Wertreich, or, The Boring Bonfire

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Dom Rottman

2 March 2025

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DOGE, The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the latest defiling of a grave, spearheaded by Elon Musk, one of today’s cartoon super villains, is pure political theater. There’s a problem with that, a problem that is more severe than any sort reckless, cavalier chainsaw cuts he can make. But first, let’s review why Elon’s quest for efficiency is just empty flourishing.

1. Congress passes the budget. That is a simple fact. DOGE can recommend whatever it wants, but only congress can allocate funds and determine outlays.

2. Most government outlays are considered mandatory spending (~62% of outlays in FY2023).¹ These outlays, since they are mandated by federal law, require the law mandating them in the first place to be amended before adjustments can be made. The House resolved earlier this month that it is their goal to reduce mandatory spending by 2 trillion over 10 years, through means unknown. Since this averages to a scant 200 billion a year–and that’s if the powers that be bend to the will of house Republicans–consider this part of the budget largely untouchable.

3. Almost 700 billion dollars evaporated into the Aether as commanded by the laws of nature.

Sorry, I meant that the government’s net interest payments were ~11% of their outlays in FY2023.

4. Discretionary spending, then, is what spending debates are largely about. In FY2023 this totaled 1.7 trillion dollars, or ~28% of the budget. Of this, the defense budget made up 800 billion. The defense budget has not been properly cut since the Clinton administration; however, the budget-wide sequestration in 2013 did cause it to shrink in the years immediately following before continuing to rise at an expected clip.

5. There already is an agency that was created to find MASSIVE FRAUD: The Government accountability office (GAO). And yes, they have actually investigated and calculated money wasted and lost due to fraud: between 233 to 521 billion, across the entire federal government.

And Elon, who has a disproportionately skewed perception of numbers, initially pledged to cut 2 trillion, followed by 1 trillion–in one year, not 10. You do the math, because he surely isn’t.

The Department of Defense is, for now, at least willing to play ball. Hegseth sent a memo earlier this month asking the Pentagon to find 50 billion in cuts²–which would, hilariously, be more than what Democrats have accomplished this millennium. Add this to the 520 billion in fraud–which would include money we’re just assuming is gone and have no way of tracking down–and then theoretically 200 billion from the House resolution, which Elon has nothing to do with, and you wind up with about 770 billion dollars as an impossibly generous estimation. Honestly, that’s more credit than I’d like to give Elon for. Thankfully, based on how I arrived at this number, between contingencies and cavalier assumptions, I won’t have to.

There are, of course, policy initiatives that could save both the American people and the government money simply by reducing the costs of goods. For instance, if the government were to fund pharmaceutical research up front rather than awarding patent monopolies to individual pharmaceutical companies, thereby allowing the drug to be immediately produced on the free market (!), total spending on drugs would be no more than a fifth of what it is today. Not only would cheaper drugs save households thousands of dollars on their own, it ought to also save Medicare and Medicaid a good chunk of change as well. Pharmaceuticals are just an extreme illustration of a basic concept in Marxist economics: Surplus value; the difference between the cost of production and the price at which a given commodity is sold, which is taken and kept as profit by the capitalist. In other words, nobody ever pays what a commodity actually costs. So, in reality, the government is overpaying for everything. In fact, they are really overpaying for everything. Based on the Pentagon’s budget, there’s no reason to assume that it’s paying any less than 640$ for toilet seats as they were in 1985 (about $1800 in today’s dollars). You could probably save trillions just by ignoring the basic principle of capitalism, or even just tempering it a little. But DOGE isn’t about actual policy. It’s not even about the budget in good faith–one could, you know, consider gouging the mega-rich and substantial tax reform, but that’s obviously off the table. It’s a bonfire, a spectacle, a flex of sovereignty, a megalomaniac playing with his new toy to show the world how powerful he is.

But you knew that already.

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The sovereigns of old made a spectacle of their power as well, often through glorious public executions by extreme acts of torture, such as being covered in hot wax before having each limb tied to a horse, who then pulled the body apart by having one run in each of the cardinal directions. On the less lethal side, Louis XIV built Versailles to his exclusive aesthetic tastes, and demanded that the French aristocracy live with him there for a period of the year to keep them under control. Absolutists aside, there has always been, for better or worse, a sort of showmanship to politics, between temples and icons of great historical politicians, use of ceremony, and high regard for oratory. And Elon Musk is making a spectacle of… budgeting. Never mind that he’s bad at it. It’s just so fucking boring! No wonder news media has become so sensationalist. I’m almost ready to forgive them for enabling Trump’s popularity, if this is what politics has come to–disorganized and mundane housekeeping.

