Elon Musk’s appointment to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-inspired by none other than Milei-is mandated to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful spending, and restructure federal agencies,” according to the press release.

To measure the potential impact, it is enough to look at the size of the U.S. state apparatus, which today has just over 3 million federal workers (1 per 100 inhabitants according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). The problem -according to researcher Paul Light in The True Size of Government- is that when adding contractors, subsidized employees, military and postal workers, the figure rises to more than 9 million, without considering the specific agencies that, despite being obsolete, are still operational.

If we look at Chile, according to Libertad y Desarrollo, in the last 10 years public employment has grown at a rate almost 3 times higher than the private sector and according to the Council for Transparency, by 2023 we already had 810,064 public employees, that is, 4.1 per 100 inhabitants.

In response to these figures, virtually every citizen on the planet is calling for a smarter, more efficient, less costly and less bureaucratic state that is better attuned to their changing and growing demands. It is for this very reason that the promised 30% reduction in government spending makes so much sense to American citizens.

With that certainty, Elon exercises total autonomy in his work with teams of technologists living near the White House and working late at night and on weekends, all with the goal of drastically reducing the size of the state. While the Musk-style implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) for many is a shock of vitality, the risks are obvious in terms of counterweights of power, privacy, information security, transparency and accountability. Historian Douglas Brinkley posits that “this lone ranger operates beyond scrutiny (…) and there is not a single entity holding it to account. A harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.”