Understanding DOGE

The Blob can’t stop what’s coming; it’s already here.

This article was published in Con Home on 26th February. All articles published elsewhere are published free here; but for paywalled articles & postscripts, subscribe below.

Cursed by a common language, British politics follow North American trends almost inexorably.

As the soon-to-be dearly departed William Atkinson has noted, ‘politics is tracking its American equivalent at a delay of four years or so: for Trump in 2016 take Boris Johnson in 2019, for Biden in 2020 take Starmer in 2024’.

But, it seems, the lag is getting shorter. Just weeks after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hit the headlines with their exposure – and ruthless defunding – of billions of dollars of US taxpayer’s money that was being spent to support a wide range of programmes of either questionable value, nebulous utility or malicious intent.

There are now a full five independent British equivalents of DOGE, all set up to track government waste. There is a search engine at The Spectator, as well as a project by Guido Fawkes (which absorbed a previous iteration led by former spad Jason Brown), freelancer Charlotte Gill’s ‘Woke Waste’ and, most recently, a ‘Shadow DOGE’ announced on Instagram by Brewdog founder James Watt.

But this infatuation is not exclusive to the right; Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has launched a new ‘DOGE unit’ to tackle wasteful spending in the Home Office.

The team is reviewing contracts and cutting unnecessary costs, such as expensive external consultants and lavish event venues. Led by Lord Hanson and Damian McBride, DOGE will scrutinize all contracts, regardless of value, to ensure better financial oversight. Initial savings have already been redirected to policing, and further measures, like banning external headhunters and stopping hiring external venues, are being considered amid Treasury pressure for departmental savings.

These efforts are laudable. But they also betray a great misunderstanding about what DOGE is actually doing in the US. DOGE isn’t just cutting silly programmes or obvious waste by applying a more rigorous eye to outsourced contracts, departmental spending or government grants. It is far more expansive, far further reaching and far more consequential than that.

DOGE isn’t traditional “small government” conservatism.

It’s about embedding operatives in govt positions, mapping financial networks & dismantling, en masse, the bureaucratic patronage systems of the ‘Deep State’ – or what we might call, less insidiously, ‘The Blob’. Trump’s team doesn’t just want less spending; they want a government that serves their vision, and the American people. DOGE is an enormous undertaking, a high-speed, high-tech operation dismantling decades of bureaucratic power by combing through essentially every single thing the US government does.

Trump took an existing agency – the U.S. Digital Service – expanded its mandate significantly, and put Elon Musk in charge.

With the administration’s backing, DOGE has been systematically reviewing the entire federal government, cutting payments, suspending programs, and removing or sidelining employees.

Previous administrations struggled for years to staff key positions.

By strategically positioning people where Senate confirmation isn’t required DOGE has placed over 1,000 people inside every single government agency, allowing Trump 2 to hit the ground running. DOGE are inside the system, and began disrupting it before officials even knew what was happening. Their speed is unprecedented; by the time USAID officials drafted objections, DOGE had already exposed decades of hidden financial networks.

Leaks, media outrage and lawsuits couldn’t keep up.

So far it has been lightning-fast surgical stuff: algorithms analyzing decades of government payments, uncovering black budgets and financial pipelines no one was ever supposed to see. Supposedly independent programs were found to share coordinated funding streams. Grants designated as humanitarian aid revealed unexpected detours through intricate networks. Black budgets – long hidden in secrecy – began to be revealed. Budget proposals fed into AI systems to suggest cuts. DOGE hasn’t “hacked” any of this information—it has full legal access, and has exploited the power of technology to make maximum impact.

This, in short, is the core DOGE strategy: deploy aligned personnel, map money flows, expose entrenched networks, restructure everything before opposition can react. By contrast, most of the DOGE efforts in this country consist of pouring over open-source data to expose individual examples of ridiculous funding.

I do not intend, and hope I am not, denigrating the work of anyone doing just that.

I consider it vital work to expose the level of outrageous overspending by the government – particularly when it comes to using taxpayer’s money to fund ideological programmes designed to astroturf support for progressive goals. As egregious as the progressive projects USAID has been funding abroad are those The Blob has siphoned off taxpayer money to support.

The Conservative Way Forward report ‘Defunding Politically Motivated Campaigns’ worked out the total spend across government on politically motivated activities was £7 billion a year. Government money was even used to help Labour, whilst in opposition, develop policy. This is just the politically motivated campaigns.

DOGE is about efficiency, which will also involve stopping funding your own opposition; the government spent more on charities who fought the Rwanda deal in court, than the actual Rwanda deal cost.

Last week, the CEO of the Refugee Council has hit out at the Government for publishing a video which shows one migrant bound with a waist restraint, arguing the government was ‘using performative tactics that play into negative and dangerous narratives about immigration’. Last year the Refugee Council received over £10M from government, which is therefore funding an institution that exists in opposition to the democratic platform that it stood on – i.e, to reduce migration.

Should the right re-take power, it should take note on what DOGE is actually doing, rather than what it is perceived to be doing. So far, Cooper’s Doge is almost laughably backwards compared to the US version; in a weekly meeting, the DOGE unit will review all pending departmental contracts, closely examining any that seem wasteful.

This is merely basic oversight of government spending, repackaged as something ‘radical’ because The Blob has so completely & successfully avoided democratic oversight. Should the right take these reins, the return will be scarce. DOGE isn’t minor reform, cutting spending or reducing waste—it’s rewriting the DNA of the administrative state. Programs, funding pipelines, and even entire agencies are being restructured in real-time. It is an exhaustive reprogramming of government itself; a complete dismantling of the permanent bureaucracy.

The Blob can’t stop what’s coming; it’s already here. We just have to wait for Britain to catch up.