DOGE is a perfect illustration of The Iron law of Liberalism: any attempt to reduce regulation, red tape, and bureaucracy will invariably result in more regulation, red tape, and bureaucracy. An unelected entity of management to oversee unelected entities of management—what could go wrong? The American people, quite explicitly, did not vote for this. They voted for a strongman celebrity who plays the role of real estate mogul (an actual real estate mogul would be far too boring). Trump, for his lack of foresight, might understand politics better than half of Washington—rename things by mere declaration, half-jokingly threaten to annex territories, tariffs driven by nationalist sentiment than actual economic sense, the pearl-clutching at DEI and wokery, the liberal phantasmagoria of the reactionary imagination–this is what the American people voted for, this is what the American people want to see, when the alternative is… management! The Democrats’ technocratic turn, characteristic of the Clinton years, is a political fault that the party has yet to recover from twice over—it has failed to improve the material conditions of the working class, and it has made them terribly boring. That we have sunk from Trump to Elon shows how far gone and powerless Americans really are. Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody, has supplanted the political arena. We have gone from one to zero. All eyes are on an unelected and impersonal body, peddled by a charlatan.

The fact that so many Americans have unmet needs, and that inequality becomes more stringent by the day, means that we were doomed to lose the plot a long time ago. Hannah Arendt feared that the demands of the dispossessed masses would degrade politics to a tyrannical bureaucracy. She was half-right, half-wrong. It has been not the masses themselves who have driven us to this point, but the manipulation, perpetuation, and continuation of dispossession and exploitation by a bunch of uber-rich psychopathic weirdos. Until this situation abates, political demands will largely boil down to the improvement of one’s basic needs, and starving minds will be dragged and flip-flopped around by whoever is willing to hear them out.

Unsympathetic though it may be for liberals to belittle conservative interests to the price of groceries, it shows that there are broader concerns. Politics is about people’s lives (were they only affordable enough to live!). Elon intends to ruin them with dollars and cents, not due to malice per se, but because his own life is so consumed by value, by the concept of big numbers, that he can’t conceive of there being any other meaning to life. It’s like any other game I play, where I obsessively minmax, pour over spreadsheets, stare at screens, stare into blank space, sit motionless for hours just thinking and rethinking combinations and recombinations to get every single last goddamn decimal to make sure I am getting the biggest, grandest, most beautiful number possible. 6.5 million. Not enough. Cap is 6.6. 19 million. I’ve seen higher, I must be doing something wrong…

This is brainrot. We are at the bottom. Our lives are become numbers.

Oh, and you know what the GAO’s recommendation was to combat fraud? Data driven fraud analytics! More FUCKING numbers!

Christ!

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This is probably closer to what Arendt was worried about when “the social” concerns of economic housekeeping become political. It turns politics into a maddening, mind-numbingly stupid game. One of the common responses to criticisms of Elon and DOGE is that all he is doing (besides acting like a Nazi) is exactly what it says on the tin–making the government more efficient, and that benefits everybody. It is true that pointing to his (deep, oh so very deep) character flaws and expressing a (completely merited) distrust of the man is deflecting from a judgement of DOGE’s actual activity. The obvious retort is that the math literally doesn’t add up to anything meaningful, and that DOGE is probably doing more harm than good simply because so many people are losing jobs. Of course, that argument doesn’t work that often either. The mere fact that Elon appears to be cutting waste is enough–the conservatives are committed to principle. It’s not a debate worth engaging in because it’s not a debate worth having, and it’s not a debate worth having because it’s a stupid debate in the first place. The fact that it’s a given that we do not have control over our federal dollars,³ and perhaps even shouldn’t have control over our federal dollars because we ought to have someone else richer smarter than us handle it–Be his name Musk or Clinton or Hamilton–and that democratic politics is therefore a matter of who does have control of the keys to the war chest is, frankly, rather nuts. Politics is not paying tributes to the gladiatorial gods in ballots and bills. And were this bastardized dog (ehehe) and pony show that we have as a substitute as exciting!

There is a dark sort of respect I have for some conservatives who so staunchly commit to principle that they are unshaken by the efficacy of numbers. This is ironic because not only is this principle of “economism” a bad one, it lies on the importance of value itself, that, when taken to its logical conclusion, undermines with numbers the strength of even the most stubborn, diehard idealist. If the conservatives ever have a point, it is their unwavering obstinacy on the primacy of the economy in politics to the point of overlooking egregious dangers to human rights if necessary–a point they share with Orthodox Marxists. Of course, they are not to be excused. And it is not necessarily the case that economic material conditions must be taken care of first in order, or that there is any “order” to begin with. This economism is part of how capitalism enters the political sphere, by manipulating the need to solve basic material issues (read: being too poor). Capitalism, being a never-ending cycle, for number must go up, makes a solvable problem unsolvable by its incessant demand for growth. We need not even go into the tax dollars awarded directly or indirectly to corporations to find the “corruption” of capitalism in government. Interest, the magical means through which 4=5, has caused the government to increase payments on its debt to levels which have in 2024 surpassed defense spending, and is projected to soon exceed the primary (non interest) budget deficit and grow further in the coming years. Only a system like capitalism could possibly accumulate so much wealth, so its existence might seem necessary, but its drive, the very principle of value, the valorization of value, is what is at the same time generating the problem it has set for itself to solve. The valorization of capital, the increasing of its value, by a government or any other entity, through whatever means, is accompanied by a concomitant increase in interest that derives its value from an increasing value of capital as well. The conservatives, who thump the national debt as much as the Bible, see the problem through a glass darkly: the government cannot meet its own demands, for either itself or the people. What penance must be paid for such failures? Austerity! Austerity–the specter of politics in late modernity, the tug of war which defines right and left and brings down populists to their knees, beloved Lula, significantly less beloved Starmer, a race to the bottom that is never won, as all social programs and duties are cut, and taxes go to nothing, politics is pared down to a thin knife devoid of all meaning except a meaningless matter of accountancy.

