Janine Jackson interviewed the Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser about DOGE “after” Elon Musk for the June 6, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

USA Today (5/28/25)

Janine Jackson: “A Bruised Musk Leaves Washington,” the New York Times told readers. USA Today said, “Musk Leaves Trump Administration, Capping His Run as Federal Government Slasher.” The Washington Post said “his departure marks the end of a turbulent chapter.”

While most outlets acknowledge that the impacts of Musk’s time as “special government employee” are still in effect, and even that many of the minions he placed are still hard at work, the focus was still very much on the great man—What drives him? What will he do next?—rather than on the structures and systems whose flaws are highlighted by the maneuvers of Musk and the so-called Department Of Government Efficiency.

Our guest says now is not the time to take our eye off the ball. Jeff Hauser is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jeff Hauser.

Jeff Hauser: Hi, great to be here.

JJ: I feel as though we spoke recently because we spoke recently, but for the press corps, there’s a new story. To imagine, as some headlines suggest, that Elon Musk has packed up his toys and left town, so some kind of chapter has concluded—that’s not just inaccurate, but rather worrisomely so, don’t you think?

JH: Absolutely. Elon Musk brought dozens of people with him to Washington, DC, to government. They were very homogeneous, in the sense that none of them were qualified to work at senior levels of government, and they all were motivated by a hatred for public service and a hatred for government protecting ordinary people from the whims of corporate America.

Politico (3/24/25)

And they remain in government right now. They’re implementing Musk’s agenda, which happens to be pretty similar to Russell Vought’s agenda, which happens to be very similar to Project 2025’s agenda, which was an agenda that Donald Trump disavowed, but is obviously governing with.

JJ: Talk about Russell Vought a little bit. I know he’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, but what else do we need to know about him, in this context?

JH: Russell Vought is sort of like Elon Musk, if Elon Musk had been paying attention to politics for a couple of decades, and minus the allegations of ketamine usage. Russell Vought brings a unique combination of hard-right social views and hard libertarian views on economic policy. He is the personal marriage of all the sort of worst tendencies within the Republican coalition, and he knows what he’s doing.

He had a senior role in the Trump administration go-around one. He thinks that they underperformed, that they could have attacked government more, they could have made the country even “freer” and more supportive of the richest, most rapacious corporations; and he’s determined that they succeed at doing so again. And he spent the four-year interregnum planning, in exquisite detail, how to bring about the devastation of American government–of the professionalization of the American government that has been the project for more than 140 years, since the Pendleton Act and the rise of the civil service in the early 1880s.

ProPublica (3/20/25)

JJ: ProPublica revealed some speeches Vought gave a little while back, and touching on Project 2025, which he’s an architect of, goes right to what you’re just saying. Part of myriad things they want to do is revive Schedule F, which would make it easier to fire large groups of government workers who right now have civil service protections. But what struck me was the quote; this is Vought:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry, because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

I have a feeling if that quote were put in front of people, it might provide some light on the project here.

JH: Absolutely. It was hiding in plain sight. They told us what they were going to do, but Donald Trump disavowed it. Donald Trump said, I’m not going to run on Project 2025. This stuff is so extreme. It’s crazy. Obviously I’m not going to do it. But they’re doing it, note for note.

And I can tell you, as somebody who not only does politics but lives in Washington, DC, when you’re in the community, there are a lot of traumatized public servants who really, deeply believe in the mission of their agencies, people who could have made a lot more money and had easier, more comfortable lives outside of government service, but are in government for the right reasons. And they are genuinely traumatized right now, and they have a lot of capacity to do good in the world that was underappreciated. Now they are being radically disempowered, and it’s going to take a very long time; it’s going to take a lot of great energy, to ever rebuild this government that Russell Vought, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are destroying.

JJ: I think it’s so interesting how you say that, even though this Trump administration is acting out the points of Project 2025, the story is still, “Oh, he disavowed it.” And it really highlights the way media have difficulty focusing on what’s happening when they’re so busy listening to what folks are saying, and what other folks are saying about what those folks are saying. But what we really need them to do is to track actual actions.

