By Betsey Piette
February 17, 2025
A key question behind the havoc Donald Trump and Elon Musk are creating through their Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is: “Are the majority of the U.S. ruling class on board?”
In recent days, as Musk and his band of young technocrats rampage their way through federal departments, it appears they have no problem putting some key departments at risk through massive layoffs. One is the Treasury Department, which backs up the entire U.S. banking system, serving as the last resort to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in a banking crisis to insure nationwide bank deposits.
Another sweeping round of layoffs took place at the Department of Energy, impacting over 300 workers from the National Nuclear Security Administration who oversee massive U.S. nuclear stockpiles. CNN reported that government officials responsible for the cuts appeared unaware of the crucial roles played by these laid-off workers. (Feb. 14)
Is the crisis for the U.S. capitalist system so great that not just a few superbillionaires but the entire U.S. ruling class is willing to risk it all?
Capitalist media’s acceptance of Musk
Major capitalist media — the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and others — all put forth a similar analysis of the Trump/Musk coup, but none question why now, and what is happening with U.S. capitalism to make it willing to take these risks.
Corporate media all report that in less than three weeks, Musk’s DOGE has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: “Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified. Gain control of the flow of funds. And push hard — by means legal or otherwise — to eliminate jobs and programs not ideologically aligned with Trump administration goals.” (Washington Post, Feb. 8)
Very few government voices from either capitalist party in Washington seem to have the courage to question what is going on.
Washington’s bureaucracy consists of agencies that administer services — Social Security, Education, Health and Human Services, the Veterans Administration, etc.; bodies that regulate the economy, including the Treasury Department; and the state apparatus — FBI, CIA, and other spy agencies, the Pentagon, USAID and the State Department.
There have been thousands of layoffs across the federal government system impacting the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management, the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security, the VA, the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and more. Musk’s goal is to run federal agencies on a for-profit basis.
The end game is to slash the federal government to levels not seen in over 20 years, diminish regulations over private businesses, reduce services, attack workers’ rights and curtail attempts to prevent capitalists’ destruction of the environment. By introducing greater technology and artificial intelligence (AI), Musk’s DOGE plans to replace the human workforce in the federal government with machines and destroy unions in the process.
While Musk and Trump claim that DOGE staff are seeking to “identify fraud and waste,” so far they haven’t targeted the Pentagon, the federal agency most notorious for fraud and waste.
Historic use of technology to replace human labor
Throughout the history of capitalism, companies have developed technology so that machines replace human labor in order to maximize profits. Karl Marx described this process in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848): “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguishes the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”
“High Tech, Low Pay,” written by Workers World Party chairperson Sam Marcy in 1984, elaborates on how the scientific-technological revolution of that period became an enormous economic factor in not only changing the social composition of the U.S. working class, but opening the way for imperialist export of technology and globalization of production.
AI was developed through intense exploitation of millions of workers on a global scale. The latest technological innovation is now being used by the capitalist class at a time of extreme crisis to totally restructure a governing apparatus in existence for over two centuries.
Dictatorship of the billionaire class
While bourgeois media focus on Musk and DOGE, they ignore the underlying cause of the crisis which is the irreversible decline of U.S. imperialism and the rise of socialist China. This crisis makes it impossible for the U.S. ruling class to govern in the old way.
The crisis is so severe that the billionaires have appointed themselves to positions of government power. They no longer trust the traditional party leaders — the representatives and senators they bought and paid for — to get what they want from their capitalist government.
The billionaire class wants even more tax breaks, but restrictions Congress historically placed on the debt ceiling currently stand in the way. The federal budget deficit is $2 trillion annually, with a national debt approaching $37 trillion. Stripping funding from social programs would pay for huge tax breaks for the superrich while remaining under the debt ceiling.
And the superrich want aggressive imperialist policies that undermine other capitalist countries as well as increased threats against countries trying to build socialism, such as China.
Corporate media’s focus on Trump and Musk serves to hide the dictatorship of the billionaire class — especially the control that they have over the government and their plans to eliminate any government regulations that get in the way of maximizing profits.
Membership in federal workers’ unions has greatly escalated in recent weeks. Demonstrations are taking place around the U.S. and more are planned. The only power that can stop the dictatorship by the billionaires is the massive power of the global working class, which is slowly awakening to its task ahead.
