier stage, improving treatment outcomes.
Lower Costs: The technology could be integrated into existing ultrasound machines without the need for expensive new hardware.
Portable and Efficient: The breakthrough makes compact and mobile ultrasound devices more powerful, aiding remote and rural healthcare services.
What’s Next?
The IIT-Madras team is working on clinical trials and industry partnerships to bring this technology into mainstream medical use. If commercialized, this could position India as a global leader in next-generation medical imaging technologies.
This discovery adds to IIT-Madras’ growing contributions in quantum technology and biomedical engineering, further cementing its role in cutting-edge scientific advancements.
Chennai, March 24, 2025 – Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-Madras) have announced a major breakthrough in ultrasound imaging technology, utilizing advanced metamaterials to enhance imaging precision. This innovation has the potential to revolutionize medical diagnostics by offering higher resolution, deeper tissue penetration, and reduced noise interference compared to conventional ultrasound systems.
What is the Breakthrough?
The research team has developed a quantum-inspired metamaterial that significantly improves the efficiency of ultrasound waves. By controlling how sound waves propagate through tissues, this material reduces distortion and enhances clarity, making it easier for doctors to detect tumors, organ abnormalities, and vascular diseases with greater accuracy.
Why is it Important?
Traditional ultrasound imaging is often limited by signal degradation, especially when scanning deep tissues. The use of metamaterials, which are engineered to manipulate sound waves at a microscopic level, allows for sharper and more detailed images. This could lead to early detection of diseases, better prenatal screenings, and improved diagnostics for cardiovascular and musculoskeletal conditions.
Impact on Healthcare
More Accurate Diagnosis: Enhanced imaging will help doctors detect conditions at an earlier stage, improving treatment outcomes.
Lower Costs: The technology could be integrated into existing ultrasound machines without the need for expensive new hardware.
Portable and Efficient: The breakthrough makes compact and mobile ultrasound devices more powerful, aiding remote and rural healthcare services.
What’s Next?
The IIT-Madras team is working on clinical trials and industry partnerships to bring this technology into mainstream medical use. If commercialized, this could position India as a global leader in next-generation medical imaging technologies.
This discovery adds to IIT-Madras’ growing contributions in quantum technology and biomedical engineering, further cementing its role in cutting-edge scientific advancements.
Sunday, March 23, 2025
Vanishing White Male Writers
By Jacob Savage in Compact Magazine
It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.
And then the doors shut.
By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.
Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).
“The kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo, I think it’s harder for white men,” a leading fiction agent told me. “In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience. The young agents and editors didn’t come up in that culture.” The agent proceeded to list white male writers who have carved out a niche for themselves—Nathan Hill, Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner, Michael Connelly, Adam Ross—but none was younger than Cohen, who was born in 1980.
The more thoughtful pieces on this subject tend to frame the issue as a crisis of literary masculinity, the inevitable consequence of an insular, female-dominated publishing world. All true, to a point. But while there are no male Sally Rooneys or Ottessa Moshfeghs or Emma Clines—there are no white Tommy Oranges or Tao Lins or Tony Tulathimuttes.
Some of this is undoubtedly part of a dynamic that’s played out across countless industries. Publishing houses, like Hollywood writers’ rooms and academic tenure committees, had a glut of established white men on their rosters, and the path of least resistance wasn’t to send George Saunders or Jonathan Franzen out to pasture. But despite these pressures, there are white male millennial novelists. Diversity preferences may explain their absence from prize lists, but they can’t account for why they’ve so completely failed to capture the zeitgeist.
The reasons for that go deeper. All those attacks on the “litbro,” the mockery of male literary ambition—exemplified by the sudden cultural banishment of David Foster Wallace—have had a powerfully chilling effect. Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them. Instead they write genre, they write suffocatingly tight auto-fiction, they write fantastic and utterly terrible period pieces—anything to avoid grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America.
“The literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down.” “The antiseptic legacy of Obama-era MFA programs hangs over this generation.” Imagine, for a moment, that you are a young-ish white male novelist attempting to write your Big Splashy Everything Novel. You want to understand your alienation from yourself, your family, the monoculture around you. You’re a bookish person—you’re a novelist, after all—so you take your toddler son to the bookstore. He’s been asking for a book about whales or fire trucks or trains. These are present, but prominent placement is given to a different kind of book. You see a large display for “Queens of the Jungle,” (“Meet the FEMALE ANIMALS who RULE the ANIMAL KINGDOM”), right next to a YA adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg board book for babies.
If you’re a normal white male millennial you probably roll your eyes; if you’re a maniac like me, you text photos of the display to your groupchats; and if you’re a hero or a Democratic congressman, you tell your two-and-a half year old son, come on, gender isn’t even a thing, we really should buy the book about girlboss animals, NPR said it’s great.
But for the last decade or so the question for our novelist has been trickier. That moment at the bookstore was, at worst, an annoyance. How do you describe a flickering moment of alienation without making your novel an exhaustive, and exhausting, chronicle of such things? On the other hand—how do you not describe it? If your own internal monologue can’t be adapted to the page, what can?
Most avoid the question altogether. Some, like Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Gretel and the Great War) retreat to the safety of history; others, like Zach Williams (Beautiful Days), employ genre (self-described “social science fiction”) to maintain a deep authorial remove from the real world. Still others seek a milieu so distant the cultural transformations on the homefront don’t register. Phil Klay’s Missionaries, a deep dive into American influence and imperialism in Colombia, could have been written at any point in the past 60 years.
Another solution is to set the aperture narrow enough the outside world barely intrudes. Jordan Castro (The Novelist) and Andrew Martin (Early Work) focus so intensely on the auto-fictional writing process, on their own literary ambitions and intimate personal dramas, that any larger social questions appear moot. The tech fable (Colin Winnette’s Users; Greg Jackson’s The Dimensions of a Cave) is a related form of this solipsism—everything is subsumed into the horrors of tech.
