For all the talk of a new class-conscious GOP, the Republican Party sounded much like its old self when, in December, Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the mission of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,” Ramaswamy complained. “The dirty little secret is that many of those entitlement dollars aren’t even going to people who they were supposed to.”

There it is again: “entitlement” reform. Drawing from his own presidential campaign pitch, Ramaswamy urged Donald Trump to deploy DOGE as a beachhead in a war on spending, arguing for using executive powers to slash “wasteful” federal expenditures without congressional approval. (Although Ramaswamy has since departed—reportedly rather messily—as co-lead to run for Ohio governor, President Trump officially established the temporary entity within the White House on Monday through one of his many day-one executive orders.)

DOGE apes the language of a Silicon Valley slide deck, but it has so far presented little more than a memeified version of well-trodden right-wing austerity politics.

Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—now DOGE’s sole leader—have pushed cuts in the corporate speak of “efficiency.” But what they offer makes little sense. Musk has talked of slashing $2 trillion. How would such a change not destroy programs Trump has promised not to kill? The billionaire does not have an answer, later backtracking his goal to consider $1 trillion to be “an epic outcome.”

“Entitelements” originally had a much different meaning.

Musk has offered the same logic that undergirded past calls for cuts: Tough love is good for the poor. He agreed in an October town hall on X that Trump’s policies would deliver “temporary hardship” but “ensure long-term prosperity.” Here, he sounds much like former House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose Path to Prosperity budgets proposed scaling back Medicare and Medicaid and repealing the Affordable Care Act to offset tax cuts for the wealthy, and like former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who said in 2023 that he did not “think hard-working Americans should be paying for all the social services” of “couch potatoes.”

Entitlements originally had a different meaning. When Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted Social Security in 1935, the program was pitched as “social insurance,” one that Americans “earned” and were “entitled” to. But Republicans have flipped that meaning by associating these programs with notions of dependence: lazy people asking for handouts—an “entitled” culture.

This argument traces back centuries, but the core of the discourse came during the New Deal and its aftermath. In the 2019 book Free Enterprise: An American History, professor Lawrence B. Glickman recounted how Roosevelt’s critics divided the country into “productive makers” and “unproductive takers.” As opposed to the early labor movements of the 1800s, wherein “makers” were workers and “takers” were business owners, free-market proponents “turned an image of class warfare on its head.” In this view, anti–New Dealers claimed taxation as theft. “The affluent declared themselves the victims” who were forced to support welfare, Glickman wrote.

The 1960s solidified anti-entitlement ideas amid a backlash to the civil rights movement, notes Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “By 1967, most of the stories about welfare and the poor were illustrated with pictures of Black people,” she told me. This laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan to huff in 1987 that “millions of Americans became virtual wards of the state” through government assistance.

The party has continually found rhetoric to suggest poor people are to blame for each new crisis. When the Tea Party took over the GOP, a key frustration was that “taxpayers” were supporting a population of the unworthy. Mitt Romney almost rode a similar “47 percent” sentiment to the White House.

This “free enterprise” mindset has assumed strange textures as venture capitalists take the vanguard of the GOP. Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen pointed to the New Deal as Roosevelt’s “personal monarchy.” We need a Caesar-like CEO in Trump, he said, to undo FDR’s grasp.

Given the upper crust’s latest New Deal backlash, the left’s challenge goes far beyond lawsuits against DOGE—it is how to revert “entitlements” back to its original meaning. In Williamson’s view, mainstream liberals have failed to show how government is good. Progressives, she says, need to start promoting a different version of government “efficiency.” Namely, the adoption of policies that better the lot of regular people and protect them from the excessively rich and self-entitled DOGE boosters.

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