Milton Friedman’s warnings for Doge and Elon Musk

Published in 1984, the book identifies the iron triangle of politics as the main obstacle to cutting off government. The three points of the triangle strengthen each other in order to support the status quo: beneficiaries, politicians, and bureaucrats.

“Beneficiaries” are industries connected to interest groups that benefit from government programs at the expense of taxpayers. Today’s beneficiaries include farmers receiving federal dollars. The new budget bill, supported by the Republicans, extends the farm bill that subsidizes crop purchases. As Friedman said, those paying the bill are “dispersed.” You may not be aware of your share $2.1 billion They go to support corn, soybeans, wheat and other prices when they paid taxes in 2023, but the farmers who got the money certainly did.

The “politicians” painted on the triangle should respond to their components But instead, they will serve interest groups. However, it is the bureaucrats who actually distribute the money.

As politicians scale the sector, they develop their strength and produce more loot to distribute to the beneficiaries. It’s all symbiotic relationships at the cost of taxpayers.

The bureaucracy tends to “continue its own laws,” Friedman writes.

Musk also observed that the transiting bureaucracy “will proceed by its own law.”People cannot vote and their will can be determined by elected representatives… Then we do not live in democracy, we do live in bureaucracy. ”

And like Friedman, he feels danger when the bureaucratic state bulge is not reversed. At another press conference, he told the attendees.”The overall goal of the Doge team is to help them deal with the huge deficit. If this continues, the country will effectively go bankrupt. ”

Doge’s strategy is to break through the iron triangle with a thousand cuts, looking for small inefficiencies that involve the mindset of a software engineer. Musk describes his role as “technical support.”He created Doge, an executive order that just rebranded an Obama-era institution called the US Digital Services.

That’s a good start. The federal workforce should be streamlined, and much of it is automated. But Musk may have repeated several mistakes from his Reagan era.

As Stockman observed, the Reagan Revolution was surprised as his team focused only on “easy solutions,” such as “an ambiguous bite of spending that could be severed without stimulating large-scale political resistance.”

To make real progress by reducing spending, cost reductions must go deeper than technical support can manage on its own. Friedman knew that the path to reducing the federal government began with the abolition of federal agencies. In his viral clip, he lists the Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Commercial and Education departments as offices for placing them in the chopping block.

Trump has already closed the Department of Education. His executive order directs the Secretary of Education to develop plans to eliminate or shift some spending into other sectors. Congress must act to keep large spending like federal student loans intact and completely dismantle them.

The Trump administration has severely cut the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and reimbursed and accessed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the creator of Elizabeth Warren. More credit and banking difficult For low-income customers. Doge was seduced too 75,000 federal workers In I’m resigning. However, many of these cost-cutting initiatives have been challenged in court. It takes Congressional action to truly eliminate federal agencies.

Trump has only a majority in Congress and has not won on a platform to cut government, so he cannot rule out the entire federal sector, such as commerce and agriculture.

But if the Trump administration actually followed Friedman’s blueprint, which it learned from the flaws of the Reagan Revolution, what if they created a political movement that could ultimately put pressure on Congress to permanently eliminate the entire Congress?

Friedman says that by narrowly focusing on providing what the state and private sector cannot do, it will actually improve the functioning of the federal government.

“One function of government is to protect the country from foreign enemies. say Friedman. “The second function of government, and what it performs very badly, is protecting individual citizens from abuse and coercion by other citizens. …I believe the government is working very effectively because it’s so much that it’s not doing business.”

Early this year, musk I acted The chainsaw, given to him by Argentine libertarian president Javier Miley, followed Friedman’s blueprint more closely by targeting beneficiaries and bureaucracy he calls “La Casta.”

In Argentina, it has caused massive poverty and triple digit inflation to trigger a real libertarian movement that could overthrow the current tyranny.

I don’t want to wait for things to get that bad.

Musk praised Miley’s approach at an event in Buenos Aires co-hosted by the Libertarian Cato Institute.

“I think governments around the world should actively remove regulations and question whether departments should exist.” I said Musk. “It seems President Miley is doing a great job in this respect.”

Certainly great. But how can we overcome the iron triangle in the American system?

Doge itself cannot legally remove an entire department. Doge’s website I insisted As of early April 2025, the company had cut its $140 billion from its $2 trillion target.

But it has a complete document and various media Open Source Analysis Doge’s total savings are sold in the range of $2 billion to $7 billion.

In any case, Doge will not be able to achieve its goal of cutting $2 trillion in government spending, or nearly 30% of its annual $7 trillion budget. The Congressional Budget Office found it The deficit increased by 5% Despite early reductions in Doge, compared to the previous year in February. Meanwhile, the Republican majority has passed a projected budget to add 3.4 trillion dollars To us $28.8 trillion in debt.

And we haven’t even spoken about Social Security and Medicare, the major factors in our debt, that Trump has promised not to touch on.

Just as Stockman has come to be, this is a bipartisan issue.

“There’s no difference [between the parties] Regarding debts, he said I said Episode of reason‘s I just have to ask a question. “Can I continue to add $1 trillion to my public debt every three months? How do you plan to get away by basically enslaving the next generation of Americans through debt? ”