DOGE: Is Efficiency a Gateway to Technocracy?

To understand the roots of Elon Musk’s DOGE we must look back to the philosophies which preceded and inspired the original Technocracy movement.

Originally Published at The Last American Vagabond

To understand the roots of Elon Musk’s DOGE we must look back to the philosophies which preceded and inspired the original Technocracy movement.

As the MAGA movement celebrates the efforts of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the unmasking of government waste, it should be noted that Musk’s talk of efficiency is reminiscent of the little known Efficiency Movement which predated the more well-known Technocracy movement.

To better understand Musk’s potential motivations and inspirations we must follow the path of the Technocracy movement and the philosophical movements which inspired it.

A Brief History of Technocracy

In the early 20th century, a movement began to develop around a political theory known as Technocracy, a system wherein management of governments is handled by technical experts, often involving technology-focused solutions. Early proponents of Technocracy claimed that the concept would lead to better management of resources and the protection of the planet.

However, this system of governance by technological experts and their technology would also involve a loss of privacy, as well as centralization of power and the management of all human behavior. Although the term appears to have been largely forgotten, the technocratic philosophy and influence can be seen everywhere in our modern digital world.

One of the most influential proponents of Technocracy was a man named Howard Scott, a writer who founded the Technical Alliance in New York City in 1919. Scott believed that business owners lacked the necessary skills and data to reform their industries, and thus control should be handed over to engineers. In 1932, Scott and fellow technocrat Walter Rautenstrauch formed the “Committee on Technocracy” at Columbia University. The group would eventually splinter, with Scott leading Technocracy Incorporated, and technocrat Harold Loeb in charge of the Continental Committee on Technocracy.

Interestingly, Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a research director for Technocracy Incorporated of Canada and national chairman of the Social Credit Party.

In 1938, Technocracy Incorporated released a publication that outlined its vision for a Technocracy (emphasis added):

Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population of this continent. For the first time in human history it will be done as a scientific, technical, engineering problem. There will be no place for Politics or Politicians, Finance or Financiers, Rackets or Racketeers…

Technocracy states that price and abundance are incompatible; the greater the abundance the smaller the price. In a real abundance there can be no price at all. Only by abandoning the interfering price control and substituting a scientific method of production and distribution can an abundance be achieved. Technocracy will distribute by means of a certificate of distribution available to every citizen from birth to death. The Technate will encompass the entire American Continent from Panama to the North Pole because the natural resources and the natural boundary of this area make it an independent, self-sustaining geographical unit.

Technocrats publicized their vision of a centrally-planned world via books, speeches, clubs, and political parties. This resulted in a brief period of popularity in the US and Canada in the years following the Great Depression. As politicians and economists searched for a solution to the financial calamity, the technocrats imagined a world where politicians and business owners were replaced with scientists, engineers, and other technical experts, who would manage the economy.

However, in the 1940s, mainstream interest in the Technocracy movement seemed to dissipate. The ideals underpinning Technocracy would later receive a notable endorsement from long time deep state actor Zbigniew Brzezinski when he released his 1970 book, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era.

While Brzezinski’s Between Two Ages substituted the term “Technetronic” for “Technocracy,” the depiction of the future is the same: a world in which the scientific and technological elite centrally plan the lives of all humanity. Essentially, Brzezinski’s vision is a technologically-advanced authoritarian-style collectivism, wherein individual liberties are subordinated to the apparent needs of the collective.

We can clearly see that CEOs of Big Tech companies have embraced the Technocratic philosophy and are now using Donald Trump’s 2nd administration to push their “tech-populism” as they remake America into the Technocrat’s utopia and a free person’s dystopia.

However, the original Technocrats of the 1930’s who inspired Brzezinski and the Technocrats of the 2020’s were themselves inspired by earlier movements. By understanding the roots of Technocracy we can more easily detect the signs of the Technocratic State when it rears its authoritarian head.

The Efficiency Movement

Technocracy was preceded by a rarely discussed movement focused on efficiency. The Efficiency Movement flourished during the Progressive Era in the United States from the late 1800’s to around 1930. It sought to identify and eliminate waste in all areas of the economy and society, and to develop and implement “best practices”. Proponents argued that these inefficiencies could be identified and fixed by experts. Supporters of the movement included Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

The book, Bureaus of Efficiency: Reforming Local Government in the Progressive Era, details how attempts at government reform led to calls for the creation of a “permanent administrative branch of government that would be divorced from politics”.