Then there’s the millennial twist on socialist realism—except the goal isn’t to showcase an ideal society, but an ideal author. In his 2024 story collection The History of Sound, Ben Shattuck curates a playlist of signifiers—proud historical homosexuals, strong unwavering women, even a Radiolab episode—to reassure the reader that he is the right sort of white man. The title story, soon to be a major motion picture, is about two young men who travel across New England collecting old songs (in other words: Alan Lomax… but gay.). The language is flat, dull, humorless (“The memories of fireflies and swimming naked in the waterfall did nothing but make very fine and long incisions in the membrane of contentedness I’d built up over the years”). But Shattuck’s stories aren’t the product here—he is, oozing sympathy from his own beautiful membrane of contentedness.
Lee Cole, author of the 2022 novel Groundskeeping, follows a similar path, conveying the proper amount of shame at his working-class Kentucky background (“They supported Trump, chiefly because of his promise to bring back American manufacturing. Any hope I may have had for them to renounce their support was ... completely gone”). And Stephen Markley’s 2023 climate change epic The Deluge, replete with a Jamaican/Native American heroine and a queer neurodivergent Arab-American mathematician, shows that appropriation is acceptable so long as the politics are sufficiently on the nose (“The trauma of that time, especially the storming of the Capitol, lit a new fire under me…”).
The antiseptic legacy of Obama-era MFA programs hangs over this generation (all three of the above authors graduated from Iowa). Workshopped to death, shorn of swagger and toxicity —and above all, humor—these books serve more as authorial performances than as novels, a long-winded way of saying, “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good ones, my heart is in the right place.”
Having your heart in the wrong place, unfortunately, isn’t quite the answer either. The best stories by the flamboyantly transgressive and politically incorrect writer Delicious Tacos capture a wonderful samizdat feeling, but anti-woke literature exists in a sort of mirror opposition to a more dominant sensibility. The gonzo provocations of Peter Vack (Sillyboi) or Matthew Davis (Let Me Try Again) tell us less about the world than about how the author wants to be seen. These too are performances. As Sam Kriss pointed out, the anti-woke heel turn is just more identity-driven content—except in these cases, the marginalized identity is that of white men.
Julius Taranto may be the only white male millennial novelist who grasps just how poisonous the collapse of the distinction between author and character has been. In How I Won A Nobel Prize, he follows a young female physicist who accompanies her mentor to an island off the coast of Connecticut where a shadowy billionaire has created a haven for brilliant but cancelled men to pursue their research. By maintaining distance through the female narrator-protagonist (who, in her muted emotional palette, apolitical bent, and scientific expertise, suspiciously resembles a man), Taranto skillfully avoids the possibility a reader might confuse his character’s sympathies for his own—and nearly succeeds at crafting a novel that actually exists within our cultural moment.
Taranto’s canceled Boomers—licentious, playful, grotesque—feel startlingly real, but he’s unable to offer the same grace to Hew, the narrator’s white male millennial husband. There’s a singular moment in which Hew is asked how he feels:
What are the rules now? I feel there was a time when I could tell you with some confidence whether I had ever done anything very seriously wrong. Something gravely immoral. Now I don’t know. I’m just waiting to be accused of something. My only certainty is that I do not currently understand my past the way I will eventually understand it. That’s the most we get. Hew disappears for much of the book, and eventually emerges as the novel’s improbable hero—but only by becoming an ultra-woke terrorist, and blowing up the island that Taranto has so intricately constructed. It feels like a cop-out.
It’s no accident that 2024’s best book about millennial rage and anomie, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, wasn’t written by a white man. A Thai-American author, Tulathimutte captures something genuinely tragic about how identities liberate and trap us—how the frameworks meant to explain our alienation often deepen it. His portrayal of a white male incel enjoys unique vitality because he writes without fear of being identified with his character. No one could credibly accuse him of sharing his incel’s worldview, though even he felt the need to publicly distance himself from his character.
But if Tulathimutte, with his perfectly-curated political persona—the droll X posts interspersed with earnest pro-Palestine retweets, the exclusive but supportive writer’s workshop run out of his Brooklyn home—can barely pull it off, what hope is there for a white guy with more questionable politics?
Maybe, as some like to point out, the vibe is shifting. There are promising literary releases on the horizon. But for all the talk about the new moment, about how things are finally opening up, the stifling cultural environment of the last decade isn’t quite over. While Andrew Boryga (Victim) and Tony Tulathimutte are free to skewer identity pieties, white male millennials are still unable to speak directly to their own condition.
In some ways that inability is their condition. It is striking how few of these novels deal with relationships and children, professional and personal jealousies, the quiet resentments or even the unexpected joys of shifting family roles.
Instead a fever urge to disclaim appears over and over, unremarked upon and unexplored—both in print and in real life. “I mean, white guys still run the world, especially in that gross nexus of higher ed and yawny high lit,” one millennial writer wrote me, as if reassuring himself of phantom powers he no longer possessed. He had just been fired from his adjunct teaching job, and his agent had told him his latest novel was unlikely to sell. But he insisted my line of inquiry was unsavory. “What’s the point in even being upset about such supposed indignities as not being published as a white guy?”
A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV, before deciding that actually, it’s not so bad that men have disappeared. “I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction,” he concluded. “They don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured.”
Great literature, like all great art, requires brutality and honesty, not least about one’s place in the world. We need novels that provide an honest accounting of the last decade and the profound ruptures it brought to American life. Because the social and political environment in which a white male novelist, in an article bemoaning the disappearance of male novelists, is forced to say the world doesn't need more male novelists, seems like it might be fertile ground for a work of fiction.
