Since arriving in Washington, D.C., to head up the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has taken a hatchet to a growing list of government institutions. The result has been mass firings, extensive furloughs and an expanding number of lawsuits challenging alleged governmental overreach.
For Musk and his colleagues, all this might simply be the cost of doing business. But Washington isn’t Silicon Valley, and the operating model of “moving fast and breaking things” being employed by DOGE has real national security implications. That’s because it is becoming increasingly clear the White House’s current approach to shrinking the government is rebounding to the benefit of adversary nations.
Take America’s public diplomacy enterprise, for instance. In recent weeks, administration officials have taken aim at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, its constituent federal services (Voice of America and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting), and “grantee” entities that rely on federal funds to carry out surrogate broadcasting in unfree societies.
The results have been dramatic. As U.S. broadcasters have been forced to go silent, the regimes in Moscow and Beijing have celebrated.
The shuttering of “‘lie factory’ VOA” is long overdue, the PRC’s official China Daily crowed. Russia’s chief propagandist was even more explicit. “Today is a holiday for me and my colleagues at RT and Sputnik,” said Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russia’s notorious state broadcaster, RT.
They’re moving promptly to fill the resulting vacuum. The end of broadcasting by the Voice of America’s Africa Division has created an opening that China is filling through an expansion of its state-run propaganda. The effort reportedly involves a significant infusion of resources and expansion of coverage on the part of the African affiliate of the state-run Global China Television Network. In Ukraine, experts say, dwindling American messaging is allowing Russia and its informational agents to do much the same.
To be sure, the U.S. Agency for Global Media is sorely in need of a facelift. The quarter-century-old agency has an extensive and well-documented track record of mismanagement, inefficiency and poor performance. But gutting its functions altogether, rather than strategically improving them, is bound to make the administration’s foreign policy objectives — whether securing a durable peace in Ukraine or meaningfully competing with China in the “global south” — that much harder to achieve.
Then there is science and technology. An array of research institutions, as well as universities across the country, have become casualties of the administration’s cost-cutting efforts. The list of DOGE’s targets to date includes the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Geological Survey, and a range of other entities. This has led to canceled grants, the firing of scholars and lingering uncertainty that has prompted an attrition of critical know-how into the private sector.
China has wasted no time taking advantage. A new expose from Reuters details how, working through a network of ostensibly private consulting and recruitment firms, China is now making a major play to hire away former federal workers and researchers in priority fields (such as artificial intelligence). In other words, the White House’s current method of cost-cutting has inadvertently helped kick into overdrive the China’s long-running “Thousand Talents” program, under which China has attempted for years to coopt leading Western researchers and academics.
There is now broad bipartisan support for slashing the size and functions of government, as well as eliminating fraud and abuse. Moreover, as Musk has correctly pointed out, there’s also historical precedent for it. During his time in office, President Clinton launched a “Reinventing Government” initiative that offered buyouts to millions of government employees and worked to slash federal operating costs.
Even so, the White House needs to take care that its well-justified efforts to reform the federal bureaucracy don’t lead to a critical loss of function — one that confers strategic benefits to America’s adversaries.
Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.
