State restructuring in the USA | The idealistic total capitalist

Capitalist Elon Musk seemed like the perfect leader of the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But since the agency was established by the Trump administration six months ago, it has also been met with criticism: The intended shrinkage of the US bureaucracy and the associated budget cuts have been described as anti-democratic, an attack on the rule of law, and as large-scale corruption to the detriment of the most vulnerable around the world.

Now that the Musk-Trump alliance has broken up, and the world's richest man initially wanted to devote himself entirely to increasing his wealth, only to then announce the founding of a new party, DOGE continues to pursue its agenda. What can we learn from this about the intimate relationship between state and capital?

Clear-cutting and small protests

A quick look back: On May 29, the "Tesla Takedown" protest movement called for an international day of protest against the electric car company. Through public pressure, boycotts, and the sale of Tesla vehicles and shares, Elon Musk, who wants to reshape the world's most powerful country according to his own vision, was meant to hit him where it hurts most: his money. Indeed, Tesla suffered massive losses in the first quarter of 2025. Global deliveries fell by 13 percent to 336,681 vehicles, and net profit plummeted by 71 percent year-on-year to $409 million. Analysts attribute this to production problems, but also to the damage to Musk's reputation due to his political entanglements. Now Musk has resigned, but Tesla shares continue to fall—and DOGE remains intact.

To mitigate the initial social consequences of the Department of Government Efficiency's austerity policies, the "50501" movement (50 States – 50 Protests – 1 Movement) is organizing demonstrations and concrete neighborhood assistance, such as through food drives. Trump supporters are increasingly affected by the government's austerity measures, unexpectedly finding themselves without a job and thus a source of income. But while protests are mounting against Trump's rigorous immigration policies, the willingness to protest the DOGE cuts in society as a whole seems (still?) to be low, even though one scandal has followed another since the agency's establishment.

Immediately after Musk's takeover in May 2025, DOGE sent out termination notices to thousands of federal agency employees, some of which had to be rescinded, for example because the government didn't want to forego a functioning nuclear safety agency. However, such concerns are not expected regarding the cut in funding for the USAID development agency or the Department of Education, whose primary purpose is, after all, to promote educational opportunities for poor or otherwise disadvantaged populations. An attack by the Trump administration on the federal pension system is also looming.

All of these measures, as well as the agency's arbitrary access to the sensitive personal data of all taxpayers, have been litigated in multiple courts from the outset. The ultra-right-leaning Supreme Court recently approved the data access. In any case, the US administration's willingness to comply with judicial rulings appears rather limited; at least, decisions are likely to be made on a case-by-case basis. The right of Parliament to determine the national budget and regulate many other matters solely by ordinary law is also being circumvented by presidential executive orders. A constitutional crisis and the end of the "rule of law" do not seem to be out of the question.

The Trump administration justifies all of this with the need to cut government spending, prevent corruption and tax waste, and break the power of unelected bureaucrats in order to make "America" ​​(meaning the USA) great again – and above all, to "give power back" to the people, represented, of course, by the president they elected. While Trump's approval ratings have plummeted to a record low of 44 percent within a very short period of time, almost half of Americans still support "their" president. How does this absurd situation arise that so many Americans are willing to view the arbitrary measures of multi-billionaires as a just struggle of ordinary people against the elites?

Propaganda hit: reducing bureaucracy

The demand for less bureaucratization is popular everywhere, actually. Who wouldn't want to avoid waiting months for appointments at the Citizen Service Center or filling out stacks of incomprehensible applications for the most shabby social benefits? Currently, most parties in the German Bundestag are promising more efficient administration and the associated tax savings; the EU wants to reduce the burden on companies to comply with its regulations by at least 30 percent.

State bureaucracy appears in this public debate as a mere goiter and superstructure: a department of the state which, with its regulations, application procedures, commands and prohibitions, presents free citizens as pure harassment and an obstacle – but above all to the “free economy.” Yet it is precisely the capitalist, free economic order itself, through its absolute ruthlessness towards its own foundations, namely humanity and nature, that makes state supervision through restrictive regulations necessary, be it in the areas of occupational or environmental protection, pollutant limits or product standardization, the welfare state or the healthcare system.

Unlimited exploitation would endanger the functioning of the workforce as a whole, and thus of the entire population. Consumer and environmental protection laws are needed to prevent the exploitation of natural and human resources from degenerating into unproductive destruction. Financial markets must also be regulated so that the concentrated power of finance capital does not devastate the productive sphere—and thus its own foundation. And the tax bureaucracy, which deals with the granular collection and differentiation of various types and levels of income, arises simply from the fact that practically no one would pay taxes voluntarily, and because this allows for better control of the distribution of money among the population. The social devastation that capitalism produces at home and abroad ultimately creates the need for social insurance, citizen's income, or development aid, the use of which must then be bureaucratically controlled.

