Elizabeth Lopatto is a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg.
Let’s pause and look at what the Elon Musk administration has done so far.
There’s been a lot of panic about the immediate but somewhat abstract constitutional crisis as Elon Musk’s misleadingly-named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) rips the government apart. And as much fun as we all are having watching Congress render itself irrelevant and wondering whether the courts even matter, there’s a concrete nightmare looming. Mass unemployment, the defunding of crucial social programs, and just plain incompetence mean that America, as we know it, The scale of destruction in the past four weeks starts at the Soviet devotion to Lysenkoist biological theories, and at maximum, is the American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution: a disastrous triumph of ideological purity over basic reality. I am not sure it has occurred to the majority of people that we are about to make a Great Leap Forward and destroy our prosperous, relatively e
Musk has, in the short term, set us up for a shock to the economy from both unemployment and frozen government grants. This will be felt more or less immediately.
The long-term costs to America that have been inflicted through a process nobody voted for will be measured in decades. “The degree to which we have failed not merely ourselves but also our children and grandchildren is breathtaking. Musk projects — such as undercutting practical preparations for possible disasters and dismantling an educational and scientific system so good that our actual enemies send their children to us for college — combine with disastrous Trump policies like mass deportation to undermine American society. And by alienating our longtime allies and cozying up to Russia, we set ourselves up to be a pariah state.”
That is what Elizabeth Lopatto writes in The Verge. America used to offer hope and a vision for the future. But it looks like it’s sliding down into a shithole.
