A shadowy group of unelected figures reshaping the federal government to their own benefit from the inside? Sounds familiar! The “deep state” is a top-tier conservative bogeyman, right up there with DEI and George Soros. But it seems fair to ask: If a bunch of shadowy, unelected figures, many with shared business interests and connections, took over government functions at the highest levels and directly contravened the will of Congress, what might you call that? How about … DOGE? After years of alarm over unelected bureaucrats pulling the strings, what better example can you find than this moment the US government is in? DOGE is the thing it claims to fear the most. Elon Musk is the problem he purportedly wants to solve. Secretive? The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has never provided an org chart, did not have a publicly documented leader until last week, and refused to reveal the identities of its young staffers in early internal meetings. Check. (…) It’s true that “deep state” is a tricky term to pin down, largely because it’s so often used as shorthand for “things Glenn Beck doesn’t like.” Let’s look, then, at how Elon Musk defines it. “If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have,” Musk said at a recent Oval Office visit. And then, moments later: “We have this unelected, fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected representative. This is … This is not something that people want, and it does not match the will of the people.”
via wired; DOGE Is the Deep State
