Feb. 9—You may not realize it, but the planet has been in the midst of a once-in-a-500-year leap forward. From the Renaissance to the advent of the printing press, in the last millennium humanity has seen two giant leaps in advancement.

And now, with the advent of the internet, artificial intelligence, quantum computing — really, let’s just call it technology — we are seeing a third.

From my perches as a Washington correspondent for TIME Magazine, and the CEO of a Silicon Valley-backed startup, I have often thought that the battle royale of our time would be the clash of bureaucracy and technology. This isn’t a partisan issue, Republican versus Democrat; it’s larger than that. It’s about how quickly government can, and should change and how we achieve that. And given this week, it seems that two big battles are starting.

Our Founding Fathers built our government to be deliberative. They viewed rapid change as akin to tyranny and so put in checks and balances to force all three branches of government to agree when big things are done — and ensure that nothing is done quickly. Former President Barack Obama used to often say that changing government was like, “Turning an aircraft carrier, you can only do it in incremental degrees.” For all of his 276 executive orders, he never approached the kind of rapid change President Donald Trump is attempting.

Indeed, the last person to successfully change the footprint of the federal government was former President Bill Clinton, who reduced that workforce by nearly 400,000 employees through targeted buyouts of $25,000 negotiated with the unions. Under every president since then, it’s either grown or stayed relatively flat.

But in this era, people want instant gratification. Order a pizza? It’ll be there in 30 minutes. Order an Uber, book a flight, buy virtually anything and have it delivered to your door. Efficiency and speed are the name of the game. But getting that out of government is, well, tough.

This frustration with the lumbering government has led to a dozen wave elections since 2000 and an almost constant change of which party is in power in the White House and Congress with almost every election. Indeed, the only thing that can be changed rapidly is who is leading either party, and rank-and-file members have grown adept at slaying their own leaders from former Republican Speakers John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy to former president Joe Biden, a Democrat.

My fellow fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in 2015, Matt Lira — a Republican who worked for former House Republican Majority Leaders Eric Cantor and McCarthy before serving all four years in Trump’s first term in the White House — has arguably done more to make the government more tech responsive than any other person alive — helping to push through hundreds of bipartisan modernization bills that went largely under the radar these last 15 years.

What’s Lira doing now? Running a nonprofit expand financial opportunity for America’s children — changing the world in a different way.

The era of incremental change is over. Enter Trump’s second term and with him much of Silicon Valley. They represent the forces of “move fast and break things,” as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has famously said. It’s been fascinating to watch the captains of technology try to take on the bureaucracy — and I’m not entirely sure who is winning.

Even Democrats will tell you in Washington that during Covid, the government grew too big. So, it shouldn’t be such a shock that Elon Musk is trying to cull it to the tune of 10%. But he’s found it isn’t so easy in Washington as doing the same at Twitter. A scant 2.5% — less than half the natural 6% attrition rate — of the workforce took his buyout offer before a court suspended it after watchdog groups and three large unions and an alliance representing more than 800,000 federal workers sued.

Similarly, Musk’s attempts to disappear entire departments like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Education are already being met with lawsuits as these are congressionally mandated agencies that the executive branch cannot unilaterally dismantle. Even getting employee data from various departments was sued by federal employees and 13 state attorneys general.

It is striking that Musk, himself, is one of the largest recipients of government contracts. And yet, many of those who stand to lose business with the government are cheering the process along. During the fourth quarter earnings call this week for Palantir — which sees 60% of its revenue from government contracts — CEO Alex Karp applauded Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as something that will be “very good” for his company in the long run.

“There will be ups and downs. There’s a revolution,” he said. “Some people are going to get their heads cut off. We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win.”

Is this a revolution? Only time will tell. But indelibly Trump and Musk have upgraded this long simmering war between technology and bureaucracy and with this president, every president moving forward will certainly approach this problem differently. This first round will now largely be decided in the courts, that third branch of the government. And that may take years, but this open warfare has only just begun.

Jay Newton-Small is editor-in-chief of the Albuquerque Journal. The opinions stated here are hers and do not represent those of the paper.