The United States has taken its next step towards oligarchy. An oligarchy is defined as a form of government controlled by a small group of people, normally aristocrats, hold the majority of power over the rest of the population. Oligarchies have popularly existed since the late 40s after the Russian Communist Party lost control of the government and Gorbachev took over with his party of business oligarchs. 

The popularization of oligarchies spread fairly quickly through the Cold War as new oligarchical governments sprouted up across the globe countries like in the Philippines, Iran takeover, and in South Africa, where the current leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, was born. Still under the apartheid rule until he turned 23, Musk was a part of the issue Mandela set out to solve, despite his father’s anti-apartheid stance. Errol Musk, Elon’s father, still co-owned a series of South African and Zambian emerald mines that helped further the South African system of apartheid. These mines, as seen in the examples of the Witwatersrand compound, were specifically designed to separate and clump the working class of miners from the upper class as a form of repression, limiting their power through poverty, overcrowding and segregation. 

This is what Musk has been built off of since birth, however he grew up the opposite of those separated, stating once, in a 2018 interview for a Business Insider South Africa story that during his college days in America Elon would “walk the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket.” With this class and ample wealth Elon eventually attended the University of Pennsylvania and soon after purchased Zip2 in 1995 , an online business directory that was soon absorbed into a series of different software companies four years after. Soon after the dissolution of his first company funded by his father, he merged another Errol funded company, X.com, and merged it with Cofinity to create Paypal. After the liquidation of Elon spent $100 million, from this paypal deal, to found SpaceX.   

Now, in 2025, after another few acquisitions, failed or current, Musk is now the acting CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, X, formerly Twitter, and Neuralink. With this ownership, Musk’s questionable morals and value for profit over all have spurned a series of 32 investigations by federal agencies, ranging from the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) investigation into potential animal cruelty cases against Neuralink studies, to over a dozen investigations by the Department of Labor (DOL) into workers rights violations and discriminatory practices in both Tesla and SpaceX.

This is where Elon’s current endeavor in DOGE  comes into play. Originally sold as its namesake, to decrease government spending through cuts, Donald Trump and Elon Musk funded DOGE with Elon Musk at the top as Trump’s ‘special government employee.’ So far, in executing DOGE’s plan to cut extraneous spending, they claim to have saved $115 billion with cuts, after notably jumping from a $65 to $105 billion in just a week. These are mainly buyout offers, to the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Department of Defense (DOD), and, most prominently, the Department of Education (DOE). However, besides the fact that cutting these vital agencies will put upwards of 12 million people enrolled in Medicare programs without coverage, DOGE’s $115 Billion estimate is wildly inaccurate for a number of reasons, and is still not verifiable as the DOGE site claims it’s posted only a fraction of their receipts. 

Primarily, a large number of the savings that DOGE has claimed are Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPA). BPAs are an agreement between a government agency and the legislative branch stating a list of purchases that they may need to make to execute their responsibilities, like a set budget for the select agency. By canceling these contracts, DOGE plans on preventing the money from being spent in the first place, claiming that as savings, while logistically most of the money in these BPAs are never spent. These logical fallacies have not been the only issue as an Associated Press Analyst has found that an estimated 40% of all cuts that DOGE plans on making will result in no savings at all, shrinking any future numbers even more.

However, in addition with Trump’s recent return to office and instatement of DOGE, he has removed a slew of his cabinet heads along with pivotal members of the bureaucracy that have been leading the aforementioned investigations against Musk. This corruption has been well documented as a paper published by the Judiciary’s House Committee outlined the basics of what Trump has cut to protect Elon. For example, even within the aforementioned departments facing buyout offers, Elon has pending and ongoing investigations in these departments that DOGE is cutting. For example, in a move to prevent any further investigations from the USDA, Trump fired the USDA’s 22-year veteran inspector general. Furthermore, in a similar action to stop investigations from the DOL against SpaceX, Trump fired their inspector general, shut down the NLRB’s rulings on any future cases, and even went as low as firing two thirds of the Democratic Commissioners in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

This is an oligarchical rule, the process of hoisting unlawful businessmen and their practices above the law is the next step. With Musk’s $288 million dollar investment into Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign he bought his way into the white house, the same way he bought his way into the University of Pennsylvania, the same way he bought his way into most any business he claims to have founded, from Zip2 to Twitter. And like most any business he has bought, he has driven it to a negative, from the dissolution of Zip2 to the current $90 billion deficit Elon has entered as of the beginning of March. This is the canary, each of these failures has been under the oversight of Musk so how can a country put their trust into a man who has been shown to fail at personal benefit time and time again.

The one solution that the general public cannot truly effect as DOGE and Musk are not elected officials but rather a temporary department led by a special government employee. So the only way out is through. However, the public is not powerless, as swaths of people have written to their representatives in Congress and supported those who have lost their jobs to the past and future DOGE cuts. We can also get educated on current and past issues like this and the way they were solved; each of these is just as possible for any member of the public to do to show their disdain towards the oligarchical lean the United States have taken. We must continue to fight these policies to ensure that America doesn’t continue down this path.