White male boomer novelists live in a self-mythologizing fantasyland in which they are the prime movers of history; their Gen X counterparts (with a few exceptions), blessed with the good sense to begin their professional careers before 2014, delude themselves into believing they still enjoy the Mandate of Heaven (as they stand athwart history, shouting platitudes about fascism). But white male millennials, caught between the privileges of their youths and the tragicomedies of their professional and personal lives, understand intrinsically that they are stranded on the wrong side of history—that there are no Good White Men.
This could be a gift, the opportunity to say something genuinely interesting and new. For a lost generation of literary young men—many of whom aren’t so young anymore—the question is whether they still know how.
Jacob Savage writes from Los Angeles.
It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.
And then the doors shut.
By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.
Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).
“The kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo, I think it’s harder for white men,” a leading fiction agent told me. “In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience. The young agents and editors didn’t come up in that culture.” The agent proceeded to list white male writers who have carved out a niche for themselves—Nathan Hill, Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner, Michael Connelly, Adam Ross—but none was younger than Cohen, who was born in 1980.
The more thoughtful pieces on this subject tend to frame the issue as a crisis of literary masculinity, the inevitable consequence of an insular, female-dominated publishing world. All true, to a point. But while there are no male Sally Rooneys or Ottessa Moshfeghs or Emma Clines—there are no white Tommy Oranges or Tao Lins or Tony Tulathimuttes.
Some of this is undoubtedly part of a dynamic that’s played out across countless industries. Publishing houses, like Hollywood writers’ rooms and academic tenure committees, had a glut of established white men on their rosters, and the path of least resistance wasn’t to send George Saunders or Jonathan Franzen out to pasture. But despite these pressures, there are white male millennial novelists. Diversity preferences may explain their absence from prize lists, but they can’t account for why they’ve so completely failed to capture the zeitgeist.
The reasons for that go deeper. All those attacks on the “litbro,” the mockery of male literary ambition—exemplified by the sudden cultural banishment of David Foster Wallace—have had a powerfully chilling effect. Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them. Instead they write genre, they write suffocatingly tight auto-fiction, they write fantastic and utterly terrible period pieces—anything to avoid grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America.
“The literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down.” “The antiseptic legacy of Obama-era MFA programs hangs over this generation.” Imagine, for a moment, that you are a young-ish white male novelist attempting to write your Big Splashy Everything Novel. You want to understand your alienation from yourself, your family, the monoculture around you. You’re a bookish person—you’re a novelist, after all—so you take your toddler son to the bookstore. He’s been asking for a book about whales or fire trucks or trains. These are present, but prominent placement is given to a different kind of book. You see a large display for “Queens of the Jungle,” (“Meet the FEMALE ANIMALS who RULE the ANIMAL KINGDOM”), right next to a YA adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg board book for babies.
If you’re a normal white male millennial you probably roll your eyes; if you’re a maniac like me, you text photos of the display to your groupchats; and if you’re a hero or a Democratic congressman, you tell your two-and-a half year old son, come on, gender isn’t even a thing, we really should buy the book about girlboss animals, NPR said it’s great.
But for the last decade or so the question for our novelist has been trickier. That moment at the bookstore was, at worst, an annoyance. How do you describe a flickering moment of alienation without making your novel an exhaustive, and exhausting, chronicle of such things? On the other hand—how do you not describe it? If your own internal monologue can’t be adapted to the page, what can?
Most avoid the question altogether. Some, like Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Gretel and the Great War) retreat to the safety of history; others, like Zach Williams (Beautiful Days), employ genre (self-described “social science fiction”) to maintain a deep authorial remove from the real world. Still others seek a milieu so distant the cultural transformations on the homefront don’t register. Phil Klay’s Missionaries, a deep dive into American influence and imperialism in Colombia, could have been written at any point in the past 60 years.
Another solution is to set the aperture narrow enough the outside world barely intrudes. Jordan Castro (The Novelist) and Andrew Martin (Early Work) focus so intensely on the auto-fictional writing process, on their own literary ambitions and intimate personal dramas, that any larger social questions appear moot. The tech fable (Colin Winnette’s Users; Greg Jackson’s The Dimensions of a Cave) is a related form of this solipsism—everything is subsumed into the horrors of tech.
Then there’s the millennial twist on socialist realism—except the goal isn’t to showcase an ideal society, but an ideal author. In his 2024 story collection The History of Sound, Ben Shattuck curates a playlist of signifiers—proud historical homosexuals, strong unwavering women, even a Radiolab episode—to reassure the reader that he is the right sort of white man. The title story, soon to be a major motion picture, is about two young men who travel across New England collecting old songs (in other words: Alan Lomax… but gay.). The language is flat, dull, humorless (“The memories of fireflies and swimming naked in the waterfall did nothing but make very fine and long incisions in the membrane of contentedness I’d built up over the years”). But Shattuck’s stories aren’t the product here—he is, oozing sympathy from his own beautiful membrane of contentedness.
Lee Cole, author of the 2022 novel Groundskeeping, follows a similar path, conveying the proper amount of shame at his working-class Kentucky background (“They supported Trump, chiefly because of his promise to bring back American manufacturing. Any hope I may have had for them to renounce their support was ... completely gone”). And Stephen Markley’s 2023 climate change epic The Deluge, replete with a Jamaican/Native American heroine and a queer neurodivergent Arab-American mathematician, shows that appropriation is acceptable so long as the politics are sufficiently on the nose (“The trauma of that time, especially the storming of the Capitol, lit a new fire under me…”).
The antiseptic legacy of Obama-era MFA programs hangs over this generation (all three of the above authors graduated from Iowa). Workshopped to death, shorn of swagger and toxicity —and above all, humor—these books serve more as authorial performances than as novels, a long-winded way of saying, “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good ones, my heart is in the right place.”
