Autocracy or Efficiency: Is DOGE Taken Straight From the Playbook of a 20th Century Dictator?

Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

One-armed salutes. A surging far-right. War in Europe. Today feels less like the Roaring 1920s and more like the 1930s - a decade which, no one will need reminding, culminated in the Second World War.

There has been much hand-wringing over whether such analysis is fair, or even helpful. Is ‘fascism’ a label only applicable to movements of the 20th century? Is it appropriate to evoke Nazism when criticising the right-wing populism of the present? Historians will no doubt decide. Regardless, it has all been deeply upsetting for Elon Musk, who finds such historical comparisons ‘pretty stressful’. In conversation with Joe Rogan, the world’s richest man felt the need to clarify he is ‘not a Nazi’ (always a good sign) in response to the torrent of outrage at his inauguration day ‘arm gesture’. While we may never know if he was deliberately mimicking a Nazi salute, his work at the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’) draws more parallels with authoritarian regimes of the past century.

With the maximisation of government efficiency as their defining mission, DOGE’s 19-year-old employees have been ruthlessly gutting the Federal Government - dismantling international aid programmes, throwing the national park system into chaos, and firing civil servants en masse. Such hostility towards an impartial administrative state is more typical of autocracies than democracies, and Musk’s slashes to America’s bureaucracy, though not equivalent, echo purges of the past. Those carried out in pre-war Germany come to mind. While the firings of government workers under Trump are not explicitly motivated by identity or political allegiance, they do pave the way for one of the goals of Project 2025 - namely, to replace impartial administrators with MAGA loyalists in a takeover of America’s political machinery. Musk himself has implied support for a government composed solely of ‘high-status males’, finding the notion of a masculine hegemony ‘interesting’.

The promise and implementation of civil service clearouts is not just a hallmark of right-wing demagoguery, but a pillar of past and present dictatorships. Hitler, Franco, and Salazar all carried out purges of civil servants in their consolidation of power, though such action is not limited to autocrats of the right. Stalin, for instance, oversaw the ceaseless persecution of Soviet bureaucrats during his time in power. Finding examples of similar crackdowns in the present isn’t difficult either - we need only look to the approaches taken by Presidents Erdoğan and Putin.

Of course, we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. Perhaps it is simply an unfortunate coincidence that the work of DOGE so closely tracks with the approach taken by past and present authoritarians. Cutting the Federal Government has been at the top of the Republican wishlist for decades, and Trump may simply be seeing his party’s vision of a smaller state to fruition. 

While this may well be the case, the work of Musk - who we should note remains unelected - does map rather worryingly onto the precedents set by autocrats of the past. We must also bear in mind that Trump’s second term is only in its infancy, and DOGE has only been in operation for six-weeks, leaving us to wonder whether all of this is simply groundwork.

As Trump ominously reminded us in his recent address to Congress, he is ‘just getting started’.