If the responsibilities of the state and its administration continue to increase, this is done to fulfill its purpose as an "ideal collective capitalist," that is, to prevent the profit interests of social capital as a whole from being undermined by the individual interests of its components, i.e., large and small individual capitals. These state actions are by no means aimed at eliminating the (fundamentally harmful) capitalist activities, but rather at bringing the national economy into a form that will sustain it in the long term—and making it a never-ending source of both state revenue and social wealth in general.

In this respect, government restrictions on capital are not a declaration of war on it, but rather a service to it, or at least intended as such. However, every relaxation of government regulations or restrictions—be it on the extraction of natural resources (Drill, Baby, Drill!) or even the abolition of a consumer protection agency—frees capital from restrictions and additional costs and thus directly increases the profits of individual capitals. Whether this will continue in the long term and overall, in the US and globally, remains to be seen in the coming years. The success of this policy will depend not least on how much deprivation and harm people are willing to accept and how much they can endure.

One thing is clear: State bureaucracy is not the opposite or even the enemy of the free economy, but rather its condition and constant companion. Nevertheless, the contradiction between the fundamental necessity of state oversight of transport and its costs for the capitalist class repeatedly gives rise to calls for debureaucratization – without this ever having been truly successful, in part because capitalism, with its food, emissions testing, and other scandals, consistently creates the need and demand for new regulations.

Incidentally, the loudest advocates of a "lean state" already know one exception: the keyword law and order. The state's monopoly on the use of force, which monitors compliance with the law internally with the police and judiciary and safeguards its external interests with its invincible military, is explicitly exempted from the austerity requirement. This very extensive state power, especially in the USA, creates the conditions in which the owners of goods, capital, and labor face opposing interests. And in Trump's eyes, it should indeed be used solely (and vigorously!) to enable free competition – and otherwise refrain from any further interference, such as high constitutional hurdles for deportations.

Taxes and democracy

So what does the Trump administration want to achieve with its "bureaucracy reduction"? Ostensibly, the reforms spearheaded by DOGE serve a very specific goal: reducing the federal deficit and thus more economically using public funds, i.e., the taxes generated by hardworking Americans. In a democracy – so the general perception goes – the government exists for its citizens, not the other way around.

Therefore, the demand for tax relief is just as popular among the middle class as the reduction of bureaucracy. In an economy whose purpose is to increase money through the exploitation of other people's labor, taxes are always a deduction from this profit, regardless of whether they are levied as value added tax, payroll tax, or on corporate profits. Moreover, no successful capitalist state is content with the money it collects through taxes, but rather naturally finances its expenditures through debt. The fact that this state systematically reaches into the future in doing so does not disturb the prevailing notion that paying taxes is a kind of ticket to participation in decision-making—or at least to the moral demand for state compensation. In fact, taxes are viewed by everyone—across all classes—as an individual deduction from "one's own" income, visible on the payslip or tax assessment.

So why shouldn't wage earners want tax relief if it means they have more money at their disposal each month? Those who, instead of believing in practical political panaceas, look for real explanations and leaf through the blue volumes of the Marx-Engels Collected Works out of perplexity about the global political situation will find that as early as the 1840s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote articles on bureaucracy, taxes, and demands for their reform. There, they also learn that tax relief under capitalism by no means benefits those who misunderstand themselves as taxpayers—and in this role even imagine themselves as the actual subjects of the state budget: "If all taxes on the working class were radically abolished, the inevitable consequence would be that wages would be reduced by the entire amount of tax that currently goes into them. Either the profit of employers would immediately increase to the same extent, or there would only have been a change in the form of tax collection. (K. Marx, MEW 4, p. 348)

In other words: If the reduction of bureaucracy were successful and tax cuts resulted from it, this would hardly benefit wage earners, contrary to all hope. Their persistent cash shortage is not the result of individual taxes or surcharges, but rather stems from their fundamental position in the capitalist production process. They sell their labor in order to live and, as a rule, receive only just enough to survive. Whether a solidarity surcharge is introduced or abolished fundamentally changes nothing, even if the answer to the question of what is necessary for capital-productive reproduction is handled flexibly – which is why the number of precarious existences ("working poor") is steadily increasing on both sides of the Atlantic.