JH: Absolutely. It’d be great if the media were more focused on letting people understand what it is that the government can be doing, ordinarily does, is doing and should be doing.

I don’t think people have a good understanding of government. Even political junkies who can tell you a lot about Nebraska’s Second District, and the chances of Democrats taking back that house seat, and how that one electoral vote might influence the Electoral College in the presidential cycle—people who know that level of minutia can’t really tell you what the Office of Management and Budget does.

AP (via PBS, 4/27/25)

They almost certainly can’t tell you what OIRA, which is a subset of the Office of Management and Budget that focuses on regulatory issues, does. They wouldn’t have been able to tell you about what the civil service does, or the role of the EPA as law enforcement against corporate criminality. They don’t know these things. The media do not convey these things.

And so if there is an abstract threat about government bureaucrats, even political junkies don’t understand, definitely, what that will mean for their real lives. And I think it’s going to become, unfortunately, painfully clear in the coming years what that means. But the process is not immediate, and it’s incumbent upon the media to, as things go wrong, show the causality, show how these bad things were made much more likely to occur by Trump’s actions, by Musk’s actions, by Vought’s actions, by their disdain for public service, and their embrace of corporate titans being able to do whatever they want to do.

JJ: I want to just ask you, finally, what Revolving Door is up to, but I just saw this quote from AP, which said Musk “succeeded in providing a dose of shock therapy to the federal government, but he has fallen short of other goals.” And we’re supposed to take away that providing “shock therapy” to the federal government is somehow benign or necessary or a good thing; it’s remarkable.

But let me ask you, finally, what Revolving Door is up to, and how you hope journalists and others can use the tools and the information that you’re providing?

Jeff Hauser: “Taking seriously the notion that Musk was some sort of deficit hawk is part of the inanity of American political coverage.”

JH: Yeah, I think the quote really actually gets at a lot of what the Revolving Door Project is up to, because we do two types of work. One is pushing back on Trump, on creeping authoritarianism, and rapacious oligarchs destroying the government so they can pillage society.

So we do that work, but we also fight back against neoliberals within the Democratic Party. We’re a nonpartisan organization, and we attack neoliberalism in all of its many forms. And the idea that government required shock therapy, that there were too many people working in government, even though the number of people working in government is the same as it was two or three generations ago, when America’s population was half of what it currently is.

But the notion of this is a nonpartisan idea, that government required shock therapy: That is the marriage of Democratic neoliberals and Republican neoliberals, and that is what allowed Musk and DOGE and Trump to happen. It’s that belief that things really were broken, that there was some legitimacy to the concept of DOGE from the jump. No one should have ever validated the idea of DOGE, or talked about, “Here’s my vision for what government efficiency pursuits would happen.”

Because Musk’s goals were not to cut government spending. In fact, Silicon Valley wants way more financial support for their artificial intelligence data centers and the like. They want subsidies for all sorts of tech projects, and they want a bigger military industrial complex that is more heavily dependent on Silicon Valley. So they want lots of spending, they just want it on their priorities. They want to attack government workers, because those government workers enforce the rules that limit and constrain corporate oligarchs.

So that’s what they wanted. They did not want to reduce the deficit, and taking seriously the notion that Musk was some sort of deficit hawk is part of the inanity of American political coverage. And I’d like the media to be less credulous about people who have obvious economic stakes in public policy, and pretending that the rhetoric that they deploy, especially when they’re known liars, is something that we should take seriously.

Rolling Stone (8/19/23)

JJ: And so the work you’re doing is tracking the ins and outs of what these predations have meant, and what they could mean, and how to stay on top of them?

JH: Yes. We are cataloging under our DOGE Watch feature the ways in which Trump and Musk are attacking the ability of government to protect ordinary people. And we’re also monitoring, separately—we have a website, Hackwatch.us—how ostensible Democratic-aligned, center-left neoliberal pundits, people like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias and Derek Thompson, are making things easier for corporate oligarchs, are carrying water for Silicon Valley and are pursuing neoliberalism, because we’re against neoliberalism in all forms.

JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note—for now. We’ve been speaking with Jeff Hauser from the Revolving Door Project. Jeff Hauser, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JH: It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

This post was originally published on FAIR.