Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.

No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as “Liberation Day,” a moment when, in his words, “vermin” and “radical left lunatics” would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing.

These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose.. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.

This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform]

The destruction of the modern civil-service ethos will take time. It dates from the late 19th century, when Theodore Roosevelt and other civil-service reformers launched a crusade to eliminate the spoils system that dominated government service. At that time, whoever won the presidency always got to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even for menial jobs. Much of the world still relies on such patronage systems, and they are both corrupt and corrupting. Politicians hand out job appointments in exchange for bribes. They appoint unqualified people—somebody’s cousin, somebody’s neighbor, or just a party hack—to jobs that require knowledge and experience. Patronage creates bad government and bad services, because it means government employees serve a patron, not a country or its constitution. When that patron demands, say, a tax break for a businessman favored by the leader or the party, they naturally comply.

Until January 20, American civil servants worked according to a different moral code. Federal workers were under instructions to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations. They were supposed to measure objective reality—evidence of pollution, for example—and respond accordingly. Not all of them were good administrators or moral people, but the damage that any one of them could do was limited by audits, rules about transparency, and again, an ethos built around the rule of law. This system was accepted by everyone—Republican-voting FBI agents, Democratic-voting environmental officers, the nurses at veterans’ hospitals, the air-traffic controllers at LAX.

What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests. Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk’s companies or were investigating them for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers’ rights, and consumer protection.

The new system, whatever its ideology, will in practice represent a return to patronage, about which more in a minute. But before it can be imposed, the administration will first have to break the morale of the people who believed in the old civil-service ethos. Vought, at a 2023 planning meeting organized in preparation for this moment, promised exactly that. People who had previously viewed themselves as patriots, working for less money than they could make in the private sector, must be forced to understand that they are evil, enemies of the state. His statement has been cited before, but it cannot be quoted enough times: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at the time. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”

[Renée DiResta: My encounter with the fantasy-industrial complex]

The email Musk sent to most employees in the federal government, offering them a “buyout”—several months’ pay, in exchange for a commitment to resign—was intended to inflict this kind of trauma. In effect, Musk was telling federal workers that he was not interested in what they were doing, or whether they were good at it, or how they could become more efficient. Instead, he was sending the message: You are all expendable.

Simultaneously, Musk launched an administrative and rhetorical attack on USAID, adding cruelty to the hostility. Many USAID employees work in difficult places, risking terrorism and violence, to distribute food and medicine to the poorest people on the planet. Overnight, they were told to abandon their projects and come home. In some places, the abrupt end of their programs, for example those providing special meals to malnourished children, will result in deaths, and USAID employees know it.

The administration has not acknowledged the dramatic real-world impact of this cut, which will, if not quashed by the courts, result in relatively minor budgetary savings. On the contrary, Musk and others turned to X to lie about USAID and its alleged waste. USAID did not give millions of dollars in direct grants to Politico, did not fund the visits of celebrities to Ukraine, did not send $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, and did not pay $84 million to Chelsea Clinton. But these fictions and others have now been blasted to hundreds of millions of people. Information taken from grant databases is also being selectively circulated, in some cases fed to internet trolls who are now hounding grant recipients, in order to smear people and organizations that had legitimate, congressionally approved goals. Musk and others used a similar approach during the so-called Twitter Files scandal to discredit researchers and mischaracterize their work.

But the true significance of USAID’s destruction is the precedent it sets. Every employee of every U.S. department or agency now knows that the same playbook can be applied to them too: abrupt funding cuts and management changes, followed by smear campaigns. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which safeguards bank customers against unfair, deceptive, or predatory practices, is already suspended. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, which mostly manages student loans, may follow. Within other agencies, anyone who was involved in hiring, training, or improving workplaces for minority groups or women is at risk, as is anyone involved in mitigating climate change, in line with Trump’s executive orders.

In addition, Musk has personally taken it upon himself to destroy organizations built over decades to promote democracy and oppose Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence around the world. For example, he described the journalists of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who take extraordinary risks to report in Russia, Belarus, and in autocracies across Eurasia, as “radical left crazy people.” Not long after he posted this misleading screed on X, one RFE/RL journalist was released from a Belarusian prison after nearly three years in jail, as a part of the most recent prisoner exchange.

