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"The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is poised to make far-reaching recommendations that could have a devastating impact on Americans and enormously benefit insiders, starting with Musk himself."
The two right-wing billionaires President-elect Donald Trump has tasked with spearheading a new "government efficiency" commission outlined their vision Wednesday for the mass firing of federal employees, large-scale deregulation, and major spending cuts that could impact antipoverty programs, drug research and development, and more.
For the first time since Trump announced plans to create the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—which, despite its name, would be an advisory commission rather than an actual federal department—Tesla CEO Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy offered a detailed look at how they plan to achieve their stated objective of taking a "chainsaw" to federal operations.
"We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America," the pair wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. "The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws."
Decrying rules crafted by "unelected bureaucrats," Musk and Ramaswamy—unelected outside advisers—wrote that they intend to present to Trump "a list of regulations" they believe should be eliminated. The culling of regulations would, they argued, provide the justification for "mass headcount reductions"—corporate-speak for sweeping firings—across federal agencies, a plan the two wrote would not be deterred by civil service protections.
Watchdogs have noted that the regulatory cuts envisioned by the commission's co-leaders would likely benefit Musk's companies, at least three of which are currently under scrutiny from nine federal agencies.
"Based on Elon Musk's comments, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is poised to make far-reaching recommendations that could have a devastating impact on Americans and enormously benefit insiders, starting with Musk himself," Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman said Wednesday.
"A second Trump term will undoubtedly see a multipronged attack on any institution that seeks to constrain big business, and DOGE will lead the charge."
Musk and Ramaswamy also laid out a plan under which Trump would evade existing federal statutes such as the Impoundment Control Act to cut spending already allocated by Congress.
"DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion-plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood," they wrote.
As The Washington Post's Jacob Bogage recently observed, the federal programs "without separate spending authorization" that Musk and Ramaswamy are targeting "represent more than $516 billion" and encompass key areas including veterans' healthcare, education spending, housing assistance, childcare aid, student loan programs, Head Start, opioid addiction treatment, and NASA.
Musk, a megadonor to Trump's 2024 presidential bid, claimed on the campaign trail that he would be able to identify "at least $2 trillion" in possible cuts to federal spending.
Casey Wetherbee, an Argentina-based writer, warned Wednesday that "Musk and Ramaswamy's admiration of Argentine president Javier Milei offers us a glimpse into their ideal end state."
"Ramaswamy tweeted on November 18: 'A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids,'" Wetherbee wrote for Jacobin. "When Milei assumed office last year, he declared that conditions would worsen before things would get better; Musk similarly warned that DOGE’s recommendations may cause 'temporary hardship.' Meanwhile, in Argentina, Milei's austerity measures have targeted the country's social safety net, causing the poverty rate to skyrocket while only lowering taxes for the country's wealthiest citizens, a troubling outlook for a second Trump administration if DOGE's advice is ever implemented."
"A second Trump term will undoubtedly see a multipronged attack on any institution that seeks to constrain big business, and DOGE will lead the charge," Wetherbee added. "After all, in DOGE's public call for collaborators, it seeks 'super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries'; that's how they see themselves. We can only hope that, by virtue of how evidently insufferable they are, DOGE's relationship with the Trump administration flames out spectacularly."
Elon Musk has already told you what Trump has planned will cause "temporary hardship." Argentinians living under their new libertarian masters can tell already you already what that pain and suffering feels like.
As the world absorbs the shockwave of Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, the playbook for his second term, designed by a handful of right-wing extremists, is already underway in Argentina.
Project 2025 is set out in a nearly 900-page ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,’ produced by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing U.S. think tank, as a ready reckoner for the incoming Trump administration. It details authoritarian tactics that exist in various parts of the world, from attacking public education to dismantling policies to tackle climate change to restricting the rights of women, LGBTIQ+ people, migrants, workers and Black people. But if there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.
“If you have any doubts about how Project 2025 would be implemented, you have to look at what has happened in the last year in Argentina,” human rights lawyer Paula Ávila-Guillén, told me in a thought-provoking interview. She is the executive director of the Women's Equality Center (WEC) which works on communication strategies on reproductive health and justice in Latin America.
I knew what was happening in my country Argentina. A 30% cut in state spending and an eleven percentage point increase in poverty in less than a year don’t go unnoticed – even if you don't live there. Nor do the struggles that family and friends go through in a society already used to economic crashes. Still, Ávila-Guillén’s provocation prompted me to delve into the way Project 2025 is being carried out back home.
When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures. This is exactly what millions are now suffering: more poverty and recession.
Project 2025 has been spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, but includes an advisory board with more than one hundred other Christian right and far right groups and dozens of former Trump officials.
