US President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that a Department of Government Efficiency will be formed in the US once he assumes office. The department will be headed by space-tech giant Elon Musk and Indian-origin entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. In his announcement, Trump said, “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Trump said that the work of the department, which will entail a smaller government with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will end no later than July 4, 2026, and will be the perfect gift to America on its 250th anniversary of The Declaration of Independence.
Elon Musk, who also owns the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), has been radically and vehemently propagating a Trump administration on the site since quite some time now. Musk has repeatedly declared staunch support for Trump on X and has criticised users opposing Trump. The ramifications of the right to opine and express look entirely different for the owner of one of the largest social media websites who openly curbs dissenting views and seeks to impose his agenda on a public platform that is supposed to be a safe space for views from all points of the political spectrum. The conflict of interest is not just evident and jarring, but also frightening.
Now, with the appointment of Musk as head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, Trump’s proclivities towards authoritarianism seem to have only solidified. It is a fact universally known that one of the first steps towards establishing an authoritarian regime is to gain control of the media. Gaining control of the media is not just gaining control over what people write, but more importantly over what people think. What the Trump administration seeks is to control the way the world thinks about him, and to construct and be in charge of his own narrative. Leaders of democratic countries have often controlled the media and press, but a lot of them do so in a surreptitious fashion. What is scary about Trump’s attempt to control the media is his nonchalance and blatancy in trying to conceal it, and his eagerness in shaping and skewing public opinion in his favour.
