Elon Musk’s conquest against the bureaucrats is based on two contradicting ideas of democratic authority.
The last months have been a non-stop flood of news about the activities of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Elon’s “Department” is actually not a department at all, but is classified as a “task force” with the mission of rooting out government overspending and corruption. DOGE has, up to now, accessed or attempted to access at least fifteen government agencies. Elon and his employees have attempted to gain access to sensitive taxpayer information from the Department of Treasury and threatened to shut down longstanding government programs like USAID. Of the latter, Musk has said it is not just an “apple with a worm in it”, but rather a “bowl of worms” which was “beyond repair”, and that the only solution was “…to basically get rid of the whole thing.” Musk’s actions have been blocked in many (but not all) cases by judicial actions which have found that his access to government information and his (and Trump’s) ability to arbitrarily shut down federal agencies and fire federal employees is not supported by Trump’s executive powers under the Constitution.
Recently, Musk appeared alongside Trump in the Oval Office, wearing a trench coat and his all-black MAGA hat, apparently to justify his actions in the past month to Americans who have grown increasingly concerned with the amount of power and access that Musk, a private businessman, has been given. When asked directly about his own power being wielded over government agencies, Musk responded, “The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get,” he said. “They’re going to get what they voted for,” Musk continued, arguing that it is important that the people making decisions are those that represent the people through elections, but that we have given over power to unelected bureaucrats, further implying that his actions are returning us to a democracy from an unrepresentative government. This has prompted him (along with the vice president) to start attacking the oversight powers of the judiciary to prevent his actions, characterizing them as acts of the executive power. Both claims suggest that judges would be blocking the legitimate power of Musk to carry out his campaign on the bureaucratic state.
Here the claims that Musk is making are 1.) that his own democratic authority comes either directly from the will of the majority of the people, or indirectly through representatives like the president; and 2.) that the bureaucratic structures which he is dismantling lack this democratic authority.
The first claim seems to depend on the idea that the people—in voting for the representative candidate (in this case, Trump)—directly vote for his platform, such that implementing that platform already has some sort of immediate democratic legitimacy. This is a fairly straightforward populist idea that there is a leader of the people that directly implements the will of the people without the mediation of constitutional checks and balances. Yet this would suggest that the people mysteriously imbued authority to him without voting for him, which would undermine the manner in which we make democratic decisions. However, it might also rest on the less radical claim that an elected official (in this case, Trump) can delegate decision-making to unelected officials who carry out the agenda specified by the elected official. This is not a radical notion. The White House delegates decision-making to White House aides, for instance, who are tasked to make decisions on behalf of the president. They, themselves, are not democratically elected, but rather their democratic authority comes to them through the president’s office. Elon Musk, charitably, might see himself as fulfilling this task; he is carrying out the agenda of the president, and the agenda for which the people have given their consent by voting.
The second claim, that bureaucrats lack democratic authority, is also not without foundation. Scholars have long bemoaned the unrepresentative quality of bureaucratic administrators who seem to wield large amounts of discretion but are not held accountable to the people directly. Of course, bureaucrats might be said to have some derivative democratic authority, say through their appointment through democratically elected officials. However, this idea, sometimes called the “transmission belt” notion of democratic legitimacy, has some problems. For instance, this model does not give us a clear method of keeping bureaucratic officials accountable to democratic interests. In other words, there are no direct checks that the people can wield over the decisions of these officials. Furthermore, top-down approaches insulate policy decisions from public deliberation, even by representative bodies like Congress. In addition, the role of the bureaucrat cannot be simplified as simply carrying out the orders of elected officials. As area experts given discretion to make judgements based on individual skill and privileged information, they often make decisions that go well beyond what elected officials have to or are able to oversee. For all these reasons, bureaucrats might lack democratic authority.
If both these claims are true, then Elon’s conquest might look more justified. However, the problem is that both of them cannot be true. If Musk’s claim about the undemocratic nature of the bureaucrat is correct, then his own democratic authority is also undermined. After all, Musk’s only claim to democratic authority is a “transmission belt”-style idea. Yet, his discretion is neither subjected to democratic accountability nor open to public deliberation, and his decisions absolutely go beyond what the White House has directly ordered. In some cases, they even go beyond the powers of the executive altogether. Bureaucrats acting in the manner of Musk would be rightly described as undemocratic for the same reasons. So, from the other direction, if Musk clings to his own democratic authority, he can only do so if he also accepts the democratic legitimacy of the bureaucrats. Their authority is derived in an identical manner, and their discretionary decision-making ought to be seen as democratically legitimate.
In other words, either both Elon and the bureaucrats have democratic authority, or none of them do. If they both do, then Elon should stop fussing about the undemocratic bureaucracy. If neither of them does, then a reform of the overblown bureaucratic state is needed, but it ought to be accomplished through more democracy, not less.
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