In early 2025, President Donald Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his specialized advisory initiative led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Its stated mission was to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse” across the federal bureaucracy. To its supporters, DOGE was a long-overdue initiative that was necessary to combat a government that was too big and wasteful, and they hoped it would finally allow for the restoration of “proper accountability” within federal institutions. However, to its critics, DOGE is simply a way for Trump and his party to maintain authority and punish those who are not loyal to his administration.

Both of these arguments are missing the deeper picture, however. Drawing from Ozan Varol’s idea of “stealth authoritarianism,” DOGE represents a clear case of using seemingly legal, “good” government mechanisms to systematically tear down institutional checks on the President and executive power. Through cloaking itself with words like “efficiency” and “reform,” DOGE made what can be argued as “anti-democratic” practices much more difficult to detect and eliminate.

Varol explains in his work that modern authoritarians have learned that direct repression can be costly. Instead, he argues that some authoritarians “cloak repressive measures under the mask of law, imbue them with the veneer of legitimacy, and render authoritarian practices much more difficult to detect and eliminate.” Using legal mechanisms that exist in democratic regimes for the goal of an eventual instance of democratic erosion is stealth authoritarianism, in simple terms.

DOGE fits this framework perfectly. It was not a violent military crackdown or a suspension of elections. It was an initiative that was presented as a neutral, technocratic exercise in government efficiency. The rhetoric around their goals was carefully crafted: it was about saving taxpayer money, cutting unnecessary spending, and finally making the government work for the people. Who could oppose something like this? This is precisely how stealth authoritarianism operates. The lie here: efficiency. Look closer, and it’s actually an unaccountable group with the authority to identify which agencies, programs, and personnel are “wasteful,” and therefore subject to elimination.

This also represents a violation of what Harvard professors and researchers Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call “forbearance,” or the idea that political actors should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional powers. Congress holds the constitutional power of the purse (cutting federal spending, raising taxes, etc.) and authority over the way the federal government is usually organized. By creating an extra-governmental body or initiative to bypass Congress and completely restructure the bureaucracy, it’s clear that the administration was deploying its power without regard to usual restraints or checks.

Well, why is this even possible for them to do? Political scientists Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg provide the answer in their work “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy.” They argue throughout this review that the American Constitution is not “retrogression-proof” ​​and is susceptible to slow, incremental, and legal erosion of democracy like any other institution. While amending the Constitution itself is extremely difficult, the autonomy of the federal bureaucracy is a completely different story. Most rules protecting career civil servants from political interference come from statutes, or laws passed by Congress, not laws directly from the Constitution itself. And what Congress creates, Congress can also take away. This means that the bureaucracy’s protections are only as strong as the political will to enforce them. When one party controls both Congress and the presidency, and when the party’s leaders are okay with bypassing normal procedures, those protections can be dismantled fairly easily. That’s exactly what DOGE enabled, a way around the rules that normally kept the bureaucracy independent from political pressure.

The answer to how DOGE was dismantled is even complicated and warrants its own cause for concern. This initiative was effectively disbanded in late November 2025, about eight months ahead of its scheduled July 2026 end date. Here’s the catch: while the centralized DOGE entity dissolved, officials have stated its principles, staff, and various “projects” continue to be integrated into different federal agencies. The ideas never died; they just got absorbed.

This also fits into Varol’s framework of “stealth authoritarianism.” Stealth authoritarianism doesn’t always need a permanent or legitimate “structure” to succeed. Sometimes the most effective approach is to temporarily concentrate power, reshape institutions, and then let the temporary structure dissolve while the changes made in quiet remain behind.

The mask of “efficiency” served its purpose. DOGE did what it needed to do, and during the time its practices continue to hurt our federal government and democracy alongside it, the organization and those who should’ve been held accountable vanished, leaving only the principles behind in the agencies it affected.