Elizabeth Warren Rolls Her Eyes at Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy’s Fake ‘Efficiency’ Department
“Two people to do the work of one person. Yeah, this seems REALLY efficient,” the Massachusetts senator wrote on Twitter.
Photos: Getty Images Politics Elon Musk
Unsurprisingly, the world has only continued to get rapidly worse since Donald Trump won last week’s presidential election, and I present you with some of the bleakest news yet. On Tuesday, Trump announced a new advisory panel called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will be led by billionaire and alleged sexual predator Elon Musk and recent GOP presidential primary loser Vivek Ramaswamy. The panel “will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government,” Trump said in a press release, explaining that “DOGE” will work with the White House and Office of Management and Budget to “drive large scale structural reform.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) responded to this news with a digital eye roll via tweet: “The Office of Government Efficiency is off to a great start with split leadership: two people to do the work of one person. Yeah, this seems REALLY efficient,” she wrote on Tuesday night. Welp!
The Office of Government Efficiency is off to a great start with split leadership: two people to do the work of one person.
Yeah, this seems REALLY efficient. https://t.co/XXKvrUAPkE
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) November 13, 2024
As annoying and scary as it is to think of how much we’re going to have to hear from and about Musk in the coming weeks (months?? years???), there’s some comfort in the fact that this department seems absolutely toothless—just a symbolic gesture to get two of Trump’s most famously annoying sycophants to leave him alone.
Nevertheless, Musk, a fifty-something father of about a dozen known kids, is predictably, pathetically thrilled by the acronym, even as the doge meme hasn’t been popular since at least 2014, and even then only among 13-year-olds on Reddit. (Dogecoin reportedly spiked about 20 percent after Trump’s announcement, which is even more eye-roll-inducing.) Musk shared an array of self-congratulatory memes shortly after the news went public.
“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” Musk said in the press release shared by Trump. Ramaswamy celebrated his appointment to a fake, bullshit cabinet by tweeting, “SHUT IT DOWN,” the slogan of his presidential campaign calling for the elimination of federal agencies.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2024
More recently, Musk has spent the last week trailing Trump all over Mar-a-Lago like the sort of simpering puppy that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security pick, Kristi Noem, might shoot.
Despite all the fun jokes about how this is effectively a fake department and a fake job for Musk, likely just dished out because Trump finds Musk annoying and wants to get Musk off his case, I still can’t help but feel some anxiety about how much power this accords two known morons, especially as Musk has expressed a desire to slash $22 trillion from the federal budget and eliminate a majority of federal government workers. Mind you, this is the man who singlehandedly caused Twitter’s value to drop by 80% through just about two years of ownership. Musk’s fake appointment also follows reports that he severely bungled the Trump campaign’s field operation—which was so dangerously mismanaged that it sparked human trafficking allegations from some workers.
I could spend all day listing every example of Musk’s stellar ineptitude, shockingly poor business acumen, unabashed embrace of neo-Nazism, and well-documented buffoonery, but alas, there are only 24 hours in a day. And, in any case, I could never read him for filth half as well as Trump did in a social media post from 2022: “When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.” Well put, Sir! Surely this same man will do an excellent job at making your administration more efficient!