Under this model, politicians would continue to decide government policies, but an “administrative cadre” would implement the policies. This contributed to the rise of an academic discipline called public administration. The founders of this discipline sought to “create at all levels of government a permanent, merit-based, civil service system that would be beyond the reach of elected officials, would employ experts and technocrats to ‘advise’ politicians of rational choices available to them”.

“The Progressives conjured up an antiseptic form of government in which decisions would be made rationally by scholars, scientists, and experts,” wrote Ron Chernow in his 1998 biography of John D. Rockefeller Sr.

These calls would lead to the creation of nonprofit agencies often labeled as “municipal research bureaus”. In fact, in 1912, John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded the New York City Bureau of Municipal Research’s investigations of the NYC Police Department.

However, what most Americans don’t know is that one branch of municipal research bureaus was the lesser known bureaus of efficiency. The creation of the “efficiency bureaus” were a direct result of the growth of the Efficiency movement itself.

For example, from 1916 to 1933, the US government under Woodrow Wilson administration operated the US Bureau of Efficiency. Chicago also created an Efficiency Division within the city government’s Civil Service Commission, and private citizens organized the Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency. Chicago Efficiency proponents also championed the study of “personal efficiency,” an attempt at measuring employees’ performance through new “scientific” merit systems.

One of the most widely known proponents of Efficiency was an engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who is reported to have used a stopwatch to identify the smallest inefficiencies. He served as the president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society. His particular brand of efficiency came to be known as scientific management or Taylorism.

Taylorism: The Predecessor to the Efficiency and Technocracy Movements

“The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work,” Frederick Winslow Taylor, in his book The Principles of Scientific Management.

Taylor’s book, The Principles of Scientific Management, was one of the most influential management books of the 20th century. He aimed to show that the United States was losing because of inefficiencies and that the solution was systematic management based on defined laws, rules, and principles which are applied to all human activity.

While Taylorism and scientific management were embraced by the likes of the Rockefellers and management professionals around the U.S., the philosophy had its fair share of critics. Some opponents of Taylorism claimed the philosophy reduced workers to simple automatons who were only capable of mindlessly following instructions from the allegedly superior managerial expert class.

One such critic was Mary Parker Follett, an American management theorist and philosopher known for her work on organizational theory and management. Follett’s views on management differed from Taylor’s in that she emphasized the importance of interpersonal relationships, communication, and cooperation in the work environment.

Follett opposed what she saw as authoritarian and hierarchical aspects of Taylorism, claiming that these would limit the workers creativity.

“The Taylor system is based on the idea that the worker is a machine, and that the manager is the one who knows how to run the machine,” she wrote in her 1918 book, The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government.

Additionally, in 1970, Professor Charles S. Maier published the paper “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the 1920s“. Maier’s paper argues that while Taylorism, and later Technocracy, were viewed as ways to improve efficiency and economic growth, these ideologies could also be used to justify authoritarianism and suppress the rights of workers. He also outlines how these ideas can be used by regimes calling themselves Communist, Fascist, and even Democratic.

In 1918, within six months of his Bolsheviks seizing power as a result of the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin openly acknowledged Taylorism as an inspiration and potential method for reinforcing the Soviet government. Writing in his essay The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, Lenin specifically mentions Taylorism as a model which his newly formed Soviet government should model themselves after.

“’We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our purposes,” Lenin wrote.

At the same time that Lenin was leading the Bolsheviks to victory and championing the cause of a socialist Taylorism, the philosophy was influencing Germany. In Judith A. Merkle’s book Management and ideology : the legacy of the international scientific management movement we learn how Taylorism influenced Germany before, during, and after World War 1.

The book tells the story of German engineers discovering the work of Taylor at the Bethlehem Steel exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Coincidentally, Taylor began working at Bethlehem Steel in 1898 and by 1900 was conducting experiments on steel with Maunsel White. After the Germans viewed his work they began using high-speed steel and conducting various metal-cutting experiments. From there, Taylor’s ideas about efficiency began to spread throughout the German engineering and political spheres.