Putting them all together, the actions of Musk and DOGE have created moral dilemmas of a kind no American government employee has faced in recent history. Protest or collaborate? Speak up against lawbreaking or remain silent? A small number of people will choose heroism. In late January, a career civil servant, Nick Gottlieb, refused to obey an order to place several dozen senior USAID employees on administrative leave, on the grounds that the order violated the law. “The materials show no evidence that you engaged in misconduct,” he told them in an email. He also acknowledged that he, too, might soon be removed, as indeed he was. “I wish you all the best—you do not deserve this,” he concluded.

[Robert P. Beschel Jr.: Making government efficient again]

Others will decide to cooperate with the new regime—collaborating, in effect, with an illegal assault, but out of patriotism. Much like the Ukrainian scientists who have kept the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant going under Russian occupation because they fear catastrophe if they leave, some tech experts who work on America’s payment systems and databases have stayed in place even as Musk’s team of very young, very inexperienced engineers have demanded illegitimate access. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one government employee told my Atlantic colleagues Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost.

Eventually, though, if the assault on the civil service is not blocked, the heroes and the patriots will disappear. They will be fired, or denied access to the tools they need to work, or frightened by the smear campaigns. They will be replaced by people who can pass the purity tests now required to get government jobs. Some will seem silly—are you willing to say “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico”?—and some will be deadly serious. Already, the Post reports, candidates for national-security posts in the new administration are being asked whether they accept Trump’s false claim to have won the 2020 election. At least two candidates for higher positions at the FBI were also asked to state who the “real patriots” were on January 6, 2021. This particular purity test is significant because it measures not just loyalty to Trump, but also whether federal employees are willing to repeat outright falsehoods—whether they are willing, in other words, to break the old civil-service ethos, which required people to make decisions based on objective realities, not myths or fictions.

To show that they are part of the new system, many loyalists will also engage in loud, performative behavior, designed to attract the attention and approval of Trump, Musk, Vought, or their followers. Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., wrote a missive addressed to “Steve and Elon” (referring to Musk and his associate Steve Davis) in which he vowed to track down “individuals and networks who appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees.” If anyone is deemed to have broken the law “or acted simply unethically,” Martin theatrically promised to “chase them to the end of the Earth.” Ostentatious announcements of bans on supposed DEI or climate-change projects will similarly threaten civil servants. Late last month, the Air Force removed videos about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, the first Black and female Air Force pilots, from a training course. After an uproar, the videos were put back, but the initial instinct was revealing. Like the people asking FBI candidates to lie about what happened on January 6, someone at the Air Force felt obliged to deny older historical truths as well.

Eventually, demonstrations of loyalty might need to become more direct. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out that a future IRS head, for example, might be pressured to audit some of the president’s perceived enemies. If inflation returns, government employees might feel they need to disguise this too. In the new system, they would hold their job solely at the pleasure of the president, not on behalf of the American people, so maybe it won’t be in their interest to give him any bad news.

Many older civil servants will remain in the system, of course, but the new regime will suspect them of disloyalty. Already, the Office of Personnel Management has instructed federal employees to report on colleagues who are trying to “disguise” DEI programs, and threatened “adverse consequences” for anyone who failed to do so. The Defense Health Agency sent out a similar memo. NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the FBI have also told employees who are aware of “coded or imprecise language” being used to “disguise” DEI to report these violations within 10 days.

Because these memos are themselves coded and imprecise, some federal employees will certainly be tempted to abuse them. Don’t like your old boss? Report him or her for “disguising DEI.” Want to win some brownie points with the new boss? Send in damning evidence about your colleagues’ private conversations. In some government departments, minority employees have set up affinity groups, purely voluntary forums for conversation or social events. A number of government agencies are shutting these down; others are being disbanded by organizers who fear that membership lists will be used to target people. Even private meetings, outside the office, might not be safe from spying or snooping colleagues.

[Annie Lowrey: Civil servants are not America’s enemies]

That might sound implausible or incredible, but at the state level, legislation encouraging Americans to inform on other Americans has proliferated. A Texas law, known as the Heartbeat Act, allows private citizens to sue anyone they believe to have helped “aid or abet” an abortion. The Mississippi legislature recently debated a proposal to pay bounties to people who identify illegal aliens for deportation. These measures are precedents for what’s happening now to federal employees.

