DOGE’s deletion strategy turns government into a blackout

DOGE’s mass – From shock access seizures to USAID shutdowns and thousands of pages removed, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has operated through mass “deletion”—a model that disrupted payments, data systems, and diversity rules. It was officially dism

The password wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was the speed.

At least one federal worker described being instructed to “return government IDs ASAP. ” then losing Google Drive access immediately. while the agency put resources about their RIF on that very drive. They were blocked from sending emails to non-GSA addresses. and even emailing career documents to a private account became “a huge issue.” Within that controlled scramble—calendars instead of announcements. unknown names in internal directories—Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slipped into the machinery of the US government.

For supporters, it was governance made responsive. For critics, it was something colder: deleting access, deleting programs, and—eventually—deleting records of who was affected.

The argument begins with the way DOGE was set up and the way it moved. In early 2025. artist and writer Nika Dubrovsky wrote on X about “a real revolution happening – or rather. a counter-revolution. ” invoking Herbert Marcuse’s idea of a “preventive counter-revolution.” Sci-fi author and journalist Cory Doctorow. also on X. called the effort “corporate fascists and their captured regulators” and accused them of plagiarizing dystopian science fiction by treating it as a blueprint rather than a warning.

Jacob Silverman. in In Gilded Age: Elon Musk and the radicalization of Silicon Valley. describes how Trump gave “chainsaw” Musk a “secretary of cost cutting” role to make good on a promise to award him “a form of authority unlike any previous big donor.” Silverman writes that Musk was tasked with erasing the “woke mind virus” from the administrative state and that DOGE “was not a real cabinet-level agency that would take an act of Congress.” Instead. DOGE was established to cut public funding and privatize government programmes.

Silverman notes that in “his six months as the unofficial head of DOGE,” Musk took “a wrecking ball” to America’s governing institutions “without provoking much meaningful opposition.”

The department’s operating plan. as described in the account. was to change the federal payment system’s software and interface design. DOGE took control through “shock mass firings and regulation destruction”—a tactic lifted from Musk’s post-purchase raid on the Twitter offices in October 2022. And the intent, according to vice-president JD Vance, was to make “the bureaucracy responsive to the elected president.”.

At one point DOGE had over 100 employees and was said to have saved US$214 billion. But the official efficiency objectives were not reached. While DOGE pursued its strategies—resulting in thousands of lay-offs and USAID-closure-related deaths—US public debt increased rapidly rather than diminishing. and the US’s global “soft power” was simultaneously damaged. DOGE was officially dismantled ten months into Trump II.

The fallout between Trump and Musk, however, was reported to have started earlier. In June 2025, Trump announced his One Big Beautiful Bill, which would increase US federal spending.

What DOGE did inside the state was shaped by its control tactics. The department positioned itself inside the US Digital Service and the General Services Administration agencies. gave itself email accounts and A-status clearance. and—described as a seizure happening “in the shadows”—its entry was “a matter not of announcements but of calendar invitations from unknown people. of unfamiliar names appearing in internal directories. ” Wired reported in March 2025.

Once inside, barriers to access were built. Wired reported that the sixth and seventh floors—where offices and suites used by the administrator were located—were restricted and “largely locked down.”

One employee described the result as operational chaos paired with decisive removal of capabilities. They said DOGE asked them to hand over access to the agency’s website and social media accounts. including Facebook. Instagram. and X. The worker said they turned over the login information they were asked for and that “it took them two days to take the website down.” They also said DOGE did not ask for LinkedIn access.

The first named target was USAID. On X. Musk called the international development agency a “criminal organization” and said it was “time for it to die. ” while Trump alleged that the agency was “run by a bunch of radical lunatics.” DOGE operatives then ran manually through payments. “clicking off lifesaving programmes.”.

On 3 February 2025, Musk bragged that he had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the woodchipper.”

In parallel, the story turned to the code. As early as February 4. 2025. a 25-year-old former X engineer named Marko Elez was granted the ability not only to read the code in the Treasury systems but also to write—or change—it. Wired reported. With that level of access. Wired said. Elez (or anyone he reported to) could potentially have cut off congressionally authorized payments. allowing Trump or Musk to exercise a line-item veto. The more immediate risk described for people familiar with the systems was that tampering could make the systems. in whole or in part. “simply stop working.”.

A few weeks later, DOGE imposed a US$1 spending limit on federal employee credit cards, another step aimed at bringing payments to a halt.

From payments to data: DOGE also moved on the question of undocumented voters. It created a “data lake” filled with migrant information and organized a hackathon to build a mega API hosted on Palantir’s Foundry platform. The stated purpose was to bring together data from key agencies alongside IP addresses to geolocate undocumented migrants. A crucial step, in the account, was the deal made to make Palantir and Databricks software more operable.

