Is privatizing US public services the ulterior motive of Elon Musk’s DOGE?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. US Republicans have long thought that what the federal government does can be done better, faster or cheaper by the private sector. So it should not shock anyone that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently revealed a larger agenda that sheds light on the Trump administration’s seemingly indiscriminate cuts to federal workers and agencies.

President Donald Trump’s overarching goal, Bessent said, is to “reprivatize the economy." That casts Elon Musk and his unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in a new light—as the vehicle for slashing agency functions to a skeletal state and outsourcing the rest to what would be a much more lightly regulated private sector. Musk himself at a recent Morgan Stanley conference suggested that the government privatize “as much as possible." The DOGE cuts so far are not enough to make a dent in the national debt or offset Trump’s proposed tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor do they make government more efficient, which would require a thoughtful assessment.

There is no evidence that the “fraud, waste and abuse" Musk claims to have discovered amount to anything more than spending with which he and Trump disagree. But as a means to push the nation closer to mass privatization of services? Now the cuts make sense. Yet, cuts like these will create considerable disruption to American life, particularly the parts of the country where Trump is most popular.

Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he has never seen efforts so rapid and widespread. “The people who will suffer the most damage are in red states," he told me. “But we are going to start seeing horror stories all over the country.