American Battleground: Tearing down the house with the richest man in the world

When the man in black charges onstage swinging a chainsaw while he whoops and hollers, the moment could be mistaken for a scene from “The Hunger Games.” The screaming crowd makes it seem even more so.

When the man in black charges onstage swinging a chainsaw while he whoops and hollers, the moment could be mistaken for a scene from “The Hunger Games.” The screaming crowd makes it seem even more so. “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy!” Elon Musk shouts, grinning behind dark sunglasses and beneath a MAGA black baseball cap. The spectacle by the richest man in the world at the Conservative Political Action Conference is a sensation, and not just because Musk spent more than $290 million of his own money to help push Donald Trump and other Republicans to their landmark wins last fall. Trump has given Musk the job of doing what so many conservatives have craved for so long: hacking the federal government to pieces. The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was initially conceived as an effort under the command of both Musk and his fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump said the group’s mission was “making changes to the Federal Bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all Americans.” It’s an oddly bureaucratic description for the coming carnage. As the DOGE team goes to work, headlines emerge of Musk and a group of young, technology whizzes (including a 19-year-old who goes by the moniker “Big Balls”) roaming the halls of government, demanding access to files, prying into computer records, and rapidly pushing tens of thousands of federal workers to consider resigning or risk being fired. At Yosemite National Park, employee Andria Townsend is terminated along with hundreds of other National Park employees in what they are calling the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” She sees calamity lurking in the coming collision of understaffed facilities, decreased maintenance and the massive vacation crowds. “Moving forward, I think it’s just going to make life even harder and less efficient for the people working in the federal government right now, which seems to be the opposite of what the administration is trying to do.”