People seem to be really freaking out over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is ripping through the federal government, laying off thousands, halting domestic and international aid grants, and threatening the shutdown of entire agencies such as the Department of Education and others, with little to no transparency or accountability. As Musk has said, he’s putting everything through “the woodchipper.”
All of this is part and parcel of President Trump’s campaign pledge to completely restructure the U.S. government from the top down, while rooting out waste, fraud, and corruption, an appropriate notion in my opinion.
I support the idea of bringing in an outside entity to thoughtfully and strategically rethink the federal government and quickly bring much needed downsizing and reform to better align with the needs of modern Americans, because the government has proven utterly incapable of doing so from within.
Jon Favreau, Obama’s primary speechwriter, admitted as much in a recent podcast. “We all know that government is slow,” he said. “We all know that government is inefficient. We all know that the bureaucracy can be bloated. We tried to reorganize the government. We tried to find efficiency. It’s hard to do.”
As Yoda said, “Do or do not, there is no try.” Wise words from the Jedi master.
The inability of the U.S. government to examine and improve its own efficiency was driven home to me by an executive I worked with in the corporate world. He served for a time as deputy secretary for a large federal agency. He came into the job from the senior ranks of a major public corporation, so logically, one of his first tasks was to do an organizational review. He requested a compilation of the annual performance reviews of the thousands of employees he’d be managing and was shocked to learn that not one federal employee in his department was underperforming.
Anyone who’s worked for a business of any size understands how utterly ridiculous that sounds. How can a government agency police itself when it institutionally believes every employee is doing a great job? It defies reality and illustrates the difficulty of restructuring such insular organizations.
So, yes, I fully support a dramatic rethinking of our federal government, its size and its priorities. I’m sure many, if not most of you, have run up against the often frustrating experience of dealing with a slow-moving and bloated federal government. I know I have.
But Elon Musk?
There’s absolutely no doubt that Musk is a true business genius by any definition. His ability to spot trends and create technologies and companies from scratch to capitalize on those trends is unparalleled in modern business when you factor in the breadth, scope, and scale of the enterprises he leads.
If you want a detailed look at Elon Musk, I highly recommend Walter Isaacson’s lengthy biography on him, published in 2023. It traces the details of his life, from his birth in South Africa to his purchase of Twitter. Isaacson, who’s written similar bios on Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Leonardo DaVinci and others, is well known for the thoroughness and accuracy of his research.
In this case, he spent two full years immersed in Musk’s life with near unfettered access to him. He attended numerous business meetings across his companies, spent time with him at various corporate and social events, and interviewed Musk, his family, friends, and current and former colleagues in great depth.
It’s a vivid picture of the man in full, and in addition to detailing Musk’s innovations and success in the business world across multiple companies, it paints a very disturbing picture of his recklessness, drug abuse, impulsivity, immaturity and utter lack of empathy toward most everyone in his life.
In other words, it’s what we’re seeing play out now with his DOGE efforts across the country.
With virtually no experience with or insight into the U.S. government, and with little regard for the real-world impacts, he and his team of Silicon Valley coders, a few in their teens, are slashing wholesale staffs and programs, in most cases via email, with no apparent strategy or endgame other than blowing things up.
I get that blowing things up was a big part of President Trump’s appeal and the wish of many who voted for him, but my guess is that over the next few months, the backlash will only build. It’s already starting among Democrats, obviously, but Republicans are also starting to blanch and push back as impacts ripple through their constituencies.
Even Steve Bannon, the conservative firebrand who was an adviser to President Trump in his first campaign and for part of his first term, has often referred to Musk as a “truly evil person.” In an interview in late February, he said of Musk, “He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions.”
By the last week in February, the FDA had to rehire food safety and medical device staffers fired by DOGE; hundreds of EPA staffers were fired then told it was a mistake; USDA “accidentally” fired staffers working on the bird flu and rehired them; nuclear weapons workers were fired then rehired. Individual members of President Trump’s cabinet in many cases are telling their staffs to disregard emails from DOGE.
No way to run a railroad, as they say.
My good friend from grade school has been in the defense contracting business his entire adult life. He’s currently president of a substantial defense contractor with tens of millions of dollars in business with multiple parts of the Department of Defense. I talked to him the other day and asked what impact DOGE is having on his business and those of his customers.
“It’s a sh*tshow,” he said. “I have one customer who lost 25 percent of their staff overnight through emails from DOGE and they can’t backfill any of the jobs. They were already short-staffed before the layoffs, so this will only slow their work down even more.”
A slowdown in the work that helps keep our country safe doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Musk and his DOGE team are applying the “move fast, break things” mantra so common in Silicon Valley. But when you’re breaking things that impact the well-being of hundreds of millions of people, maybe it’s time to “take a breath, fix things.”