CATO’s Missing DOGE Model: DOGE Is a Pro-Russian Intelligence Operation

CATO engaged in an interesting project: faced with all the uncertainty about what DOGE is up to, it attempted to lay out six possible models to explain what DOGE is doing.

Social science models simplify reality, spotlighting key variables that may shape DOGE’s actions in a way that can be tested. The models discussed above clearly simplify the complex endeavor of reforming the largest human organization ever by expenditures—the U.S. federal government. They help explain past decisions and anticipate future moves. The models above try to make sense of DOGE’s actions so far. They are not mutually exclusive, yet several can be informative together or alone, while some may only make sense temporarily. Other models not set out here might offer fresh insights, but scholars should try to develop them. Without doing so, one of the biggest policy initiatives of President Trump’s second term risks being under-analyzed or misunderstood.

It offered these six possible models:

1. DOGE is seeking to purge progressive influence within the federal government.
2. DOGE is a scaled-up public version of Musk’s style of corporate restructuring applied to the federal government.
3. DOGE is the first step of a public relations campaign to build popular support for spending cuts.
4. DOGE is an essential component of a Trump administration legal challenge to expand the president’s power of impoundment.
5. DOGE provides political cover for Congress to be even more fiscally irresponsible.
6. DOGE is about self-interest and cronyism.

Some of these — like the attempt to purge progressivism and cronyism — are partially convincing. Others, such as the claim that DOGE helps either the PR campaign or the legal one, are soundly rebutted by public facts. DOGE’s epic failures have increased pushback and provided legal bases to challenge cutbacks that wouldn’t exist if done more competently.

Even when it considers the possibility that Elon is self-dealing, CATO’s exercise is wildly credulous about DOGE’s own — Elon’s own — deceit. This piece, which they link, is far less so:

Elon Musk has many great strengths, but he is not a reliable narrator.

[snip]

As has been well covered in mainstream outlets, DOGE has been extremely sloppy about cutting contracts and reporting the numbers. Most of the biggest ticket savings have been the result of DOGE misreading federal contracting data, or killing contracts that were already dead. From the New York Times:

What’s more concerning than the sloppiness itself is that it does not appear to be getting resolved over time. The same kinds of data parsing errors and confusion about how federal contracts are awarded and then paid out have persisted over two months. Some of this comes back to the information environment: DOGE has instituted few if any ground-up mechanisms within the federal government to surface real savings opportunities.

Both pieces seem to treat the evolving explanation about what DOGE is (which CATO lays out in more depth and I’ve laid out here) as an evolving goal; neither considers whether it is an evolving cover story, necessitated, in part, by the inaptness of the USDS mission to what DOGE wants to do, exposed via various lawsuits.

Importantly, both ignore the most troubling aspect of DOGE: Its repeated rush to access the live data from these agencies. That has happened over and over — at OPM, at the Social Security Agency, at HHS. As Tiffany Flick wrote in a widely reported declaration, these boys are being granted access for which they have no obvious need to know, and they’re accessing that data in insecure ways, to use in rooms remotely with other DOGE boys.

You don’t need to access the Personally Identifiable Information of all Americans to cut costs. You don’t need to access the PII of all Americans to harmonize benefit programs across agencies, in the process making it easier to identify fraud. You don’t need to access the PII of all Americans to cash in (unless using it for extortion). Doing so doesn’t help your PR case or your impoundment case.

It certainly could be part of a totalitarian bid for power, a way to identify undocumented immigrants who were advised to pay their taxes, same sex married couples, or trans people who have changed their gender on official documents.

And that application might explain one of several troubling new details from recent weeks: the court filing that revealed that, before he left Treasury, Marko Elez emailed two unnamed people at GSA the name or names of people with transaction details.

12. The forensic analysis also revealed that Elez sent an email with a spreadsheet containing PII to two United States General Services Administration officials. The PII detailed a name (a person or an entity), a transaction type, and an amount of money. The names in the spreadsheet are considered low risk PII because the names are not accompanied by more specific identifiers, such as social security numbers or birth dates. Elez’s distribution of this spreadsheet was contrary to BFS policies, in that it was not sent encrypted, and he did not obtain prior approval of the transmission via a “Form 7005,” describing what will be sent and what safeguards the sender will implement to protect the information.

Over a month after the investigation into what Elez was up to, Treasury reveals that he was alerting others to specific details about entities, with no explanation of why. That has nothing to do with the optimization he was supposed to be doing!

So sure, that could arise from an effort to target specific adversaries of Elon or Trump.

But that doesn’t explain another alarming revelation about DOGE: That Elon set up Starlink for the White House and GSA (not coincidentally, where most of his DOGE boys are working with the PII of Americans).

Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is now accessible across the White House campus. It is the latest installation of the Wi-Fi network across the government since Mr. Musk joined the Trump administration as an unpaid adviser.

[snip]

White House officials said the installation was an effort to increase internet availability at the complex. They said that some areas of the property could not get cell service and that the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was overtaxed.

[snip]

In recent weeks, Starlink was also set up at the General Services Administration, which has served as a hub for Mr. Musk’s government-shrinking efforts, according to documents and people familiar with the service.

[snip]

It was also unclear if Starlink communications were encrypted. At a minimum, the system allows for a network separate from existing White House servers that people on the grounds are able to use, keeping that data separate.

“It’s super rare” to install Starlink or another internet provider as a replacement for existing government infrastructure that has been vetted and secured, said Jake Williams, a vice president for research and development at Hunter Strategy, a cybersecurity consultancy. “I can’t think of a time that I have heard of that.”

“It introduces another attack point,” Mr. Williams said. “But why introduce that risk?”

It’s certainly true that these two details could just be consistent with Elon’s plan to adopt totalitarianism himself, using his own personal satellite network.

But taken in tandem with other priorities of DOGE, such as dismantling almost the entirety of USAID, starting with the programs that Russia and Hungary most loathe, but also including those Republicans cherish, you need to at least consider whether this is an intelligence operation. Elon, his sidekick installed at the White House, David Sacks, and the VP they foisted on Trump, JD Vance, all parrot Russian propaganda. Dangles for Elon — cooperation on Mars! — have been included in Russia’s efforts to cultivate Trump.

And Musk was cemented as part of the this team at the same time as two other people whose inclusion in the Administration only helps America’s adversaries, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.

DOGE has not been cost-cutting, though that has confused the good government types and libertarians for months. Rather, DOGE has been capacity-cutting, even while it conducts the most intrusive data dive into Americans this side of consumer profiling.

I’m not saying a Russian intelligence operation is the only explanation for DOGE’s actions (again, I think a totalitarian plan is another missed possibility, though question why an aspiring totalitarian would want to destroy so much capability in advance of solidifying power).

I’m saying that experts like those from CATO look at it and cannot tell what it is doing, even while ignoring evidence that its claimed goal — cost-cutting — is false. But no one has ruled out something far more sinister is hiding behind a cognitive (if evolving) model designed to look familiar.