“The Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (VDI) maintained a central role in the introduction of Scientific Management reforms in Germany…. it popularized Taylorism among the members of the engineering profession, founded organizations designed to promote efficiency in industry, and encouraged communication and exchange with the Scientific Management movement in the United States,” Merkle writes.

Merkle also notes that the “immediate effect” of the exchange of technical knowledge between the U.S. and Germany was that Taylor’s written works were translated for German industrial and technical audiences. Translations of Taylor’s Shop Management were printed in numerous editions, and in 1913 The Principles of Scientific Management was read with great interest. She also details how Taylor’s ideas influenced key engineers and economists within the German empire, including Wichard von Moellendorff who would become “one of the architects of Germany’s wartime planning system” and an advocate of a state-run economy using Taylor’s Scientific Management.

“Thus, from lesser figures in the history of corporatism such as Goetz Briefs, to the great advocates of post-World War I Planwirtschaft such as Walther Rathenau or Wichard von Moellendorff, the example and teachings of Scientific Management can be shown to have been a real and a lively force that gave new strength to old German doctrine,” Merkle concludes.

Is Musk Making Government More Efficient or Less Human?

Elon Musk has embraced the Technocratic philosophy that says engineers, scientists, and technological experts should impact (and eventually manage) society by becoming stronger and more influential than the government and private business together.

What Musk and his fellow Technocrats seek is to dismantle traditional government structures and merge the remaining pieces with their corporate oligarchy. We know that the Technocrats have been influenced by the ideas of Curtis Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment hacks who yearn for the days when a “national CEO” can run the country like a monarchy.

But to do this, they must convince the public that their efforts at “efficiency” are simply aimed at revealing waste and bringing corruption into the light. Where the original Technocrats aimed to centrally plan and manage society with “machines”, the modern Technocrats seek to do the same with Artificial Intelligence.

A quick search of DOGE and AI reveals numerous headlines from recent weeks, including:

Elon Musk’s DOGE is feeding sensitive federal data into AI to target cuts

DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email

DOGE’s Plans to Replace Humans With AI Are Already Under Way

Democrats Demand Answers on DOGE’s Use of AI

Elon Musk wants to use AI to run US gov’t, but experts say ‘very bad’ idea

These articles warn of the ways in which Musk is beginning to employ AI to decide which federal employees he should fire; which tasks can be automated by AI chatbots; and apparently considering handing over even more tasks to the rapidly advancing technology.

We now know the Trump administration is testing a new chatbot with 1,500 federal employees at the General Services Administration. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer now employed as director of the Technology Transformation Services (TTS) within GSA, said in a recent meeting that decreasing the size of the federal government presents “a huge opportunity for technology and automation to come in full force.”

This should come as no surprise given the recent reporting that the Trump administration is also using AI for a “Catch and Revoke” program which will determine which pro-Palestine (or what the regime calls “pro-Hamas”) student protesters to expel from the United States.

Coincidentally, the World Economic Forum launched the AI Governance Alliance in June 2023 with the goal of establishing “global best practices for AI governance”. In May 2024, the AI Governance Alliance Community Meeting was held in San Francisco, with 118 leaders from the public and private sectors, academia, and civil society working to “advance the vision and objectives of the Alliance”.

This is yet another example of how Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the “tech-populists” in Trump’s 2nd administration continue to call for a world which is eerily similar to that posed by the UN-WEF “Progressive” cabal. While Musk and his cohorts claim we must merge with AI to survive, or put chips in our brains, or inject mRNA “vaccines”, or accept a transhumanist future to thwart the “other side”, in reality they are selling the American public the exact same dystopian vision as Klaus Schwab. All they offer is a different path to the same horrendous destination. It’s what I call The Great Inversion.

If the public does not quickly wake up to this reality they will find themselves locked into an efficient, techno-tyranny with little opportunity for a life outside of the all-consuming Technocratic State. We must focus our attention on opting out of this nightmare and building parallel systems outside of their control so humanity may thrive long into the future.

Elon checks all the boxes. #QuestionEverything pic.twitter.com/LPUWWMRbAD

— The Last American Vagabond (@TLAVagabond) February 25, 2025