Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been making a right old mess of the US government. While there was always much to criticise about the country, Musk and his so called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) haven’t been going after the programmes which make people’s live worse; they’ve been going after the ones which make things borderline tolerable. Now, Nigel Farage is threatening to do the same thing to councils across the UK.
Nigel Farage tells #bbclaurak "that we probably need a DOGE for every single county council in England.."#bbclaurak: Like Elon Musk's slashing bureau?
NF: Yes pic.twitter.com/hydoCf8bVc
— Haggis_UK 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 (@Haggis_UK) April 13, 2025
DOGE: the slashing bureau
If you listened to Musk (like Nigel Farage seemingly has) you’d believe he genuinely wanted to improve government efficiency. If you listened to anyone who wasn’t a billionaire, you’d know that DOGE was a spite-driven machine designed to cut services for regular people.
CNN rounded up several ways Musk “misled” Americans, including:
- Lying about a USAID-paid celebrity trip to Ukraine designed to “boost Zelensky’s popularity among Americans” (the trip never happened).
- Sharing misinformation spread by random X users, including a graph which suggested an increase in tax credits was some sort of nefarious welfare scheme (it was actually a scheme that Trump signed into power and Joe Biden later allowed to expire).
- Musk also claimed “They took money from FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency], meant for helping Americans in distress, and sent that money to luxury hotels for illegal immigrants in New York” (the money was from a separate scheme and the hotels weren’t luxury).
Don’t get us wrong – we’re not saying the US government was doing good work with any of the above. USAID did benefit many people around the world, but at the same time it existed primarily to push American soft power abroad. Biden should have continued the tax credits scheme, too, and New York and the US government would actually save money by using permanent housing instead of temporary solutions like hotels.
DOGE isn’t slashing these services to implement something better, though, it’s slashing them because Musk and other billionaires despise anything which doesn’t benefit themselves. This is why Musk is very happy to take government “contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits” for his own companies, but cries bloody murder when government money is directed anywhere else.
Incompetent
And let’s not forget the incompetence (something Nigel Farage needs no lessons in).
In February, DOGE had to rush to rehire crucial workers in fields like nuclear weapons. As the Standard reported:
Federal workers responsible for America’s nuclear weapons are being rehired after being accidentally fired in President Donald Trump’s rush to slash government waste in a whirlwind of new policies since he returned to the White House.
Scientists trying to fight a worsening outbreak of bird flu and officials responsible for supplying electricity are also being given their jobs back after being among the tens of thousands of workers axed by Trump’s administration.
“This shows a level of absolute incompetence in the firing process,” said Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
“They are taking a chainsaw to public services without any kind of careful review of the people being removed and the tasks they are employed for.”
You might not agree with nuclear weapons existing, but you probably think that as long as we do have them they should at least be secure.
Attacking MAGA
Another element we should mention is that the promise of DOGE to Trump voters was that it would go after the enemies of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. But do you know who it actually attacked?
That’s right – Trump voters themselves.
In the 2024 election, nearly two thirds of veteran voters opted for Trump. How did Trump and Musk repay them? Well, as The Week reported:
A “climate of fear” has enveloped the Department of Veterans Affairs, said Sonner Kehrt in Mother Jones. Guided by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration has cut 2,400 jobs at the agency over the past month. And last week, VA Secretary Doug Collins announced plans to ax 80,000 more employees this year—about 17 percent of the department’s entire workforce. Despite repeated claims from administration officials that the layoffs will not affect the 9 million vets who rely on the agency for medical care and other services, VA workers say the cuts are “already hurting” patients. Suicide prevention trainings have been canceled, and therapists who work with PTSD patients have been fired. Some vets have seen mammograms and other crucial exams delayed for months because of staff shortages. Meanwhile, VA workers are struggling to focus on providing care as they worry about whether they’ll even have a job tomorrow. “Honestly, the last time I felt this level of fear was in combat,” said one decorated veteran turned veterans’ therapist.
One thing Musk and the Trump movement have raged against is the the idea of ‘DEI hires’, with DEI standing for ‘Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion’. As it turned out, many of the veterans employed in the federal government were hired as part of DEI initiatives to provide support for American soldiers after they return from combat. Now, these soldiers are going from an environment which provided next-to-no-support to one which is actively hostile towards them.
And all because the guy they supported won.
Does this sound like something we want to import to the UK? Nigel Farage clearly thinks so.
Musk’s finger puppet Nigel Farage being fingered by Laura Kuenssberg
On her Sunday morning politics show, Laura Kuenssberg suggested the upcoming council elections could be a “big breakthrough” for Nigel Farage and his Reform Party, asking him:
councils have been strapped for cash for a long, long time. We know that. And there are many issues. Let’s look at a couple of them.
There’s already an overspend of £3bn for children with special needs. Councils aren’t able to give people the help that they need. They haven’t got enough money to meet it. So if Reform was to be running any council, would you increase Council Tax, or would you cut back services even further?
You could argue these are the only two options, sure; you could also argue that Reform could use their growing electoral heft to bully Labour into sending more money to councils (money we’d like to see them generate through wealth taxes). Kuenssberg doesn’t even consider this to be an option, of course, because she’s one of the many ideology-brained austerity psychos that make up the British media.
Farage responded:
I’ve looked at the numbers. We did thousands of FOI requests to have a look where money was being spent. I’m gonna say this. We probably need a DOGE for every single county council in England.
Yep, because DOGE is working out great in America.
It’s really making people’s lives better.
It isn’t just a scam to funnel more money to the rich.
Nigel Farage blamed the shortages on things like councils spending money on ergonomic chairs. Undoubtedly there are instances of excessive spending which you could point at, but let us be clear – when a politician rises to power with a focus on what they can cut and not what they can improve, they really have no intention of improving anything.
Kuenssberg did push back, saying:
if you look properly at how local councils spend their money, nearly 80% of it is on education, police, children and adults social care, and the vast majority of it does not go on things like ergonomic chairs in the office. There are serious shortages.
The problem is that she’s not saying this because she thinks the point about chairs is silly; she’s saying it because she wants Farage to commit to cutting things like education and adult social care.
Little America, thanks to Nigel Farage
With America fucking up so fantastically right now, you’d think UK politicians would want to distance themselves from the ongoing catastrophe. Sadly, it seems like our political class want to go down with the Titanic success Trump is having – with Nigel Farage cheering the pack on.
Featured image via BBC and Wikimedia (Gage Skidmore – background removed from image)
