With Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy newly present as cabinet members of the White House, the two plan to employ a new government structure that is called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE for short. My initial thought upon seeing this new government installment was that if we are making our systems out to be a joke by naming them memes like DOGE, it underlines a sense of immaturity, lack of seriousness and willful ignorance to how much the government is negatively impacting the people of the United States.
The people of the United States are currently dealing with the impact of the forces of climate change because of the structures that are being imposed on our well-being. Our natural disasters are becoming more intense, our polluted air is sickening every species that breathes air and the ground we walk on is infested with the constant contamination of concrete that highlights the ever-expanding nature of negative growth in our society.A key example of this negative growth is Musk’s artificial intelligence supercomputer facilities and how these structures are devastating to the environment and people. As of last November, Musk has perpetuated numerous environmental injustices, including his AI facility in south Memphis, which Southern Environmental Law Center states is “spewing dangerous air pollution, worsening air quality and endangering families in the predominantly Black neighborhoods nearby.” This raises the question of whether the push for greater efficiency and expansion by Musk and Ramaswamy is truly necessary if that expansion is causing injustice. We must rethink this unchecked growth that drives us toward an unsustainable future, restricting our planet’s positive progress, and deepening the divide between humanity and the Earth.
Musk and Ramaswamy are physical representations of that disconnect between people and earth. A disconnect between people and earth shows a lack of empathy and ignorance to harmful environmental impact and how it is affecting people. The natural disasters that are happening right now in the world have been largely influenced by human-driven climate change. We are witnessing a rise in displaced individuals, food insecurity, heatwaves, floods, droughts and heightened risks of death which have all been exacerbated by large corporations that continue to intensify these atrocities.
Carbon Majors is a database of historical production data from 122 of the world’s largest fossil fuel and cement producers. Carbon Majors found that “80 percent of carbon dioxide emissions between 2016-2022 can be traced to just 57 cement or fossil fuel companies.” We have reached a point in history where people cannot be willingly or unknowingly ignorant of the harmful structures that we face towards these large corporations and government structures that do not care about us or the environment, because they affect us all in negative ways whether we directly see it or not.
Trump followers need to understand that positive change does not start with economic growth and instead positive change needs to hold the foundation of sustainable development. This sustainable growth entails framing the economic system to support equal structures. The right-wing political forces that uphold our economic systems show a willful ignorance to the people that are uncomfortable with our current systems, simply because the people that are enacting and reinforcing these systems have comfortable positions in our material society. The National President of the American Federation of Government Employees stated early last September that “Elon Musk and Donald Trump care about one thing: lining their own pockets. Not government efficiency, and certainly not making things better for everyday Americans.” This quote is supported by Musk and Ramaswamy’s actions in which Musk pledged on X that his new cabinet would post all of its actions online for transparency and teased “a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars.” This is a reminder that Musk is not taking the wealth disparities in America seriously, and that he is either ignoring, or is ignorant to the way that class structures are negatively affecting the impoverished and working class people of America.
There is a more exploitative side to this issue in that Musk depends on underpaid immigrants to do engineering work at Tesla. Engineers at Tesla, many of whom are immigrants, are being paid significantly less than any other engineer in America. John Molander, who is the president of the health nonprofit VentiNow, states his opinion that “Ohio has engineering programs offering over 170 programs. What is wrong? Are these Ohio engineering graduates not good enough? Every time a company passes over an American engineer and hires an immigrant with an H-1B visa at a small fraction of the cost, they lower the entry.” What this means, is that Musk is selectively hiring immigrants solely because he can exploit them by giving them unequal pay which I believe is a disgusting use of power.
The most interesting part to me about the usage of Musk in Trump’s affairs, is that not every right-wing individual believes in Elon’s rise to hold a powerful position in Trump’s cabinet. MSNBC describes this dispute as a “MAGA civil war.” (MAGA is short for “Make America Great Again,” from the 2016 Trump campaign.) The slogan of one of the main MAGA followers that hold disdain for Elon is Steve Bannon who was the former chief strategist of the White House. Steve Bannon worked closely with Trump in the White House and has been a long time MAGA follower, but he believes that Elon is a “truly evil guy.”
I’m encouraged to see that some Trump supporters are beginning to recognize the potential harm posed by the individuals Trump is appointing to office. However, some of those opposing Musk’s involvement have their own agenda of seeking to ensure that Trump faces no external opposition. There needs to be self-reflection among Trump followers, specifically in reflecting about how much we really want to push the boundaries of our economic system, how much we want to expand our military and how our current systems are oppressing and have historically oppressed marginalized groups.
I believe that we all need to act in ways that outwardly show our stance against climate change, against never ending expansion and against self-indulgent hateful structures that politicians exploit us with. Exploitative structures need to hear our voice for there to be revolution and positive change. We, as people that believe in coexistence and love have a much stronger foundation for an empathetic and thriving society that benefits everyone involved. We are bigger and more powerful than them because the structures that impose their will on us evidently do not have a capacity to uphold the elements of empathetic and positive collaboration. These are the same elements that we can use as tools to override the self-indulgent nature of our current government.
