Elon Musk claims DOGE firings will boost American manufacturing. But who will really be working in these factories?

Last Friday, Elon Musk tweeted a grand unifying theory for America’s path to prosperity. “We need to shift people from low- to negative-productivity jobs in government to high-productivity jobs in manufacturing,” he wrote on X, combining DOGE’s Rapture-style approach to downsizing the federal workforce and the supposed reshoring goals of Trump’s tariffs.

Musk is so fond of this theory, in fact, he has tweeted some variation of it at least eight times since November’s election. All that repetition...