Having your heart in the wrong place, unfortunately, isn’t quite the answer either. The best stories by the flamboyantly transgressive and politically incorrect writer Delicious Tacos capture a wonderful samizdat feeling, but anti-woke literature exists in a sort of mirror opposition to a more dominant sensibility. The gonzo provocations of Peter Vack (Sillyboi) or Matthew Davis (Let Me Try Again) tell us less about the world than about how the author wants to be seen. These too are performances. As Sam Kriss pointed out, the anti-woke heel turn is just more identity-driven content—except in these cases, the marginalized identity is that of white men.
Julius Taranto may be the only white male millennial novelist who grasps just how poisonous the collapse of the distinction between author and character has been. In How I Won A Nobel Prize, he follows a young female physicist who accompanies her mentor to an island off the coast of Connecticut where a shadowy billionaire has created a haven for brilliant but cancelled men to pursue their research. By maintaining distance through the female narrator-protagonist (who, in her muted emotional palette, apolitical bent, and scientific expertise, suspiciously resembles a man), Taranto skillfully avoids the possibility a reader might confuse his character’s sympathies for his own—and nearly succeeds at crafting a novel that actually exists within our cultural moment.
Taranto’s canceled Boomers—licentious, playful, grotesque—feel startlingly real, but he’s unable to offer the same grace to Hew, the narrator’s white male millennial husband. There’s a singular moment in which Hew is asked how he feels:
What are the rules now? I feel there was a time when I could tell you with some confidence whether I had ever done anything very seriously wrong. Something gravely immoral. Now I don’t know. I’m just waiting to be accused of something. My only certainty is that I do not currently understand my past the way I will eventually understand it. That’s the most we get. Hew disappears for much of the book, and eventually emerges as the novel’s improbable hero—but only by becoming an ultra-woke terrorist, and blowing up the island that Taranto has so intricately constructed. It feels like a cop-out.
It’s no accident that 2024’s best book about millennial rage and anomie, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, wasn’t written by a white man. A Thai-American author, Tulathimutte captures something genuinely tragic about how identities liberate and trap us—how the frameworks meant to explain our alienation often deepen it. His portrayal of a white male incel enjoys unique vitality because he writes without fear of being identified with his character. No one could credibly accuse him of sharing his incel’s worldview, though even he felt the need to publicly distance himself from his character.
But if Tulathimutte, with his perfectly-curated political persona—the droll X posts interspersed with earnest pro-Palestine retweets, the exclusive but supportive writer’s workshop run out of his Brooklyn home—can barely pull it off, what hope is there for a white guy with more questionable politics?
Maybe, as some like to point out, the vibe is shifting. There are promising literary releases on the horizon. But for all the talk about the new moment, about how things are finally opening up, the stifling cultural environment of the last decade isn’t quite over. While Andrew Boryga (Victim) and Tony Tulathimutte are free to skewer identity pieties, white male millennials are still unable to speak directly to their own condition.
In some ways that inability is their condition. It is striking how few of these novels deal with relationships and children, professional and personal jealousies, the quiet resentments or even the unexpected joys of shifting family roles.
Instead a fever urge to disclaim appears over and over, unremarked upon and unexplored—both in print and in real life. “I mean, white guys still run the world, especially in that gross nexus of higher ed and yawny high lit,” one millennial writer wrote me, as if reassuring himself of phantom powers he no longer possessed. He had just been fired from his adjunct teaching job, and his agent had told him his latest novel was unlikely to sell. But he insisted my line of inquiry was unsavory. “What’s the point in even being upset about such supposed indignities as not being published as a white guy?”
A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV, before deciding that actually, it’s not so bad that men have disappeared. “I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction,” he concluded. “They don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured.”
Great literature, like all great art, requires brutality and honesty, not least about one’s place in the world. We need novels that provide an honest accounting of the last decade and the profound ruptures it brought to American life. Because the social and political environment in which a white male novelist, in an article bemoaning the disappearance of male novelists, is forced to say the world doesn't need more male novelists, seems like it might be fertile ground for a work of fiction.
White male boomer novelists live in a self-mythologizing fantasyland in which they are the prime movers of history; their Gen X counterparts (with a few exceptions), blessed with the good sense to begin their professional careers before 2014, delude themselves into believing they still enjoy the Mandate of Heaven (as they stand athwart history, shouting platitudes about fascism). But white male millennials, caught between the privileges of their youths and the tragicomedies of their professional and personal lives, understand intrinsically that they are stranded on the wrong side of history—that there are no Good White Men.
This could be a gift, the opportunity to say something genuinely interesting and new. For a lost generation of literary young men—many of whom aren’t so young anymore—the question is whether they still know how.
Jacob Savage writes from Los Angeles.
Friday, March 21, 2025
Six Ways to Understand DOGE and Predict Its Future Behavior
CATO Institute Article
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is the biggest domestic policy news of 2025 so far. Established by executive order (EO) on January 20, 2025, and “led” by Elon Musk, DOGE officially occupies the administrative shell of the US Digital Service and was mandated to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” However, DOGE’s reach clearly extends far beyond this, with an impact across the federal government that has seemed chaotic. As a result, observers struggle to develop a coherent model to explain DOGE’s actions and predict its future behavior.
This is unsurprising given DOGE’s changing missions. Upon conception before the election, Musk said DOGE would aim to cut $2 trillion in spending to balance the budget. This was a remit we enthusiastically embraced with our 2024 Cato report that detailed where and how to cut that amount and potentially much more depending on willingness to reform entitlements. Musk and his then-partner Vivek Ramaswamy subsequently wrote that DOGE would harness executive actions to reduce the administrative state, cheapen the procurement process, reduce the civil service, and reform other aspects of government, including on the regulatory front.
DOGE’s goals changed somewhat again upon DOGE’s creation when Musk revised his stated goal to cut $1 trillion of spending. Then, Trump’s EOs of January 20th empowered DOGE to reduce the federal workforce and overhaul the government’s technology. Later EOs focused DOGE on downsizing the federal workforce, eliminating specific small bureaucracies, and rescinding or modifying unlawful or burdensome regulations.
