Britain needs DOGE: How Elon Musk is cutting billions in waste including a Sesame Street play in Iraq - analysis

Stephen K Bannon, an ally of the President, described this period as “days of thunder”. To many conservatives, President Trump has done more for their cause in two-weeks than a string of top Republican politicians have achieved in two-decades. One of the most successful initiatives has been the creation of the Department for Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, led by Elon Musk. Musk claims to have cut more than a billion dollars in spending every day, and has taken aim at various taxpayer-funded programmes, in particular those promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

If the coming weeks unfold as they have since Trump’s inauguration, then no American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legendary first 100 days has done more to reshape the nation.

Since the birth of the welfare state and FDR’s transformative expansion of the US government in the 1930s—marked by his controversial “alphabet agencies” aimed at revitalising the economy after the Great Depression—conservatives and libertarians have continuously fought against this revolution, championing small government instead. And ever since the 1930s the size of the government has only ever gone in one direction: It has grown. This was true under Democrat and Republican Presidents alike, including Ronald Raegan, and Donald Trump in his first term.

The government has become so bloated that the US national debt has reached $36.22 trillion, with its annual deficit standing at a whopping $1.8 trillion. Elon Musk has pledged to cut “trillions” in waste and fraud, a lofty goal which will be difficult to reach. However, the Tesla CEO has already identified billions spent on programmes he says are surplus to requirement. These include the tens of billions spent on USAID to projects around the world, some of which are absurd.

Among the projects funded by American taxpayers via USAID are: $20 million for a Sesame Street show in Iraq, $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland, $2 million for Moroccan pottery classes, and $6 million to promote tourism in Egypt. DOGE has already cut down the agency’s employees from more than 14,000 to just hundreds of critical staff, and Trump has tweeted promising to shut down the entire department.

DOGE operates with Elon Musk at its head and a series of young men underneath him. Musk has 20 staff operating in DOGE, most of whom are men in their early 20s, including one who is just 19.

These men are equivalent to Dominic Cummings’ “misfits and weirdos” who worked in Number 10 during Boris Johnson’s premiership. Musk believes he can hire autistic geniuses to work day and night to go through the federal budget with a knife. The team is using AI algorithms to search for waste, which is surely required when one takes into account the size of US government spending. One member of the team won a prestigious prize (worth hundreds of thousands of dollars) for using AI to translate ancient Roman texts which were previously believed to be unreadable. They have the political backing of the President and his Cabinet, as well as much of Congress. For the first time since the New Deal there seems to be a Republican President who meant it when he said he wanted a smaller, more efficient state.

Britain’s welfare state began at the turn of the century in the lead up to the First World War. It expanded in the 1930s and boomed in the 1940s under the radical-Left government of Clement Attlee. Much like in the United States conservatives have promised to trim back this vast expansion of government, and have failed at every turn.

The tax burden in Britain is the highest since the Second World War, government spending is at record levels, and the public sector has grown in numbers by more than 500,000 in less than ten years. Meanwhile people feel public services are failing, with long waiting lists for the NHS and a hugely unreliable train network.

If Labour lose the next election in 2029 there will be a huge opportunity for Reform or the Conservatives to instigate a UK DOGE. Britain’s welfare state is massively inefficient, and is creaking with the pressure brought from mass migration.

The UK copied America’s DEI obsession too, and according to a report from Conservative Way Forward taxpayers could save more than £7billion if these politically motivated campaigns were defunded. Moreover, a recent FOI found that 10,000 DEI jobs are costing the UK taxpayer £557million a year.

I expect the British Right are studying closely what Elon Musk and his band of brothers are doing, for if they truly want to shrink the state then they must follow the Musk playbook.