And the fate of federal employees will, in turn, serve as a precedent for what will happen to other institutions, starting with universities. Random funding cuts have already shocked some of the biggest research universities across the country, damaging ongoing projects without regard to “efficiency” or any other criteria. Political pressure will follow. Already, zealous new employees at the National Science Foundation are combing through descriptions of existing research projects, looking to see if they violate executive orders banning DEI. Words such as advocacy, disability, trauma, socioeconomic, and yes, women will all trigger reviews.

There are still greater dangers down the road—the possible politicization of the Federal Electoral Commission, for example. Eventually, anyone who interacts with the federal government—private companies, philanthropies, churches, and above all, citizens—might find that the cultural revolution affects them too. If the federal government is no longer run by civil servants fulfilling laws passed by Congress, then its interests might seriously diverge from yours.

None of this is inevitable. Much of it will be unpopular. The old idea that public servants should serve all Americans, and not just a small elite, has been part of American culture for more than a century. Rule of law matters to many of our elected politicians, as well as to their voters, all across the political spectrum. There is still time to block this regime change, to preserve the old values. But first we need to be clear about what is happening, and why.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

OpenAI has said that it believes that DeepSeek, the Chinese start-up behind the shockingly powerful AI model that launched last month, may have ripped off its technology. The irony is rich: We’ve known for some time that generative AI tends to be built on stolen media—books, movie subtitles, visual art. The companies behind the technology don’t seem to care much about the creatives who produced that training data in the first place; Sam Altman said early last year that it would be “impossible” to make powerful AI tools without copyrighted material, and that he feels the law is on his side.

If DeepSeek did indeed rip off OpenAI, it would have done so through a process called “distillation.” As Michael Schuman explained in an article for The Atlantic this week, “In essence, the firm allegedly bombarded ChatGPT with questions, tracked the answers, and used those results to train its own models. When asked ‘What model are you?’ DeepSeek’s recently released chatbot at first answered ‘ChatGPT’ (but it no longer seems to share that highly suspicious response).” In other words, DeepSeek is impressive—about as capable as other cutting-edge models, and developed at a much lower cost—but it may be so only because it was effectively built on top of existing work. (DeepSeek did not respond to Schuman’s request for comment.)

“What DeepSeek is accused of doing is nothing like hacking, but it’s still a violation of OpenAI’s terms of service,” Schuman writes. “And if DeepSeek did indeed do this, it helped the firm to create a competitive AI model at a much lower cost than OpenAI.” (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.) Whether or not DeepSeek distilled OpenAI’s technology, others will likely find a way to do the same thing. We may be approaching the era of the AI copycat. For a time, it took immense wealth—not to mention energy—to train powerful new AI models. That may no longer be the case.

Illustration by The Atlantic

DeepSeek and the Truth About Chinese Tech

By Michael Schuman

When the upstart Chinese firm DeepSeek revealed its latest AI model in January, Silicon Valley was impressed. The engineers had used fewer chips, and less money, than most in the industry thought possible. Wall Street panicked and tech stocks dropped. Washington worried that it was losing ground in a vital strategic sector. Beijing and its supporters concurred: “DeepSeek has shaken the myth of the invincibility of U.S. high technology,” one nationalist commentator, Hu Xijin, crowed on Chinese social media.

Then, however, OpenAI, which operates ChatGPT, revealed that it was investigating DeepSeek for having allegedly trained its chatbot using ChatGPT. China’s Silicon Valley–slayer may have mooched off Silicon Valley after all.

Read the full article.

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On Sunday night, in the basement ballroom of the Salamander Hotel in Washington, D.C., Charlie Kirk was happier than I’d ever seen him. “I truly believe that this is God’s grace on our country, giving us another chance to fight and to flourish,” Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, a conservative youth-outreach organization, said to cheers from the hundreds of MAGA loyalists who had come out for his pre-inaugural ball. “What we are about to experience is a new golden era, an American renaissance.”

The celebrations have continued now that Donald Trump is back in the White House, as he has signed a flurry of executive orders to make good on his campaign promises. But this might be the best mood that MAGA world will be in for a while. The president’s coalition is split between two distinct but overlapping factions that are destined for infighting. On one side are the far-right nationalists and reactionaries who have stood by Trump since he descended down his golden escalator. Among them are Stephen Miller, who is seen as a chief architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and the former executive chair of Breitbart News. On the other side is the tech right: Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, who have become ardent supporters of the president. Already, these groups are butting heads on key aspects of Trump’s immigration crackdown. In Trump’s second term, not everyone can win.