Since its creation, DOGE has pursued aspects of all the above goals, emphasizing publicly ways that it has reduced spending by firing government employees and canceling contracts.
Successfully affecting DOGE’s behavior from the outside requires understanding, at least somewhat, its goals and how it functions. This abridged history of its shifting mission doesn’t tell us where DOGE is headed, nor does it explain why it has behaved in the way it has to this point. Others have struggled with explaining DOGE. Santi Ruiz, for instance, has many insightful observations, but he doesn’t have a coherent model or set of models for interpreting its actions. Below are six theoretical models for understanding DOGE’s action to date, each with supporting evidence.
DOGE is seeking to purge progressive influence within the federal government. DOGE is systematically eliminating left-leaning personnel, policies, symbols, and government funding for progressive nonprofits and causes within the federal government—and will continue to do so. DOGE’s broad exemption of more conservative-leaning security agencies from review except for reevaluating all consulting contracts, its focus on dismantling DEI programs, and its termination of probationary employees hired under the Biden administration are evidence for this. Foreign aid is certainly perceived as progressive-coded, which explains why DOGE initially targeted USAID—an agency known for funding numerous left-leaning nonprofits and international NGOs. DOGE’s other recent target is the Department of Education, the source of many insidious progressive DEI programs and other policies that conservatives rightly abhor. It’s even going after progressive symbols such as the Anthony Fauci exhibit at the National Institutes of Health. He is a popular progressive icon despised by conservatives as the personification of progressive control over the government-funded public health sector. This is primarily a theory of what agencies DOGE decides to prioritize cutting.
DOGE is a scaled-up public version of Musk’s style of corporate restructuring applied to the federal government. DOGE is applying Musk’s cost-cutting playbook to the federal government by prioritizing workforce reductions. Musk applied such a strategy to Twitter when he acquired it, as explained in Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography and elsewhere. Musk likes to delete steps or people involved in a production process to streamline it, but his rule of thumb is, “If you’re not adding things back in at least 10 percent of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough.” This model explains why the government sought to rehire nuclear staff after DOGE fired them. Rather than a failure, rehiring workers is an expected part of Musk’s downsizing process.
Federal workforce reductions are necessary, but they will have less of a positive budgetary effect on the federal government than for private firms where payroll costs are often more than 40 percent of revenue for professional services firms. According to our colleague Chris Edwards, total compensation for the 3.8 million federal defense and nondefense workers accounts for only 8 percent of spending (excluding postal employees). The federal government’s labor costs are lower than those of private firms because its primary task is transferring money from taxpayers to beneficiaries, which is not a labor-intensive activity, whereas businesses typically make profits by supplying goods and services that are more labor-intensive.
musk doge
While there are undoubtedly many government employees who can be terminated, broad and indiscriminate layoffs in the absence of broader regulatory reform can prove false economies. Much of federal regulatory activity is enforcement of existing rules, which should be slashed. However, other federal personnel approve permits for private actions like oil drilling on federal lands, which are required by statutes implemented through regulations. Firing personnel whose jobs are to approve permits halts new drilling activity so long as the underlying laws and regulations are unaffected, thus reducing overall economic efficiency. Alex Tabarrok is similarly concerned about the indiscriminate firing of employees at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which could lengthen drug review times. Personnel cuts may also delay deregulatory actions the administration has ordered agencies to pursue. If the personnel cuts were combined with Ramaswamy’s DOGE strategy to focus on reducing the regulatory and administrative state, then across-the-board firings would have been less disruptive to the private economy. As we’ve noted before, absent reducing the federal government’s size and scope, its disparate range of objectives can create inherent efficiencies that staff layoffs can exacerbate.
Still, this shouldn’t come across as too negative. It’s easy to nitpick and ignore the forest for the trees. While the drilling example, the FDA, and possible cuts to workers tasked with deregulating other sectors of the economy are negative, they are set against many other positive firings at the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, USAID, and elsewhere. Regardless, the scale and scope of firings are consistent with a Musk-style restructuring that sometimes goes too far, and that can be later corrected with rehiring. This is primarily a theory of how DOGE cuts budgets in the agencies it targets.
DOGE is the first step of a public relations campaign to build popular support for spending cuts. Eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse is an often repeated justification for DOGE. Its first target was unpopular foreign aid dispensed through USAID. DOGE’s early announcements highlighted a cut of $50 million for “condoms for Hamas” that turned out to be contraceptive aid for a province in Mozambique named Gaza. Condoms for Hamas would have certainly been ludicrous, actual contraceptive aid for Mozambique somewhat less so. Nevertheless, many Americans will rightly think that is not a priority use of their taxpayer dollars.
Still, DOGE has canceled several small-dollar projects that are just as silly, such as a Peruvian comic book about an education superhero that had to feature an LGBTQ+ character to address mental health issues. Often, the money was already spent, but at least it sends the signal there won’t be any more spending on these or similar initiatives. DOGE’s efforts to reduce spending on more popular programs like Social Security are stopped cold, such as its scrapped proposal to reduce phone services for program beneficiaries. The goal of reducing waste, fraud, and abuse is also inconsistent with the administration’s firing of Inspectors General whose jobs were to monitor federal actions to reduce, among other things, waste, fraud, and abuse.
Still, the focus on ludicrous, silly, and absurd spending on unpopular programs like foreign aid may be the first part of a strategy to push a desperately needed austerity agenda focused on the actual programs eating the budget. As OMB director Russ Vought has said:
When families decide to get on a budget, they do not target the largest and immovable items of their spending, like their mortgage, first. They aim to restrain discretionary spending—they eat out less, shop less, and find cheaper ways of entertaining themselves. Then they look at what makes sense for the immovables—how to refinance their debt or make major life changes. Politically, a similar approach is the only way the American people will ever accept major changes to mandatory spending. They are simply not going to buy the notion that their earned entitlements must be tweaked while the federal government is funding Bob Dylan statues in Mozambique or gay pride parades in Prague. This Budget mathematically must include substantial reforms to mandatory spending to achieve balance—although importantly, there are no benefit reductions to Social Security or Medicare beneficiaries—strategically, it will emphasize the discretionary cuts needed to save the country from tyranny.