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration,” the Heritage Foundation says on its website to introduce Project 2025.
In the months leading up to election day, as Project 2025’s authoritarian goals were increasingly documented by the press, hate watch groups and trade unions, Trump tried to distance himself from it.
Javier Milei, president of Argentina since December last year and an emerging figurehead of the global far right, has never mentioned Project 2025. But he had been looking to establish ties with the Heritage Foundation since at least 2023, according to documents submitted by a lobbyist to the U.S. Department of Justice.
And a copy of the ‘Mandate for Leadership’ was handed to Milei by Heritage’s executive vice-president Derrick Morgan when the two met in Washington in February for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), according to Argentina’s government website which lists gifts received by the president.
A central goal of Project 2025 is to “dismantle the administrative state” allegedly co-opted by the left or wokism. It entails disbanding federal ministries and agencies, cutting public funding for health, education and welfare, and eliminating programs and resources to combat gender-based violence, discrimination, pollution and climate change.
If there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.
Milei has worked fast in his first ten months in power and has followed this script entirely. The argument for many of his new measures has been the need to lower public spending to balance a lopsided economy, with an annual inflation at 211% and a huge debt owed to the International Monetary Fund. There is nothing wrong with cutting superfluous spending of course, but Milei has gone so much further than anyone might have initially imagined, in what many have dubbed his “chainsaw-style approach” to reducing the size of the state.
“I love being the mole inside the state,”I Milei said in an interview in June. “I'm the one destroying the state from within”.
“I love being the mole inside the state. I'm the one destroying the state from within”
Milei
Milei has made an unprecedented cut to all public spending at close to 30%. He cut investment in education by 40%, denied increases to pensions, cut access to life-saving drugs for cancer patients, defunded the science and technology system and universities, and laid off almost 27,000 public employees.
He closed the public media and froze food distribution to soup kitchens. Now, he’s set to sell-off public companies in the fields of nuclear energy, aviation, fuel, mining, electricity, water, cargo transport, roads and railways.
Milei has eliminated nine ministries, including the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and the Ministry of Education— something that the Mandate for Leadership mentions and Trump has also spoken about.
He has dismantled all gender policies and defunded services including those for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Last year, more than 170,000 people accessed these services, while official figures show that a femicide is committed every 35 hours in Argentina. It is now unclear whether anyone will continue to keep track of these statistics.
He also closed the Institute against Discrimination, Racism and Xenophobia, which he called a “sinister body used for ideological persecution.” Project 2025 authors would no doubt be delighted. Their blueprint for Trump goes to great lengths to explain how every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy, program and fund must be removed.
The ‘Mandate for Leadership’ details the need to assemble an army of loyalists from day one to carry out this task of reducing the state. The Heritage Foundation has a database of some 20,000 people in the U.S. who would make up a transitional staff for Trump. But it would require firing tens of thousands of career civil servants to replace them with people loyal to their ideology and ban public employees’ right to unionise.
Milei is actively persecuting civil servants who don’t follow his mindset. In a letter to the diplomatic corps, he demanded those who don’t align with his foreign policy ideas to “step aside,” specifically referencing his plan to repudiate the UN's Agenda 2030 which governments have signed to combat poverty, inequality and environmental destruction.
Days later, in a statement, he announced a purge: “The executive branch will launch an audit of the career staff of the foreign ministry with the aim of identifying promoters of anti-freedom ideas.”
According to Project 2025, the next US president must “remove from every existing rule, regulatory agency, contract, grant, regulation, and federal law the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights.”
Abortion is mentioned 199 times in the document, including proposing a federal ban, increased criminalization, more restrictions on providing care for miscarriages and obstetric emergencies, defunding emergency contraception and strict surveillance systems on people who have abortions or suffer miscarriages.
Heritage also wants to impose its worldview across borders: restore the so-called ‘Mexico City policy,’ which prohibits any U.S. public funding to foreign non-governmental organizations if they include any abortion-related activity—even if they do so with their own funds.
The right to abortion, legalized in 2021 in Argentina, is in danger under Milei. His party introduced a bill to repeal abortion which he’s referred to as “aggravated murder.” He’s also defunded the distribution of abortion pills and contraceptives.
Milei eliminated a program to prevent teenage pregnancy and has not set aside any funds in the 2025 budget for comprehensive sex education—which is mandatory by law and considered essential to prevent child abuse. Instead, authorities hired the Chilean Catholic organization Teen Star, that promotes abstinence, for training teachers in charge of CSE.
