In Donald Trump's America, it's tech bros versus deep state

With tech moguls Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at the helm, can the new Department of Government Efficiency hack bureaucracy?

- Bhagyashree Garekar

Within weeks of taking over as president for the first time in 2017, Donald Trump hit an unanticipated roadblock. Hundreds of civil servants in the nation's capital were rising in open defiance of his administration. The State Department's "dissent" channel - where staff can register opposition without fear of reprisals - was flooded with objections to the new refugee policy.

At the Securities and Exchange Commission, disgruntled employees contradicted the White House stance on banking regulations. Other bureaucrats were attempting to derail his policies by leaking them on Twitter. Some were consulting their Obama-era bosses about how they could stall the new president's agenda.

Today, armed with a decisive mandate for his second term, Trump has moved early to beat back the much-reviled "deep state" of his first term - the ideologically-opposed, slow-walking bureaucrats.

A week after his political comeback, he made a pre-emptive strike by announcing the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

At the helm of the curiously named agency are two figures cut from the cloth of Silicon Valley ambition: Mr Elon Musk, the world's richest man often clad in T-shirts declaring his goal of colonising Mars, and Mr Vivek Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate and billionaire biotech entrepreneur whose loud anti-woke stance has made him the darling of conservative Republicans.

The new body's acronym, synonymous with a meme cryptocurrency associated with Mr Musk, makes the enterprise sound unserious. But Trump has insisted its work is as urgent and important as that of the World War II project to develop the atomic bomb. "It will become, potentially, 'The Manhattan Project' of our time," he said while announcing the agency.

And indeed, the task it set itself appears staggering: to cut by a third the US$6.75 trillion (S$9.1 trillion) federal budget and axe 75 per cent of the 2.3 million-strong federal bureaucracy.