DOGE is an essential component of a Trump administration legal challenge to expand the president’s power of impoundment. DOGE is testing the limits of presidential control over federal spending, potentially setting the stage for court cases and a Supreme Court ruling that increases the president’s power of impoundment. There are a staggering number of lawsuits filed against the Trump administration’s actions and several are challenging DOGE’s cuts. Beyond DOGE, OMB Director Russ Vought and President Trump claim the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is unconstitutional and the president has enormous authority to impound spending. Our colleague Gene Healy notes that “historically, there’s been little support for [their] view event among conservative legal heavyweights.” Regardless, DOGE could be an important component of a legal strategy to convince the Supreme Court to change its mind on the constitutionality of a broader presidential power over impoundment and to make a head start in cutting spending in case these efforts are successful.
DOGE provides political cover for Congress to be even more fiscally irresponsible. Congressional Republicans could be politically free-riding on DOGE, using it as a way to extend and enhance the 2017 tax cuts without making significant budget cuts—claiming that DOGE will handle federal spending. Cato’s Director of Budget and Entitlement Policy Romina Boccia noted that, “The House recently passed a budget resolution calling for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts plus $300 billion in new spending over the coming decade—all balanced out with $2 trillion in offsetting spending cuts and about $2.6 trillion in pixie dust from assuming their budget will have economic growth taking off like one of SpaceX’s rockets.” All this is playing out while Congress, other politicians around the country, and the public focus on DOGE. Media and political hyperventilation about “large scale” and “massive” cuts as well as DOGE’s own exaggerations of the scale of its austerity could certainly help Congress shirk its fiscal responsibility yet again.
DOGE is about self-interest and cronyism. DOGE isn’t about cutting government waste—it’s about consolidating business power for friends, punishing competitors, and securing lucrative opportunities for DOGE and other tech bro insiders via future government contracts and privileges. This theory, pushed mainly by progressives, highlights DOGE operatives gaining access to federal payment systems and procurement contract details, allowing those close to Elon Musk and friends to obtain sensitive information about competitors to his companies.
Department of Education
While DOGE has acted more broadly than in departments or agencies that Musk’s businesses are involved with, there have been examples of conflicts of interest. FDA employees reviewing Neuralink, Musk’s controversial brain-chip company, were reportedly fired (with some later rehired). The FAA, which has clashed with SpaceX over launch delays and environmental reviews, has been another target and Musk has criticized a competitor of his own company, Starlink, that provides services to the FAA. The recent image of President Trump doing marketing for Tesla on the front lawn of the White House, the controversy about the State Department’s apparent plans to purchase Tesla cybertrucks, and the Trump administration’s intentions to establish a strategic crypto reserve provide further evidence of a culture of crony capitalism, which DOGE is seen as part of.
This theory says that DOGE’s other activity is a smokescreen for more self-interested intentions on behalf of its members and backers. The time-limited nature of DOGE and lack of transparency around its leadership and structure is seen as further evidence that something underhand is at play.
Many of the models above help to explain the outwardly chaotic nature of DOGE’s actions. Horror at the resulting chaos is one reason why some advocates of smaller government recoil at DOGE. “Cut the government,” some of them would say, “but not like this!” To be sure, there are more orderly ways to reduce the size and scope of the federal government and there are legitimate and important legal and constitutional concerns about DOGE. Still, any reduction in the size and scope of an organization that spends approximately $7 trillion annually will be chaotic.
The government was built and expanded over centuries and is a complex bureaucracy of overlapping responsibilities, powers, and controls with its own diverse and evolved internal operations and local tacit knowledge inscrutable to outsiders. Firm bankruptcies and downsizings are often chaotic and disorderly, so Americans should only expect more such chaos from the substantially larger federal government that is involved in virtually every aspect of American life.
It’s tricky to make accounting comparisons between the federal government and private firms, but Walmart’s operating expenses in 2024 were about $621 billion—less than one-tenth of the federal government’s outlays that year. Walmart would certainly be thrown into chaos if it sought to reduce its costs through bankruptcy proceedings or substantial layoffs. Supporters of smaller government should be tolerant of short-term disruption so long as we think that DOGE can advance the goal of a smaller and less intrusive federal government and that Congress will ultimately do what’s necessary to entrench the reforms and savings.
Social science models simplify reality, spotlighting key variables that may shape DOGE’s actions in a way that can be tested. The models discussed above clearly simplify the complex endeavor of reforming the largest human organization ever by expenditures—the US federal government. They help explain past decisions and anticipate future moves. The models above try to make sense of DOGE’s actions so far. They are not mutually exclusive, yet several can be informative together or alone, while some may only make sense temporarily. Other models not set out here might offer fresh insights, but scholars should try to develop them. Without doing so, one of the biggest policy initiatives of President Trump’s second term risks being under-analyzed or misunderstood.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is the biggest domestic policy news of 2025 so far. Established by executive order (EO) on January 20, 2025, and “led” by Elon Musk, DOGE officially occupies the administrative shell of the US Digital Service and was mandated to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” However, DOGE’s reach clearly extends far beyond this, with an impact across the federal government that has seemed chaotic. As a result, observers struggle to develop a coherent model to explain DOGE’s actions and predict its future behavior.