During the campaign, it was easy for these two groups to be aligned in the goal of electing Trump. Members of the nationalist wing took glee in how Musk boosted their ideology on X, the social platform he owns. With his more than 200 million followers, Musk has helped spread far-right conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets. Meanwhile, the tech right has relished attacks on DEI efforts in the workplace—attacks that have allowed them to more easily walk back hiring practices, against the wishes of their more liberal employees.

But the two groups also want different things. The nationalist right wants an economy that prioritizes and assists American-born families (specifically, traditional nuclear ones), sometimes at the expense of business interests; the tech right wants a deregulated economy that bolsters its bottom line. The nationalist right wants to stop almost all immigration; the tech right wants to bring in immigrant workers as it pleases. The nationalist right wants to return America to a pre-internet era that it perceives as stable and prosperous; the tech right wants to usher in a bold, globally focused new economy.   

Already, the cracks have started to show. Last month, Trump’s pick of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an AI adviser led to a bitter and very public spat between the two camps over visas for highly skilled immigrants. (“FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” Musk at one point told his critics on the right.) At the time, I argued that the MAGA honeymoon is over. The disagreements have only intensified. Last week, after former President Joe Biden used his farewell speech to warn about the influence of Silicon Valley oligarchs and the “tech industrial complex,” the white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes posted on X that “Biden is right.” Bannon in particular has not relented: Earlier this month, he told an Italian newspaper that Musk is a “truly evil person” and that would get the billionaire “kicked out” of Trump’s orbit by Inauguration Day. (Considering that Musk is reportedly getting an office in the West Wing, Bannon does not seem to have been successful in that quest.) In an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, Bannon described the tech titans as “nerds” whom Trump was humiliating. Seeing them on Inauguration Day was “like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot,” Bannon said.

In a sense, he is right. During the inauguration ceremony, tech billionaires—including Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—sat directly behind Trump’s family on the dais. They are not all as forcefully pro-Trump as Musk, but they have cozied up to the president by dining with him at Mar-a-Lago and making million-dollar donations to his inaugural fund (in some cases from their personal bank accounts, and in others from the corporations they head).

In doing so, they’ve gotten his ear and can now influence the president in ways that might not line up with the priorities of the nationalist right. On Monday, during his first press conference from the White House this term, Trump defended the H-1B visa program: “We want competent people coming into our country,” he said. Later, Bannon responded on his podcast, lamenting the “techno-feudalists” to whom Trump is apparently listening.

Both factions still have overlapping interests. They are both fed up with a country that they see as having grown weak and overly considerate to the needs of the vulnerable, at the expense of the most productive. America lacks a “masculine energy,” as Zuckerberg recently put it. Some members in both camps seem interested in trying to reconcile their differences, or at least in not driving the wedge further. On the eve of the inauguration, just before Turning Point USA’s ball, the right-wing publishing house Passage Publishing held its own ball in D.C.—an event intended to be a night when “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” The head of Passage Publishing, Jonathan Keeperman, has been keen on playing peacemaker. Last month, he went on Kirk’s podcast and tried to frame the debate over visas as one where his reactionary, nativist wing of the right could find common cause with the tech right. By limiting immigration and “developing our own native-born” STEM talent, he said, Silicon Valley can “win the AI arms race.”

Kirk couldn’t keep his frustration toward the tech elite from seeping out. “Big Tech has censored us and smeared us and treated us terribly,” he said. “Why would we then accommodate their policy wishes?” It’s easy to imagine Musk asking the same question. He and his peers run some of the most powerful companies in the world. They’re not going to give that up because a few  people, on the very platforms that they own, told them to. Each side is steadfast in what it wants, and won’t easily give in.

We already can guess how this will end. During his first administration, despite making populist promises on the campaign trail, Trump eventually sided with the wealthy. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during the start of his first term, pushed for tax hikes on the wealthy. Seven months into his presidency, Trump fired him, and then proceeded to pass tax cuts. In his new administration, the nationalist right will certainly make gains—it is thrilled with Trump’s moves around birthright citizenship and his pledge to push forward with mass deportations. But if it’s ever in conflict with what Trump’s rich advisers in the tech world want, good luck.

Remember, it was Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk who sat on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Bannon, Keeperman, and Kirk were nowhere in sight.

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