Only in a society in which politics has become a case of glorified accounting can it be coopted by a private entity. The overwhelming presence of money in politics is in part because money is politics. This is not a mere observation of actually-existing politics, as it was in the previous century, where money was merely political. The Buckley v. Valeo decision, which introduced the ruination of enlightenment to United States politics by quantifying speech, introducing the disease of value to the unique, beautiful, and priceless, was a historical moment which was one (il)logical step away from reducing speech itself to numbers. If speech can be quantified in volume, speech itself must have a quantifiable value that can then be reified through the dollar. This absurd principle, once only implied, was made a concrete, material fact of political reality in the United States in the twenty-first century. The Citizens United decision, which holds that money can not only constitute speech, but political speech, has not only enabled unmistakable material havoc but has also established an ideologically bankrupt conception of politics which undermines any sliver of democratic pretense in the nation’s founding and is pure and unmitigated philosophical batshit insanity. It spits in the face of the entire political tradition of Western Civilization, corroding it with venom unmatched. The equivalence of speech to value reduces the words and deeds of all our political forbearers to rubble and the democratic potential of the masses to dust. No longer is it possible for any political actor in the United States to move us with great speeches, for they can no longer be unique if they can be surpassed by the dollar.

So, yes, this is politics, and it was only a matter of time. The world’s richest man should, logically, by the definition of the Supreme Court of the United States, have the most political power. And yes, he should be an unelected, private being, seated at the right hand of the president. The cherry on the literal top is that Donald Trump, perhaps the last true politician in Washington, stands guardian to the remaining political ephemera left in the vote, incalculable in value–because he has not publicly disclosed his net worth!

Politics, the realm of human affairs in which we discuss and judge how best to live, is a necessarily plural endeavor. The words and deeds exchanged between individuals are unquantifiable because they are unique; furthermore, such exchanges form a horizontal, rhizomatic web that conforms to no mathematical pattern. Contrary to conventional wisdom, then, equality in politics is not a matter of zeroing out a balance sheet. Equality in politics arises from, on the contrary, the uniqueness and distinction of human relationships, inherently resistant to quantification. Inequality, then, is the failure to recognize these capacities in another human being. Historically, the easiest way to be consistent with an idea that all individuals and/or citizens are equal was to simply make others sub-human: women have been second-class citizens (or worse) since the ancient period, and slaves, stripped from all environs, communities, and relationships which define them and have shaped their understanding of the world, experience not just dehumanization but “social murder.” The creation and maintenance of a class(es) of sub-humans allowed, furthermore, the use of their labor to support the livelihood of actual citizens individually and collectively. That inequality has become a matter of “value” today is indicative of a political project gone askew, as the modern expansion of who is equal, who counts as a person, is a movement that reckons with these two great historical wrongs: the exclusion of certain groups from humanity, and the exploitation of their labor. But it seems that the United States is unwilling to engage with this—admittedly, overwhelming—unique opportunity to reckon with, perhaps for the first time in history, the idea of a truly universal political equality, one that does not rely on expropriation and exclusion. Politics, now thought of in terms of value, officially so in the past few decades, has replaced qualitative difference with quantitative difference, collapsing political and economic inequality, related but distinct, into a single irresolvable issue. Equity, not equality, fairness, not justice, become the hollow virtues of “the marketplace of ideas.” Even this shoddy metaphor requires that its participants have enough wealth to sell!

But even this grants us an insight. The contest of values will never fully be won, but there is still a particular floor at which material need is met to be recognized as a person and therefore capable of politics. Therefore the Sisyphean task of pulling up a bottom always falling through is still worth committing to. But even this is not equality in any sense. Equality, not given us, is not to be demanded, but created. In the empire of value, a demand to live and therefore for recognition is not a demand for equality at all. It is in fact rather modest. As capital accumulates, as only the few and valued become more valued still, as value is valorized, as number go up, this modest ask will turn willful ignorance into malicious neglect. The extremes, once condemned as delusional will reverse the course of value’s development: only an idiot would want to waste one’s soul away in an endless cycle of numbers to a value so high that it lacks any actual utility; from this, the cycle will be seen as idiotic to begin with. Some may remain high in the clouds, but politics will continue on earth.

Elon would fancy himself a Roman emperor or senator, but he is actually rather Austrian–nobility tasked with managing the empire’s bureaucracy. It is not hard to see why he would see this most boring and unglamorous duty as the highest political act. In another political situation this would be easy enough to simply ignore. But in Wertreich, severance by chainsaw is as powerful as the impalement of orifices and the breaking wheel.

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