The push also extended to institutional messaging. DOGE outlined a plan to purge federal agencies of diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Two weeks into Trump II. around 8. 000 webpages and approximately 3. 000 datasets were taken down or modified. mainly containing diversity and inclusion information.

The outcome was fast. It is estimated that by the end of 2025 around 317,000 US government workers left or lost their job.

That scale is where the editorial through-line becomes hard to miss: DOGE’s signature approach wasn’t reform through explanation. It was deletion—done overnight, without warning, and built on access control.

As sociologist and philosopher Mauricio Lazzarato writes, “The function of the ‘fascist’ market is never economic. It is. above all. repressive of the individualization of the proletariat and of any collective or solidaristic action and. secondarily. disciplinary.” In the same view of the story. DOGE’s deletions weren’t just technical. They were ideological. a one-off hackers’ intervention force that introduced “deletion” as a techno-cultural logic and experimented with contemporary forms of abstract violence.

The account repeatedly returns to the same idea: deletion isn’t a button you press. It becomes a cultural logic. “Cancelling” can feel like a protest, an interpersonal act. Deletion. as described here. is cold and abstract—executed from a distance. often without explanation. and powered by the premise that opponents have to be silenced “for good.”.

The same account even places the tactic inside a broader political vocabulary. A US conservative on the far-right libertarian blog ZeroHedge wrote, “It’s a childish notion to think you can coexist with the devil in the same house when his only desire is to see your destruction.”

There is a practical reason this model depends on technical access. To erase permanently requires the ability to cross out identities and related resources indefinitely, not simply to edit. It also presumes that backups will be prevented—hence the claim that victims need to be anonymized and disappear for good. and that giving back names and faces can be a gesture of undeleting memory.

All of this plays out against a wider claim about the internet itself. In Extinction Internet, the account describes the internet as a “network of networks” that is dead inside. It argues the internet is no longer an engineering consensus over “neutral. technical protocols. ” but a stack of power controlled by American Big Tech. In contrast, countries like Germany, it says, still roll out fibre-optics and discuss the necessity of “digitization.”.

The account quotes Cade Diehm in his speech “Who Will Remember Us When the Servers Go Dark?” at the National Digital Forum 2025. Diehm is quoted saying: “We were once told the digital would remember everything. That cyberspace was sovereign. That metadata was harmless. That archives were neutral. That the cloud would always be there.” The account says that myth is dead and that content is either deleted or no longer matters.

Later, the story complicates its own premise. In December 2025, it was reported that DOGE, unlike the internet, wasn’t dead. It had “burrowed into the agencies like ticks. ” and “Former DOGE staff. dispersed within the US government structure. were still cutting contracts.” It also claims that tech destruction of government agencies was part of a wider “finding the exit” strategy.

That strategy, in the account, later folded into military ambitions. Late 2025. defence Secretary Pete Hegseth assigned remaining DOGE staff the mission of “catching up” with countries that use drones in large numbers on the battlefield. replacing expensive. dinosaur military vehicles that have become easy targets.

The account then steps beyond the US bureaucracy into the direction tech power might take next. It says US Big Tech billionaires do not believe American civilization can be reformed or rescued. and that the political system can no longer be fixed. In Jacob Silverman’s critique. he states: “There’s a problem with the frontier. at least the kind presented in American folklore: it’s a dangerous place. It’s riven by battles over land and sovereignty. People grab what they want with no regard who was there first. Not everyone wants to live or do business there.”.

The libertarian response, in the account, is parallel societies such as the Próspera ZEDE libertarian charter city project in Honduras, described as self-governing economic zones based on blockchain and cryptocurrency principles.

Even so. the account suggests DOGE-style violence may also be read as a sign that Silicon Valley’s power is waning. It quotes Hannah Arendt from On Violence: “Power and violence are opposites. … Violence appears where power is in jeopardy. … Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”.

So the deletion strategy becomes more than a policy story. In this telling. it is a moment of impotence: as Big Tech hegemony evaporates. soft power stops working. platforms move beyond optimization and openly commit “structural violence.” It’s framed as a shift from “Californian Ideology. ” defined by theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron as the hegemony of the prior three decades. to “Californian Violence. ” where “we will delete you” becomes the battle cry.

DOGE may have been dismantled ten months into Trump II. but the argument this account builds is that deletion outlives any agency. Once “deletion” becomes the method—over access. payments. datasets. websites. and programs—it is not limited to one department or one headline cycle. It settles into the way governance can be switched off: fast, abstract, and difficult to undo.

DOGE Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk Trump II USAID Marko Elez Treasury systems diversity and inclusion DEI purge mass deletion Palantir Foundry Databricks Marko Elez US Digital Service General Services Administration Wired JD Vance Pete Hegseth Próspera ZEDE