DOGE’s deletion strategy

In early 2025 darkness descended upon the world. What some called nonstop performative idiocracy of US oligarchs, others analysed as an administrative coup. ‘In the US, there is a real revolution happening – or rather, a counter-revolution’, akin to Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s notion of a ‘preventive counter-revolution’, wrote artist and writer Nika Dubrovsky on X. ‘Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are the most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian science fiction as a suggestion, rather than as a warning,’ wrote sci-fi author and journalist Cory Doctorow on X. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) operated along these lines.

In Gilded Age: Elon Musk and the radicalization of Silicon Valley, Jacob Silverman describes how Trump gave ‘chainsaw’ Musk the ‘secretary of cost cutting’ role to make good his promise of awarding the entrepreneur ‘a form of authority unlike any previous big donor’.1 Musk received carte blanche to erase the ‘woke mind virus’ from the administrative state. DOGE, which ‘was not a real cabinet-level agency that would take an act of Congress’,2 was established to cut public funding and privatize government programmes. ‘In his six months as the unofficial head of DOGE, Musk took a wrecking ball to America’s governing institutions. And he did it without provoking much meaningful opposition,’ notes Silverman.3

Musk gave his DOGE team the task of changing the federal payment system’s software and interface design. They took control via a series of shock mass firings and regulation destruction – a tactic lifted from Musk’s post-purchase raid on the Twitter offices in October 2022. As vice-president JD Vance put it, the task of DOGE was to make ‘the bureaucracy responsive to the elected president’.

However, despite having at a certain point over 100 employees and supposedly saving US$214 billion, DOGE soon failed to reach its official ‘efficiency’ objectives. While the department undertook its techno-sadist strategies, causing thousands of lay-offs and USAID-closure-related deaths, simultaneously ruining the US’s global ‘soft power’, US public debt increased rapidly rather than diminishing. Consequently, DOGE was officially dismantled just ten months into Trump II. Indeed, the fall out between Trump and Musk happened even earlier in June 2025 when Trump announced his One Big Beautiful Bill that would increase US federal spending.

But judging Musk’s DOGE solely along financial lines would be a mistake, as this was never its intention. 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.’4 DOGE served Elon Musk’s power games. It was a one-off hackers’ intervention force that introduced ‘deletion’ as a techno-cultural logic, experimenting with contemporary forms of abstract violence. From day one DOGE was designed as an ideological weapon and conceptual laboratory in one – techno-solutionism at its worst.

Move fast and break things

Let’s first assess DOGE’s modus operandi. One of its main approaches was to forbid senior staff access to databases overnight. Shock tactics, which have been used by neoliberal management elites ever since the 1970s – preventing workers from coming together, organizing and resisting, whether in the physical workplace or online – had been turned into an ideology where speed is key. As Big Tech billionaire Marc Zuckerberg once said in the early days of Facebook: ‘Move fast and break things.’

The department quickly positioned itself inside the US Digital Service and the General Services Administration agencies, gave itself email accounts and A-status clearance – tactics known from hacking. ‘As would happen at agencies across the government, the GSA seizure took place in the shadows – a matter not of announcements but of calendar invitations from unknown people, of unfamiliar names appearing in internal directories,’ reported Wired in March 2025.

Once DOGE was in, their aim was to create barriers to GSA-staff-member access – physical as well as digital. ‘The sixth and seventh floors, which had offices and suites used by the administrator, were restricted and largely locked down,’ reported Wired. One employee described how disorganized and unprofessional the DOGE operation was: ‘Staff were instructed to return government IDs ASAP. We lost Google Drive access immediately, and the agency put resources about our RIF on there. We were blocked from sending emails to non-GSA addresses. Even trying to email career documents to your private email address became a huge issue.’

And within this chaos, certain acts of resistance were possible, as another federal worker stated:

‘I had to turn over access to our website and social media accounts. Ethan Shaotran asked me to turn over the login info to the website, to Facebook, Instagram, and X. I gave the passwords and usernames for those accounts. He came back later and asked for the address to log in to the WordPress account. I tried to just give the exact information they asked for because I wanted to passively resist. That’s why DOGE didn’t get access to our LinkedIn – they didn’t ask for it. The public considers these guys to be tech geniuses, but I’d say WordPress is pretty intuitive. It took them two days to take the website down.’

The first target was USAID. On X, Musk called the US’s international development agency a ‘criminal organization’ and said it was ‘time for it to die’; Trump alleged that the agency was ‘run by a bunch of radical lunatics’. DOGE operatives 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’.

‘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,’ reported Wired. ‘With that level of access, he (or anyone he reported to) could potentially have cut off congressionally authorized payments, effectively allowing Trump or Musk to exercise a line-item veto. More immediately ominous to people familiar with the systems was the possibility that, by tampering with the code, Elez could cause the systems, in whole or in part, to simply stop working.’ A few weeks later DOGE imposed a US$1 spending limit on federal employee credit cards, another move to bring payments to a halt.