However, when capitalist Elon Musk, whose companies are receiving even greater subsidies and commissions under the new government, sees all other government spending as expenses and the bureaucracy itself as an obstacle to his enterprises, he is right from his perspective. The program consistently pursued by Musk was formulated by Friedrich Engels as early as 1847: "From the moment state administration and legislation come under the control of the bourgeoisie, the independence of the bureaucracy collapses; indeed, from that moment on, the pests of the bourgeoisie are transformed into their obedient servants." (MEW 4, p. 54) In Engels's view, the bourgeoisie completely takes over the state, so that its bureaucracy is completely absorbed into pure servitude to capital.

Whether this prognosis, which has never been realized in the history of civil states and is, in fact, difficult to reconcile with them, should finally become reality, has been the subject of open debate in the US over the past six months. However, the DOGE inquisitors leave no doubt about the radical nature of their claim.

Dictatorship of forms?

It is a peculiarity of US right-wing radicalism, which is increasingly spreading globally through Musk's influence on the social media platform X, that this ideology clearly defines the contradiction between the necessity and cost of the administrative apparatus. The narrative runs as follows: The root of all evil lies in a state that is "too big," often denunciatorily referred to as "socialism." The resulting bureaucracy and regulatory frenzy curtails the freedom of citizens because this freedom can only be realized in the free market, where the best are supposedly supposed to prevail – keyword meritocracy. Even the cushioning of racism and sexism, which are all too damaging to society and, above all, business, through support programs for minorities and women, is met with a paranoid hatred of a "woke mind virus" that supposedly prevents the best from asserting themselves. It is self-evident to these right-wing radicals that in the fight for survival, which is inherent in this competitive relationship, the winners deserve their victory and the losers have only themselves to blame.

The social Darwinism of these actors is complemented by the call for unlimited political power: While conventional liberal political theory understands the state administrative apparatus as part of the democratically legitimized executive branch, which—equipped with the "power of the people"—enforces the will formed in the legislative branch, Trumpism and related ideologies see bureaucracy as little more than a limitation of popular sovereignty: This, they argue, leads a life of its own and does not submit to the will of elected representatives, i.e., the president. Because the actions of public authorities can be bound by existing laws and previous regulations, even Donald Trump discovered during his first term in office that his ability to arbitrarily impose administrative regulations remained restricted and institutionally limited. DOGE is Trump's tool for this purpose—not for budget savings, as Musk discovered with horror in the face of the not-at-all-frugal tax break bill bearing the grotesquely pompous title "Big Beautiful Bill."

The conspiracy-theoretical whispering of the MAGA movement about a The Deep State, which supposedly undermines the interests of Americans, also draws on the relative autonomy of the state apparatus—the autonomy necessary to even organize civil life in a regular manner. Accordingly, the DOGE declares it "unconstitutional" (and directly provides the corresponding "Unconstitutionality Index" on its website) for federal agencies to issue a multitude of administrative regulations per law passed—even though these same laws empower them to do just that.

Trumpism in general and DOGE politics in particular resolve the persistent contradiction throughout the history of capitalism, namely that state bureaucracy is a necessity for the lasting success of capitalist money-making and, at the same time, an obstacle to individual enterprises, by practically denying this contradiction. The unrestricted competitive power of a few is ideologically glorified as the concern of all, not only in the "free market" but also in politics, and is ruthlessly pursued. In reality, however, the relative independence of the state from individual capitalist interests remains intact, and so Musk was forced to resign. In the ensuing mudslinging, Trump even threatened to terminate the contracting and funding of his space company, SpaceX. How far this dispute will go will certainly depend on how serious Musk is about his announcement to found his own political party.

The false notion that the will of the people – mediated through elections – determines politics is the civic foundation of their later radicalization: Once it is established that this is not the case, the demand for political decisions by a tribune of the people is not far-fetched. At the same time, the idea that the market economy is the appropriate way to ensure general welfare is considered an unquestionable truth in almost all segments of society. The fact that neither the market nor state institutions are designed to benefit the majority of the American electorate has been increasingly exposed, and not only in recent years. But anyone who refuses to abandon their good faith in the market economy would rather be governed by someone like Trump.

And so it should come as no surprise if a similar government policy prevails in the USA, and possibly soon here as well. According to the coalition agreement, Germany is not yet "great again," but at least "back" – a fact they intend to demonstrate here as well through "bureaucracy reduction." While the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development will not be abolished, contrary to the demands of the CDU/CSU parties, the intention to maintain the "level of social protection" is subject to general funding. Whether Germans will soon save taxes not only for their military capability, but also to colonize Mars, remains to be seen.