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Journalism of Courage
At a time when the internet is berating the likes of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy and Ola CEO Bhavish Agarwal for their stance on extended working hours, Elon Musk seems to have outdone them. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under the Donald Trump administration, want ‘high-IQ small-government revolutionaries to work over 80 hours a week and that too at zero pay.
In a post, the official handle of the newly formed department said that it was grateful to thousands of Americans who expressed interest in helping it at DOGE. The acronym of the name could remind one of the shiba inu dog in the meme that once dominated pop culture once upon a time and has inspired a cryptocurrency known as DOGECOIN.
The post by DOGE also throws up some specifics about the ideal candidates that it desires. The department does not need part-time idea generators; in fact, it needs high-IQ staff who are willing to work over 80 hours on ‘unglamorous cost-cutting.’ The post concludes by asking aspirants to share CVs with Musk and Ramaswamy, who would be reviewing the top one per cent of applicants. “If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants,” reads the post.
In a separate post, the SpaceX chief said that this would be ‘tedious work, make lots of enemies, and compensation is zero’. Musk also alluded to how Trump is looking to reduce federal bureaucracy by a third and cut $2 trillion from US government spending. According to Musk, this ‘necessarily involves some temporary hardship’.
Following his landslide victory over Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, Trump has been taking some brisk decisions. Within days, the president-elect announced the formation of DOGE, which he termed as the ‘Manhattan Project of our time’. The Manhattan Project is the US-led research team that built the world’s first nuclear bomb.
Talking about DOGE, Trump said that Musk and Ramaswamy would pave the way for his incoming administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies. This, according to Trump, is essential to the ‘Save America’ movement.
