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On Sunday night, an image went viral: “Who are these little boys and why are they in charge of our money?”
The image was adapted from a WIRED hit piece on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that identified six young men ages nineteen to twenty-four as “the Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover.”
“Mamas, come get your babies out of our government,” the meme read.
There is much debate about when humans reach their peak cognitive abilities, with estimates ranging from twenty to thirty-five years old. Either way, the answer in our eyes is much closer to the nineteen to twenty-four-year-olds running DOGE than the US Senate with an average age of a bit over sixty-five in 2023.
Our generation came of age watching countless media clips of senior citizen senators and career politicians dozing off or falling—a bipartisan issue. Though age affects people differently, it’s no secret that President Biden’s abrupt removal from the 2024 Democratic ticket was because of his visible senility. With every sign pointing towards a full-on gerontocracy in the United States, our nation faces a dearth of new ideas and energy. Our gerontocracy has become increasingly more explicit in its sacrifice of the young to benefit the old.
When we edit articles, we have multiple sets of eyes looking over them because we know that a new perspective is helpful. Conversely, career anythings, from career businessmen to politicians to engineers, are known to be ossified. Their ideas are stale and they are rigid. When the problems that we as a country need to tackle range from culture wars to technological stagnation to $36.2 trillion in debt, it is obvious that current leadership has failed. Our nation needs fresh, energetic leaders and voices. Youth is often insightful; old age is, inherently, tied to old ways of doing, which in modern America are not holding up. There’s a reason that the average age of a Manhattan Project engineer was a mere 25 years old.
This is not a novel insight. It is one that is inseparable from American history:
Our country was founded by young, ambitious people who had no experience founding nations or running governments. On July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson, then 33 years old, wrote the Declaration of Independence. On that day, James Monroe was 18. Aaron Burr was 20. Alexander Hamilton was 21. James Madison was 25. Their elder statesmen were John Adams, 40, Paul Revere, 41, and George Washington, 44. These men had waged a war against the most powerful empire on the planet and formed a new nation at an age younger than when many millennials move out of their parents’ house. Many of them by today’s standards are not old enough to run for the House of Representatives, let alone the Presidency.
Even during the New Deal, arguably the beginning of modern America with the introduction of the welfare system and rampant spending, smart, capable young men were tapped to spearhead massive national projects. Take President Roosevelt's Great Depression-era “Brain Trust”, a small group of young academics who advised the president on new policies. Many of these lieutenants were of ages modern gerontocrats would scoff at.
FDR’s looming, ossified shadow was architected by a bunch of twenty-somethings. Though he expanded the federal government, creating the skeleton that our behemoth of a federal government is built on, Roosevelt also knew the powers of youth.
Reacting to FDR’s Brain Trust, American philosopher James Burnham wrote his seminal 1941 book The Managerial Revolution just as young men in the upper crust were joining the federal government en masse in lieu of pursuing industry or entrepreneurship. Increasingly complex bureaucratic structures in the public and private sector incentivized the birth of career bureaucrats who managed these systems–FDR’s lasting hold on America.
As it was novel for young adults to in the early forties to turn to “careers in the government, not as politicians in the old sense, but as managers in the various agencies and bureaus,” as per Burnham, so too is it novel for our elite young human capital in 2025 to work selflessly to save trillions for the federal government government rather than making hundreds of thousands in consulting, banking, or big tech. DOGE is the antithesis of the New Deal, using bright young minds to implement Silicon Valley-style efficiency and technology to bloated structures that have been expanding since the 1940s.
Oddly, the call to listen to the youth has long been a talking point of the left. Activists like Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai, and David Hogg, newly the Vice Chair of the DNC, have been given massive platforms to advocate for causes around the world, but the young engineers at DOGE taking valuable action on problems of national importance is thought to be impermissible. The Trump Administration has given young people the license to make things happen, and this should be appreciated.
There is a deep hypocrisy that the people who created our government's bloat and inefficiency possess. They tell us that young people do not have the “credentials” or “experience” to fix our nation's problems. However, the only thing their rampant credentialism gave us is $36.2 trillion in debt, a fiscal noose around the neck of future generations that manifests itself as overzealous entitlement programs and spending.
It is obvious that our government runs inefficiently. Our tax dollars are sent to the government only to disappear in the bloat. Our government has been run by the “experts” for some time now–perhaps it's time to let the youth give it a try?