This is unsurprising given DOGE’s changing missions. Upon conception before the election, Musk said DOGE would aim to cut $2 trillion in spending to balance the budget. This was a remit we enthusiastically embraced with our 2024 Cato report that detailed where and how to cut that amount and potentially much more depending on willingness to reform entitlements. Musk and his then-partner Vivek Ramaswamy subsequently wrote that DOGE would harness executive actions to reduce the administrative state, cheapen the procurement process, reduce the civil service, and reform other aspects of government, including on the regulatory front.
DOGE’s goals changed somewhat again upon DOGE’s creation when Musk revised his stated goal to cut $1 trillion of spending. Then, Trump’s EOs of January 20th empowered DOGE to reduce the federal workforce and overhaul the government’s technology. Later EOs focused DOGE on downsizing the federal workforce, eliminating specific small bureaucracies, and rescinding or modifying unlawful or burdensome regulations.
Since its creation, DOGE has pursued aspects of all the above goals, emphasizing publicly ways that it has reduced spending by firing government employees and canceling contracts.
Successfully affecting DOGE’s behavior from the outside requires understanding, at least somewhat, its goals and how it functions. This abridged history of its shifting mission doesn’t tell us where DOGE is headed, nor does it explain why it has behaved in the way it has to this point. Others have struggled with explaining DOGE. Santi Ruiz, for instance, has many insightful observations, but he doesn’t have a coherent model or set of models for interpreting its actions. Below are six theoretical models for understanding DOGE’s action to date, each with supporting evidence.
DOGE is seeking to purge progressive influence within the federal government. DOGE is systematically eliminating left-leaning personnel, policies, symbols, and government funding for progressive nonprofits and causes within the federal government—and will continue to do so. DOGE’s broad exemption of more conservative-leaning security agencies from review except for reevaluating all consulting contracts, its focus on dismantling DEI programs, and its termination of probationary employees hired under the Biden administration are evidence for this. Foreign aid is certainly perceived as progressive-coded, which explains why DOGE initially targeted USAID—an agency known for funding numerous left-leaning nonprofits and international NGOs. DOGE’s other recent target is the Department of Education, the source of many insidious progressive DEI programs and other policies that conservatives rightly abhor. It’s even going after progressive symbols such as the Anthony Fauci exhibit at the National Institutes of Health. He is a popular progressive icon despised by conservatives as the personification of progressive control over the government-funded public health sector. This is primarily a theory of what agencies DOGE decides to prioritize cutting.
DOGE is a scaled-up public version of Musk’s style of corporate restructuring applied to the federal government. DOGE is applying Musk’s cost-cutting playbook to the federal government by prioritizing workforce reductions. Musk applied such a strategy to Twitter when he acquired it, as explained in Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography and elsewhere. Musk likes to delete steps or people involved in a production process to streamline it, but his rule of thumb is, “If you’re not adding things back in at least 10 percent of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough.” This model explains why the government sought to rehire nuclear staff after DOGE fired them. Rather than a failure, rehiring workers is an expected part of Musk’s downsizing process.
Federal workforce reductions are necessary, but they will have less of a positive budgetary effect on the federal government than for private firms where payroll costs are often more than 40 percent of revenue for professional services firms. According to our colleague Chris Edwards, total compensation for the 3.8 million federal defense and nondefense workers accounts for only 8 percent of spending (excluding postal employees). The federal government’s labor costs are lower than those of private firms because its primary task is transferring money from taxpayers to beneficiaries, which is not a labor-intensive activity, whereas businesses typically make profits by supplying goods and services that are more labor-intensive.
musk doge
While there are undoubtedly many government employees who can be terminated, broad and indiscriminate layoffs in the absence of broader regulatory reform can prove false economies. Much of federal regulatory activity is enforcement of existing rules, which should be slashed. However, other federal personnel approve permits for private actions like oil drilling on federal lands, which are required by statutes implemented through regulations. Firing personnel whose jobs are to approve permits halts new drilling activity so long as the underlying laws and regulations are unaffected, thus reducing overall economic efficiency. Alex Tabarrok is similarly concerned about the indiscriminate firing of employees at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which could lengthen drug review times. Personnel cuts may also delay deregulatory actions the administration has ordered agencies to pursue. If the personnel cuts were combined with Ramaswamy’s DOGE strategy to focus on reducing the regulatory and administrative state, then across-the-board firings would have been less disruptive to the private economy. As we’ve noted before, absent reducing the federal government’s size and scope, its disparate range of objectives can create inherent efficiencies that staff layoffs can exacerbate.
Still, this shouldn’t come across as too negative. It’s easy to nitpick and ignore the forest for the trees. While the drilling example, the FDA, and possible cuts to workers tasked with deregulating other sectors of the economy are negative, they are set against many other positive firings at the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, USAID, and elsewhere. Regardless, the scale and scope of firings are consistent with a Musk-style restructuring that sometimes goes too far, and that can be later corrected with rehiring. This is primarily a theory of how DOGE cuts budgets in the agencies it targets.
DOGE is the first step of a public relations campaign to build popular support for spending cuts. Eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse is an often repeated justification for DOGE. Its first target was unpopular foreign aid dispensed through USAID. DOGE’s early announcements highlighted a cut of $50 million for “condoms for Hamas” that turned out to be contraceptive aid for a province in Mozambique named Gaza. Condoms for Hamas would have certainly been ludicrous, actual contraceptive aid for Mozambique somewhat less so. Nevertheless, many Americans will rightly think that is not a priority use of their taxpayer dollars.
Still, DOGE has canceled several small-dollar projects that are just as silly, such as a Peruvian comic book about an education superhero that had to feature an LGBTQ+ character to address mental health issues. Often, the money was already spent, but at least it sends the signal there won’t be any more spending on these or similar initiatives. DOGE’s efforts to reduce spending on more popular programs like Social Security are stopped cold, such as its scrapped proposal to reduce phone services for program beneficiaries. The goal of reducing waste, fraud, and abuse is also inconsistent with the administration’s firing of Inspectors General whose jobs were to monitor federal actions to reduce, among other things, waste, fraud, and abuse.
