The "Fraud" Fraud

How DOGE destroys

How does Elon Musk use the word "fraud" to dismantle the US federal government?

The term is not as an attempt to describe the world, but to change it. It is a political tool, used by a politician to justify a political action: regime change to oligarchy.

The word "fraud" operates in six ways.

1. The bait and switch. When Musk says "fraud," people who benefit from government programs are supposed to think "that applies to others, but not to me." The idea of "fraud" creates a sense of us-and-them. I am a normal citizen just receiving Social Security or Medicare or other benefits. But other people are abusing the system. Naturally, I am against those people and in favor of Elon Musk, the person who will halt their abuses. In this way, the idea of "fraud" creates political cover. When the benefits themselves cease, when institutions cease to function, people are confused. But that was always the point.

2. The linguistic inflation. At first, the idea was that there are incidents of "fraud" within government programs. This shifts very quickly, though, to the idea that "fraud" is so widespread that the program or institution itself must be eliminated, as has happened with foreign aid and consumer protection. At a certain point, which we have reached, the association with "fraud" becomes the justification for cutting popular programs by way of legislation. It becomes the rationale that Republicans in Congress use to justify attacking Social Security or Medicare.

3. The state of exception. The notion that there is widespread "fraud" inside government is supposed to suggest that all previous rules no longer apply. Promises made to constituents no longer matter, for example. Congress has to cut things because the situation is somehow so dramatic. Entirely new tools are necessary, such as a group of private citizens led by Elon Musk marching through government departments, taking personal control of key systems, and collecting the data of all Americans for themselves. We need a strongman to cut through the mess. And so on.

4. The slander of civil servants. The explicit policy of Musk-Trump, as described by the head of the Office of Management and Budget, is to traumatize federal workers. We see this in the decapitation of their institutions, the choice of obviously unqualified people to run those institutions, in the firings, and in the abuse. If there is "fraud," then we should understand civil servants as its perpetrators and they should understand themselves as such. The idea is to break bonds of trust between citizens and civil servants and to make the latter feel hopeless and alone. When the departure of civil servants reaches a certain threshold, then government ceases to function. And that is the goal.

5. The delegitimation of government as such. The word "fraud" becomes the main way that government is discussed. No one in or around DOGE, or in or around the White House, is talking about the good things that government does for people, how government can ease lives, how government can liberate. No one speaks about the benefits of workplace safety or consumer protection or disease control or public schools or public highways or health care or pensions. "Fraud" becomes a paradigm, undermining the sense of having a government. The implication is that only a lone oligarch can be pure and uncorrupt. The opposite, of course, is the case.

6. The ennoblement of oligarchy. If government is dirty, we are meant to think, then the oligarch is pure. Only a centibillionaire can carry out the necessary cleansing, the happy purge. The insistence on government "fraud" by the oligarch himself is meant to suggest that a new form of politics, oligarchy, must be the answer.

Musk's "fraud" rhetoric is presented as an anti-politics, as something fresh and exciting. But it is in fact a politics, a very old sort, the politics of oligarchy. As he himself has made clear himself, Musk is a politician with a program. It is to disable the rule of law, leaving no barriers to his oligarchical power. In this scheme, the only parts of government meant to function are the ones used to silence people who point out this obvious truth.