The Elon DOGE Emperor Has No Clothes

Here’s a silly thing that happens sometimes: A powerful person says something obviously false, and everyone pretends not to notice. This is the plot of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where an entire kingdom maintains a collective delusion until one child (who, importantly, hasn’t yet learned the sophisticated art of lying to yourself) points out that hey, the emperor is naked.

The story endures because it captures something fundamental about institutional lies, they don’t actually require sophisticated deception. They just require everyone to agree, collectively, to not say the obvious thing. (George Orwell had some thoughts about this too — in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ultimate flex of authoritarian power isn’t making you believe lies, it’s making you actively deny what your own eyes tell you.)

Here’s the thing about institutional lies though: They can go on for quite a while, but they tend to have a breaking point. And that breaking point often comes when someone says something so obviously, comically false that it forces everyone to confront the absurdity.

This is probably why authoritarian regimes tend to get more ridiculous over time, not less — they keep having to make increasingly outlandish claims to maintain the fiction.

Which brings us to DOGE, Elon Musk, and what might be the most brazen example of institutional gaslighting we’ve seen in recent memory.

Yesterday, the Justice Department filed a declaration claiming Elon Musk isn’t running or employed by DOGE. The audacity of this claim would be almost comical if it weren’t so dangerous. As Cathy Gellis just pointed out a little while ago, this declaration actually makes their potential Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) violations worse, but that’s almost beside the point given the sheer brazenness of the lie.

Let’s go through some of the receipts.

On November 12, Donald Trump clearly announced that Elon Musk would run DOGE:

I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk… will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”). [DOGE] will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the “Save America” Movement. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” stated Mr. Musk.

Sure, some things have changed since that November announcement — Vivek Ramaswamy, mentioned in the same release, was kicked off the project before inauguration. But Musk’s leadership of DOGE? That’s been constant, obvious, and repeatedly demonstrated through both his actions and his own statements.

And then there are DOGE’s day-to-day operations. Just last week, Rolling Stone reported on how DOGE’s staff — a collection of what can only be described as extremely online wannabe edge lords — have been running around Washington with all the subtlety of a kid who just discovered 4chan and thinks it’s actually cool. Their go-to move when they don’t get what they want? Threatening to call their boss. And who might that boss be? Well:

When security officials, for instance, at several departments and agencies have responded that they need to check to ensure these young Musk allies have proper clearance to view sensitive databases, DOGE staff have routinely erupted in fury. Some have told these security officials that if they don’t give them what they want immediately, they’ll call Musk’s cell phone and give him the officials’ names — and have the richest man in the world call and yell at them, or get them reprimanded or fired.

“Do I need to call Elon?” one DOGE member barked at a federal security official while demanding access to sensitive information at one agency this month, a source familiar with the exchange tells Rolling Stone.

This has happened repeatedly since the dawn of the second Trump administration — at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Treasury Department, at the Office of Personnel Management, and elsewhere. It has become a cruel punchline within the federal bureaucracy, four sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone, that “some child” from the DOGE team “will threaten to call Elon Musk, if you don’t do what the child wants,” as one federal career official describes it.

This isn’t the behavior of staff working for an “advisor” or someone uninvolved with DOGE. This is the conduct of employees who know exactly who their boss is. And who (rightly assume) that everyone they’re talking to also knows who their boss is.

Which, by the way, creates an interesting situation: If the Justice Department’s declaration is true and Elon really isn’t running DOGE, then federal employees should immediately stop bowing down to these threats. After all, why would anyone need to worry about a call from someone who (according to the DOJ) has no official role or authority over the DOGE team? In fact, given this declaration, shouldn’t security officials be asking DOGE staff who actually has the authority to override their security protocols? (Good luck getting an answer to that one.)

But of course, everyone knows exactly who’s really in charge. And Musk hasn’t exactly been subtle about it. I mean, when Elon gave his White House briefing last week, he spoke so much about DOGE and what he was doing via DOGE that the Elon fanboy account “Elon Clips” listed out 17 “DOGE actions” that Elon discussed. And then Elon retweeted it.

Just days ago, Elon tweeted a picture of himself sitting behind a “D.O.G.E” sign, in response to a Congressional Rep expressing concerns about DOGE:

And now we’re supposed to believe he has no role with DOGE? This isn’t just a lie — it’s an insult to our collective intelligence, a demand that we deny what we’ve all witnessed with our own eyes.

Like the emperor parading naked through the streets, this lie is both absurd and revealing. The Justice Department isn’t just asking us to believe a falsehood — they’re demanding we participate in an obvious fiction, testing who will stay silent and who will speak up.

Of course, Trump/Musk trolls will celebrate this as the ultimate troll, as if deliberately lying to a federal court is just another epic meme. But that’s exactly the point: this isn’t about humor or owning the libs or whatever excuse they’ll manufacture. It’s about whether we’ll collectively accept a lie so brazen it makes a mockery of truth itself.

This declaration isn’t just an attempt to shield Musk from accountability for DOGE’s actions — it’s a test of our willingness to deny reality itself. And like that child in Andersen’s tale, we need to state the obvious: Elon Musk runs DOGE. Everyone knows it. He knows it. His staff knows it. Donald Trump knows it. The Justice Department lawyers who filed this declaration know it. The federal judges who will read it know it. And they know we know it too.

That’s what makes this moment so clarifying. It’s not just about whether Elon runs DOGE (he does). It’s about whether we’re willing to pretend he doesn’t. Whether we’ll nod along as the emperor parades down the street, stark naked, insisting he’s wearing the finest clothes anyone has ever seen.

You can choose to believe the lie if that’s important to you. But I think I’ll stick with the kid in the story. The emperor is naked, Elon runs DOGE, and no amount of legal paperwork can change what we’ve all seen with our own eyes.