Still, the focus on ludicrous, silly, and absurd spending on unpopular programs like foreign aid may be the first part of a strategy to push a desperately needed austerity agenda focused on the actual programs eating the budget. As OMB director Russ Vought has said:
When families decide to get on a budget, they do not target the largest and immovable items of their spending, like their mortgage, first. They aim to restrain discretionary spending—they eat out less, shop less, and find cheaper ways of entertaining themselves. Then they look at what makes sense for the immovables—how to refinance their debt or make major life changes. Politically, a similar approach is the only way the American people will ever accept major changes to mandatory spending. They are simply not going to buy the notion that their earned entitlements must be tweaked while the federal government is funding Bob Dylan statues in Mozambique or gay pride parades in Prague. This Budget mathematically must include substantial reforms to mandatory spending to achieve balance—although importantly, there are no benefit reductions to Social Security or Medicare beneficiaries—strategically, it will emphasize the discretionary cuts needed to save the country from tyranny.
DOGE is an essential component of a Trump administration legal challenge to expand the president’s power of impoundment. DOGE is testing the limits of presidential control over federal spending, potentially setting the stage for court cases and a Supreme Court ruling that increases the president’s power of impoundment. There are a staggering number of lawsuits filed against the Trump administration’s actions and several are challenging DOGE’s cuts. Beyond DOGE, OMB Director Russ Vought and President Trump claim the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is unconstitutional and the president has enormous authority to impound spending. Our colleague Gene Healy notes that “historically, there’s been little support for [their] view event among conservative legal heavyweights.” Regardless, DOGE could be an important component of a legal strategy to convince the Supreme Court to change its mind on the constitutionality of a broader presidential power over impoundment and to make a head start in cutting spending in case these efforts are successful.
DOGE provides political cover for Congress to be even more fiscally irresponsible. Congressional Republicans could be politically free-riding on DOGE, using it as a way to extend and enhance the 2017 tax cuts without making significant budget cuts—claiming that DOGE will handle federal spending. Cato’s Director of Budget and Entitlement Policy Romina Boccia noted that, “The House recently passed a budget resolution calling for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts plus $300 billion in new spending over the coming decade—all balanced out with $2 trillion in offsetting spending cuts and about $2.6 trillion in pixie dust from assuming their budget will have economic growth taking off like one of SpaceX’s rockets.” All this is playing out while Congress, other politicians around the country, and the public focus on DOGE. Media and political hyperventilation about “large scale” and “massive” cuts as well as DOGE’s own exaggerations of the scale of its austerity could certainly help Congress shirk its fiscal responsibility yet again.
DOGE is about self-interest and cronyism. DOGE isn’t about cutting government waste—it’s about consolidating business power for friends, punishing competitors, and securing lucrative opportunities for DOGE and other tech bro insiders via future government contracts and privileges. This theory, pushed mainly by progressives, highlights DOGE operatives gaining access to federal payment systems and procurement contract details, allowing those close to Elon Musk and friends to obtain sensitive information about competitors to his companies.
Department of Education
While DOGE has acted more broadly than in departments or agencies that Musk’s businesses are involved with, there have been examples of conflicts of interest. FDA employees reviewing Neuralink, Musk’s controversial brain-chip company, were reportedly fired (with some later rehired). The FAA, which has clashed with SpaceX over launch delays and environmental reviews, has been another target and Musk has criticized a competitor of his own company, Starlink, that provides services to the FAA. The recent image of President Trump doing marketing for Tesla on the front lawn of the White House, the controversy about the State Department’s apparent plans to purchase Tesla cybertrucks, and the Trump administration’s intentions to establish a strategic crypto reserve provide further evidence of a culture of crony capitalism, which DOGE is seen as part of.
This theory says that DOGE’s other activity is a smokescreen for more self-interested intentions on behalf of its members and backers. The time-limited nature of DOGE and lack of transparency around its leadership and structure is seen as further evidence that something underhand is at play.
Many of the models above help to explain the outwardly chaotic nature of DOGE’s actions. Horror at the resulting chaos is one reason why some advocates of smaller government recoil at DOGE. “Cut the government,” some of them would say, “but not like this!” To be sure, there are more orderly ways to reduce the size and scope of the federal government and there are legitimate and important legal and constitutional concerns about DOGE. Still, any reduction in the size and scope of an organization that spends approximately $7 trillion annually will be chaotic.
The government was built and expanded over centuries and is a complex bureaucracy of overlapping responsibilities, powers, and controls with its own diverse and evolved internal operations and local tacit knowledge inscrutable to outsiders. Firm bankruptcies and downsizings are often chaotic and disorderly, so Americans should only expect more such chaos from the substantially larger federal government that is involved in virtually every aspect of American life.
It’s tricky to make accounting comparisons between the federal government and private firms, but Walmart’s operating expenses in 2024 were about $621 billion—less than one-tenth of the federal government’s outlays that year. Walmart would certainly be thrown into chaos if it sought to reduce its costs through bankruptcy proceedings or substantial layoffs. Supporters of smaller government should be tolerant of short-term disruption so long as we think that DOGE can advance the goal of a smaller and less intrusive federal government and that Congress will ultimately do what’s necessary to entrench the reforms and savings.
Social science models simplify reality, spotlighting key variables that may shape DOGE’s actions in a way that can be tested. The models discussed above clearly simplify the complex endeavor of reforming the largest human organization ever by expenditures—the US federal government. They help explain past decisions and anticipate future moves. The models above try to make sense of DOGE’s actions so far. They are not mutually exclusive, yet several can be informative together or alone, while some may only make sense temporarily. Other models not set out here might offer fresh insights, but scholars should try to develop them. Without doing so, one of the biggest policy initiatives of President Trump’s second term risks being under-analyzed or misunderstood.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
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