Derek Robertson

Washington has been blown away by the speed and recklessness with which Elon Musk and his team of engineers have swept across the executive branch. But what, really, does Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency want?

Elon Musk’s campaign to cut Washington’s bureaucracy is aiming at a very specific, very sensitive digital power center: the federal IT infrastructure. Musk and his allies have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payments systems, and they’ve commandeered enough control at the Office of Personnel Management to send a 

When President Trump finally issued his executive order formalizing the Department of Government Efficiency, its scope—or lack thereof—took Washington by surprise. While Elon Musk and now-departed DOGE co-founder Vivek Ramaswamy 

The jarring prominence of tech CEOs at President Donald Trump’s inauguration—positioned, as many noted, in front of Trump’s Cabinet picks—represents a massive sea change in American business and its cultural politics. The tech world’s turn to the right post-election has captivated anyone who watched these companies serve as a GOP punching bag for the past several years. There are plenty of good business reasons for any billionaire to want

As Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States, there was a jarring contrast hovering over the proceedings—between his populist style, embodied by his flurry of action to save TikTok, and the massive government apparatus of which he took control. The TikTok drama represents the crash of two powerful strains in American public life, a conflict that President Trump has a flair for capitalizing on and even encouraging.

Elon Musk is doing exactly what a lot of observers worried (or wondered, or hoped) he would do when he jumped into politics this year: governing via X.

With two key staffing picks—Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson as the new chair of that agency, and U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commissioner (and Palantir senior adviser) Jacob Helberg as undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment—President-elect Donald Trump is giving some early hints as to how his second administration will try to forge a new Republican consensus on tech. The two men will be responsible, in part, for enacting a sea change from the Biden administration in how government relates to tech — and turning the diverse, heter

As Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” prepares for its mission of slashing federal government to the bone, it’s collecting some unlikely supporters. One is Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and former President Barack Obama’s deputy chief technology officer who says that despite Musk and DOGE co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy’s right-wing lens on increasing efficiency, it could present a welcome and rare opportunity to do so.

At first, Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” looks like the most Silicon Valley-style project one could imagine. But now that they’ve laid out their plans for the “department” (actually an advisory commission outside government) in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, concern is bubbling up—even in the tech world—that the project might suffer from a couple other very Silicon Valley qualities: ego and overpromising. It’s not clear to many experts that the pair’s plans, as detailed as they s

Washington is getting ready to run a wild experiment, testing what happens when one of Silicon Valley’s signature “disruptors” meets the world’s biggest bureaucracy. Elon Musk showed up in person in the capita the day after Donald Trump named him to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency”—an initiative to slash government waste, fraud, and inefficiency, wherever the tech mogul might decide he finds it. Musk will co-lead the project with Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech investor and MAGA cheerleader who ran against Trump in the GOP primary. Trump unveiled the idea with his usual lavish prom