Plotting around the conspiracy theory that undocumented people are voting in the States, DOGE then created a ‘data lake’ filled with migrant information. The department organized a hackathon to create a mega application programming interface (API), hosted on Palantir’s Foundry platform, bringing together data from key agencies in combination with IP addresses to geolocate undocumented migrants. A crucial step in this operation was the deal made to make Palantir and Databricks software more operable.

DOGE further outlined a plan to purge federal agencies of its diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Two weeks into Trump II around 8,000 webpages and approximately 3,000 datasets were taken down or modified, which mainly contained diversity and inclusion information. It is estimated that by the end of 2025 around 317,000 US government workers left or lost their job. This could never have been achieved so fast with a one-on-one approach to redundancies.

More than a keyboard command

Deletion is no longer merely a computer command or a button on a keyboard. It has been transformed into a form of cultural logic. While over the past years ‘cancelling’ was perceived as a one-off interpersonal affair done out of protest, ‘deletion’ is cold and abstract, perpetrated overnight, without explanation. It is a form of abstract violence committed from distance. As beliefs have become mutually exclusive, the opponent-turned-enemy has to be silenced for good. As a US conservative on the far-right libertarian blog ZeroHedge writes: ‘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.’ Deletion is not committed in an act of Luddite anger. It is the opposite of rage against the Machine. Connected machines are mobilized to erase the Other. The public gesture of cancelling individuals or attacking groups is often not enough and only stage one in a process leading to eradication.

Deletion was DOGE’s main weapon. The cultural technique of mass deletion goes beyond censorship and budget cuts.5 To silence or hurt is one thing; to kill the file for good is another. Blotting or blacking out can still be read as a correction. Editing should be an improvement, right? But for deletion, one needs crucial access to data to cross out identities and related resources indefinitely.

And deletion presumes that backups will be prevented, which, in turn, shows why they always have to be made and stored elsewhere. Removing data and hardware once is not enough for operations like DOGE, where destruction needs to be final and devastating. Victims need to be anonymized and disappear for good, which is why giving back names and faces is seen as a powerful gesture of undeleting memory.

The death of a medium

In Extinction Internet6 I describe the internet as a ‘network of networks’ that is dead inside. It is no longer a benevolent consensus ritual amongst innocent engineers that decide over so-called neutral, technical protocols but a stack of power controlled by American Big Tech. The internet’s slide into a cynical online abyss over the past decade made it possible for DOGE to exist in the first place. In contrast to countries like Germany that still roll out fibre-optics and discuss the necessity of ‘digitization’, the US is no longer utilizing computers to connect and digitize. ‘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’, said Cade Diehm in his speech ‘Who Will Remember Us When the Servers Go Dark?’ at the National Digital Forum 2025. According to Diehm, that myth is dead. The global, neo-liberal cybernetic world order is a thing of the past. Content is either deleted or no longer matters.

Retrospectively, Musk called DOGE ‘a little bit successful’, regretful of the damage done to his reputation and that of Tesla.7 What remains are new rules that make it easier to shut down federal offices and programmes by allowing agencies to lay off entire teams without following the usual seniority or performance-based protections. This is the DOGE legacy: mass deletion as cruel political strategy while celebrating the death of a medium. The internet governance circus had supposedly been unmasked as an ultra-left globalist conspiracy -> del *.*.

We will delete you

In December 2025 it was reported that DOGE, unlike the internet, wasn’t dead. It had ‘burrowed into the agencies like ticks’, said government sources. Former DOGE staff, dispersed within the US government structure, were still cutting contracts. Furthermore, the tech destruction of government agencies is part of a wider ‘finding the exit’ strategy. 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.

US Big Tech billionaires do not believe American civilization can be reformed or rescued. In their view, the political system can no longer be fixed. In Silverman’s critique of the US situation, 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.’8 So libertarians are planning parallel societies such as the Próspera ZEDE libertarian charter city project in Honduras as self-governing economic zones based on blockchain and cryptocurrency principles.

And yet technological violence DOGE-style can also be interpreted as signs that Silicon Valley’s power is waning. In On Violence Hannah Arendt wrote: ‘Power and violence are opposites. … Violence appears where power is in jeopardy. … Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.’9 We could therefore say that DOGE violence is not a display of tech power but arises from a moment of impotence. As Big Tech hegemony evaporates into thin air, soft power no longer works. We see platforms moving beyond optimization and openly committing forms of structural violence. The Trump-Musk DOGE saga exemplifies that ‘The Californian Ideology’, as defined by theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron,10 which went uncontested for three decades, has lost its hegemony and is showing its brutal side. DOGE and Palantir stand for the transition to ‘Californian Violence’, where ‘we will delete you’ is going to be the battle cry for years to come.