Dispatch #3: The DOGE Chainsaw Massacre

May 6, 2025

Greetings from the swamp.

Being a film scholar and horror aficionado, I couldn’t help but associate images of Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw over his head with that of Leatherface, the iconic monster from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), acting similarly.

The connections are not as tenuous as they might first seem. The men from the murderous Sawyer family of Texas find themselves jobless from the recently closed slaughterhouse that once employed them. In an impotent rage, they kill unsuspecting hippie tourists who find themselves lost in their neck of the woods. (In the film’s brilliant sequel, they grind their victims’ bodies to use as meat for their prize-winning chili recipe). The Sawyers are the early victims of neoliberalism as automation and outsourcing decimate manufacturing jobs within the United States.

They most certainly would have voted for Donald Trump. They also probably would have relished his imposition of tariffs, not because such tariffs will return their jobs but instead because they inflict global mayhem beyond the Sawyers’ wildest dreams.

Furthermore, a similar impotent rage engulfs Musk as he aims his chainsaw at the federal government, nemesis of tech billionaires and capitalists alike. Musk’s alibi is he is trying to establish a more efficient government. But he is truly aiming to slash at the inheritances of the social safety net and government regulations that Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered in during The Great Depression. He is trying to make a corpse of them all.

And like Leatherface, Musk’s actions might seem equally impotent. The New York Times recently reported that the savings created by DOGE are most likely offset by the costs in firings through lawsuits, the rehiring of laid off workers, and paying out for their time lost. But nitpicking over such details exposes the mainstream news’ fundamental inability to come to grips with our current moment: it’s the theatrics that matter, not the substance.

The theatrics of efficiency performed by DOGE are nothing new. Journalists usually link DOGE’s theatrics back to Musk’s takeover of Twitter and evisceration of its workforce. Sometimes, they might follow this thread back to a Silicon Valley mindset where hyper-inflated ideas (like Theranos’ faulty blood testing machine) emerge from a workforce grinding out 70-80 hour work weeks. But Wall Street mastered such theatrics of efficiency long before this.

Karen Ho’s book Liquidated (2009) masterfully reveals how “reckless expediency is the generalized norm” that fuels Wall Street, where she worked at for two stints during the late nineties. Because shareholders are the main people Wall Street appeals to for constant investment, firms must make their quarterly reports appear as if profits are constantly growing. One way this is done is by making their businesses more “efficient.”

But what this really translates into is inefficiency. As Ho writes, “the point is to be dynamic, to simply get out products instead of improve them, to grow without planning the proper support infrastructure, to make money immediately.” She concludes that despite how such efforts normally backfire “after all the waste and mistakes are factored in, [ii] is certainly profitable in the short-term.”

This is precisely the playbook that DOGE operates by: be dynamic, act fast, appear to be efficient. By the time the reporters catch up to the swindle, the damage has already been done with the fixes in and the profits made.

Unsurprisingly, Red states have similarly emulated DOGE efforts. Although many of these efforts have been less shock-and-awe than Musk's version of DOGE, Florida remains the exception. Our swamp state has taken primary focus at universities and colleges. In early April, the state DOGE office, rumored to be comprised of only six people, instructed universities and colleges to collect within a week “all research published by staff” over the last six years, including “Papers and drafts made available to the public or in online academic repositories for drafts, preprints, or similar materials.” By the end of the month, additional material related to the length of research of each publication, funding sources for each institution’s noninstructional position and the names of employees administering the grants. When asked for clarification from our provost at our faculty senate about how these materials were being assessed and by what criteria, he had no answers.

Confusion here is key.

Universities and colleges already go through independent audits regularly in Florida. Furthermore, faculty are assessed yearly regarding their work. Those of us tenured or tenure-track go through additional hurdles of promotion and tenure. All of the materials asked by Florida DOGE are readily available. But this returns back to my second dispatch regarding The New York Times interview with Christopher Rufo, who has been one of the main ideologues attacking public higher education. He wants universities and colleges to be faced with “an existential terror” by those in power. In addition to threatening state funding, Florida’s DOGE effort serves as another weapon in this campaign of terror.

Conveniently overlooked in such auditing are the largest institutional costs such as funding select sports programs, building costs, and administrative salaries and bloat. But these DOGE efforts having nothing to do with efficiency and instead with attacking the infrastructure of public higher education, which serves as an impediment to growing authoritarian power domestically and worldwide. This move is taken from the playbook of other attacks against public education found in repressive nations like Turkey, Hungary, and Russia.

A rich irony accompanies Florida’s DOGE efforts as our state’s governor has become embroiled in a scandal where his administration has been accused of allegedly misappropriating $10 million worth of state funding to political activities like ads against proposed state amendments for legalizing weed. The Miami Herald has been particularly vigilant in reporting on this fiasco. But reporters, in general, haven’t connected the dots between the ironic twist of a state government creating a DOGE office while its governor’s office has recently been accused of stealing and laundering millions of dollars of state funds.

But what still needs to come into focus is how such theatrics that underlie all DOGE efforts are the point. Journalists pouring over statistics to determine if such DOGE efforts are actually creating efficiency or not is a distraction from the true issue: DOGE is a reactionary attack against government at the federal or state level that attempts to guts bureaucracies from the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Education down to that of state universities and colleges. It is to rid impediments both to businesses like that of regulation and oversight and to a growing authoritarian movement that wants to crush any opposition in advance. The idea of efficiency is a bait and switch tactic used to modestly cover-up these true goals.

Returning back to Musk and his chainsaw: sure, his DOGE efforts aren’t really creating efficiency. Likewise, we can point out how Sally survived the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But who remembers that detail? We remember Leatherface. And that is the point: the murderous dance with the chainsaw, an image that imprints upon our collective memory.

The survivors are incidental.

We are incidental.

Public higher education is incidental.

It is the dance of death and destruction that matters to those holding the chainsaws, along with the fast profits and quick escape that accompany it. 

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