The capital is rattled. The headlines tell the story. From The Wall Street Journal: “DOGE Staffer Arrives at Internal Revenue Service Headquarters.” “DOGE Aides Search Medicare Agency Payment Systems for Fraud.” “Musk Moves with Lightning Speed to Exert Control Over the Government.”

Well, that last one, though an actual headline, is a little ahead of the facts. Under orders from President Trump, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency are trying to exert control over the sprawling federal government, agency by agency. So far, the most government efficiency they have found is in the Department of Government Efficiency itself. Perhaps its title was too literal. The Department for Government Efficiency might sound more ambitious, or at least properly impatient.

But one can’t deny that DOGE has sent a jolt of fear through each agency its young staffers are rumored to be investigating next. When “Musk’s nerd army,” as the Daily Mail calls them, arrive in the building and sequester themselves in the payments center or other tech ganglion, the civil servants start sweating. As Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics officer under President George W. Bush, told The Wall Street Journal, “This is completely unprecedented. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

How right he is. Not that there haven’t been plenty of previous calls to streamline the federal government, to appoint businessmen to office and run the executive branch “as a business,” to discipline spending by a Balanced Budget constitutional amendment, to introduce private-sector accounting practices and MBA-level management techniques, to “re-invent government” itself as the Clinton Administration boasted in vain. None of these panaceas got far enough to be noticed, much less resented. Most were hardly even tried.

Part of the problem was a lingering confusion about the point of such reforms. Would “government efficiency” result in stronger, more energetic administration or weaker, less assertive administration? Would efficiency allow the government to do more with less money, or less with less money?

Was the problem basically that government spent too much, or that it attempted too much, i.e., too many of the wrong sorts of things? Was the federal government fat, or fevered? What is new in the second Trump term, as Mr. Painter detected, is the administration’s clearer sense (clearer than in the first term, and perhaps than in any recent Republican administration) that the problem is not so much Big Government as bad, factious, or oppressive government that has slipped its constitutional traces. Trump’s political appointees explicitly target the “administrative state,” meaning the long-term attempt by American progressives to overcome the separation of powers, starve the presidency of its rightful energy and responsibility, and yield the permanent political initiative to the unelected judges and bureaucrats of the Beltway swamp.

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The changed language reflects a changed understanding. The administrative state, that unlovely entity singled out by the Trumpists, is defined by them to be deliberately, if quietly, an unconstitutional or even anti-constitutional political scheme, whose nature must, therefore, be kept hidden by its perpetrators from American citizens. It is the people’s control over the government, after all, that is the ultimate casualty of freeing the swamp from constitutional restraints. Trump’s first job is thus to reveal what the administrative  state has been up to. Previous generations of American conservatives worried that democracy—popular demands for political benefits and entitlement spending—was the proximate origin of the problem of Big Government. The Trumpists are confident that democracy is more likely the victim of today’s factious, or bad, government.

Bad Government grows and grows, of course, and so proves hard to distinguish from simply Big Government, especially when the federal government is overspending as ours is. When Musk and Trump talk about the imperative to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, they sometimes can sound like their Republican predecessors targeting the size of government. The difference is in the algorithms. What panics the government employees in the agencies is not that their overall budget or level of spending will be revealed, but that Musk’s nerd army will, using algorithms the bureaucrats don’t understand, light up the money trails that flow between government agencies and non-government organizations—the DEI brainwashers, left-wing academics, deluxe-level subscription services to Politico and The Washington Post, all the factious networks grounding, protecting, and steering the administrative state.

That is the second unprecedented element in the current landscape, the lightning speed with which Musk’s minions can illuminate and preserve the real map of American government, public and private: a real-time map of corruption, in both the monetary and ideological senses of the term. As people found out when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, you can outrun the occasional boulder or shower of lava, but you can’t outrun what the geologists call the pyroclastic flow, racing downhill at hundreds of miles an hour to incinerate you instantly and preserve evidence of you forever. Musk is our pyroclastic flow.