Milei banned the use of gender inclusive language in public services, and put a Catholic lawyer, Ursula Basset, in the foreign ministry to review all the country's positions on gender and climate change. At the last Organization of American States (OAS) General Assembly, Basset stymied the negotiations by demanding the removal of “LGBTI people,” “gender,” “tolerance,” “climate change,” and “families” from agreed intergovernmental statements.
“Argentina was the only G20 country to oppose the Ministerial Declaration on Gender Equality,” signed last month in Rio, Ávila-Guillén told me. The disagreement stemmed from the fact that “family care” was defined as work and the term “reproductive rights” was mentioned. Argentina ended up in a more extreme position than Saudi Arabia or Russia.
“At the G20 meeting, Argentina ended up in a more extreme position on gender than Saudi Arabia or Russia”
Respectability and academic tone is just a veneer for hate in Mandate for Leadership. You only need to skim the document to find polarizing language and the construction of an internal enemy. Milei likewise calls his opponents “rats,” “human excrement,” “fucking lefties,” “imbeciles,” or “traitors.”
“The idea that Milei is the most Argentinian thing that could happen to Argentina is ridiculous; he is part of a much bigger agenda, crafted in the U.S. and which is trying to be implemented in different parts of the world,” Ávila-Guillén says.
The lobbyist that connected Milei with the Heritage Foundation last year is Damián Merlo, partner director of Latin America Advisory Group, a company which lobbies in the U.S. on behalf of authoritarian Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Merlo is close to digital strategist Fernando Cerimedo, who also works for Milei and has done so for the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Cerimedo is currently under investigation in Brazil for his alleged role in the 2022 failed coup attempt led by Bolsonaro against Brazilian president Inácio Lula da Silva.
When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures. This is exactly what millions are now suffering: more poverty and recession.
In the last days of the U.S. election campaign, a similar message was spread by billionaire Elon Musk who put more than $100 million into Trump's campaign, and who would be, according to Trump, his “secretary of cost-cutting.” Such cuts, Musk warned, might cause “temporary hardship,” but they were necessary in the path to “long-term prosperity.”
Prosperity for whom is not clear—but a recipe for hardship, denial of rights and persecution is on display in Argentina, if you can bear to take a look.
A veritable Who's Who of fascist-facing leaders lined up to congratulate the man who said he'd be a dictator on "day one" of his impending presidency.
Current and former far-right leaders around the world cheered U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's remarkable victory in Tuesday's election, in which the twice-impeached, 34-count convicted felon, self- and court-affirmed sexual assaulter, and insurrection-fomenting 78-year-old Republican won not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote in what some observers described as a "mandate for fascism."
In Israel—which the Biden administration buoyed with massive military and diplomatic support even as it faces a genocide case at the World Court for a war on Gaza that's killed more than 43,000 Palestinians—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Trump's victory is "history's greatest comeback" and represents a "powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America."
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's national security minister and leader of the Jewish supremacist Otzma Yehudit party, reposted an earlier message in which he proclaimed, "God Bless Trump."
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was the first European leader to endorse Trump in 2016, lauded the Republican's "enormous win," which he called "a much-needed victory for the world."
Argentinian President Javier Milei—who campaigned as a libertarian populist but has governed like a neoliberal shock doctrinaire—hailed Trump's "formidable electoral victory."
"Now, Make America Great Again," he added. "You know that you can count on Argentina to carry out your task."
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele—who Trump recently accused of sending gang members to the U.S. to insidiously reduce crime in his country—wished divine blessings and guidance for the president-elect.
Arab dictators—from the monarchs of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi—also congratulated Trump. Some, like Jordan's King Abdullah II, said they hoped Trump's second term would usher in an era of "regional and global peace and stability for all."
However, while Trump's first term saw the signing of the historic Abraham Accords that nominally normalized relations between Israel and some of its former Arab enemies, he also presided over what one of his former defense secretaries called a "war of annihilation" that left thousands of civilians dead and cities in ruins in Syria and Iraq.
Former right-wing leaders also cheered Trump's win. Disgraced former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—who like Trump incited an insurrection following his last election loss, but unlike Trump was slapped with an eight-year electoral ban over it—said Tuesday's result represents "the triumph of the people's will over the arrogant designs of an elite who disdain our values, beliefs, and traditions."
"This triumph is historic," Bolsonaro—sometimes called the "Trump of the Tropics"—continued. "Its impact will resonate across the globe... empowering the rise of the right and conservative movements in countless other nations."
On the flip side, progressive leaders around the world vowed to fight fascism—even as they shuddered at the specter of what horrors may come in Trump's second term.
"We are a global movement, made up of all faiths and backgrounds, united in our opposition to racism and hatred," said leftist U.K. lawmaker Jeremy Corbyn. "We will never abandon hope in a more equal, sustainable, and peaceful world."