The Republic Downsized: How DOGE Became the Guillotine of Government
In a republic of laws, institutions are not mere office space. They are the scaffolding of constitutional order—the embodied presence of the state in the daily life of its citizens. To dismantle that presence is not an act of efficiency, but a declaration of abandonment.
Over the past several months, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has undertaken what it calls a “streamlining” of the federal government. In practice, it is a liquidation. Through a sweeping array of executive orders signed by the 47th President—an increasingly monarchic figure who governs without legislative constraint—DOGE has terminated hundreds of leases, shuttered scores of public offices, and eliminated untold thousands of federal positions. These closures span the essential and the existential: Social Security field offices, Environmental Protection Agency branches, NOAA forecasting stations, USDA outposts, and offices of the Fish and Wildlife Service, among others. The result is not mere budgetary reduction. It is the erasure of government from the landscape of public life.
To put it plainly: the republic is being gutted under the guise of thrift.
In Alaska alone, six federal office closures have been spun into a savings of $11.35 million (source). In California, nine offices—including five NRCS, two FSA, one Forest Service, and one Agricultural Marketing Service location—have been shuttered (source). Nearly 100 leases in Washington, D.C. are targeted for early termination (source). The Social Security Administration alone has seen 47 offices marked for closure, disproportionately impacting older Americans and people with disabilities who rely on in-person services (source; source).
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has not been spared either: hundreds of weather forecasters and technical staff have been fired as DOGE dismantles its office footprint nationwide (source). Environmental regulatory offices, particularly those within the EPA, have also been targeted for eviction from their leases (source).
The scale is staggering, but the pattern is clear. DOGE is not acting randomly. It is targeting agencies tasked with administering collective goods—social insurance, environmental stewardship, tribal affairs, public health, and scientific research. These are not the excesses of government; they are its most democratic expressions.
But the justification, repeated endlessly, is one of cost. According to DOGE’s official website, these cuts “reduce unnecessary expenditures” and “streamline government function” by eliminating overlapping facilities and saving “millions of taxpayer dollars” (source). The implied argument is that less government is always better government—that the state, in its physical form, is a relic of inefficiency. It is the old neoliberal dream rebranded in the language of disruption: the state as startup, the budget as bottom line.
And yet, efficiency is a dangerously incomplete metric when applied to constitutional governance. Governments are not corporations. They are not beholden to shareholders but to citizens. Their legitimacy flows not from quarterly savings but from public trust and legal accountability. The Social Security office in a rural town is not a profit center—it is a constitutional commitment rendered visible. The weather station forecasting hurricanes is not a discretionary expense—it is the voice of the republic warning its citizens in advance.
What DOGE destroys is not just infrastructure—it is the visible, legible presence of shared responsibility. It hollows out the very idea that the federal government exists to serve, protect, and accompany its people through the crises of life: aging, disaster, illness, and poverty.
More alarming still is the manner in which DOGE operates. Its decisions are opaque, its mandate unaccountable, its power unchecked by congressional oversight. One might expect such a sweeping reconfiguration of the federal state to involve debate, legislative negotiation, or at least some public rationale beyond bullet points on a government webpage. But under the current president, executive orders have replaced lawmaking, and DOGE acts with a decisiveness that borders on the despotic. When Congress becomes an afterthought and agencies are reshaped by fiat, the result is not efficiency. It is authoritarianism wearing a budget analyst’s tie.
This is not mere administrative restructuring. It is a political revolution in slow motion.
Critics, including elder advocates, disability rights groups, and environmental defenders, have raised concerns about the cascading effects of these closures: inaccessible benefits, community job loss, climate blind spots, and the abandonment of rural populations (source; source). These are not fringe anxieties. They are warnings from the civic conscience of the country, reminders that a government without presence is a government without obligation.
If this trajectory continues—if DOGE’s logic is extended, normalized, and left unchallenged—the American republic risks becoming a hollowed polity: a nation with laws but no institutions, rhetoric but no delivery, citizenship but no service.
In such a state, the presidency is not a coequal branch but the sole sovereign. Bureaucracy becomes an expendable inconvenience. And the people, shorn of institutional guardians, are left to face the storms alone.