Democracy Is Not a Rocket Ship

Elon Musk believes he can make the government more efficient by destroying much of it. Atop his perch at the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), alongside coconspirator Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk will aim to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, which far exceeds all nondefense discretionary (NDD) spending in the United States.

“Delete delete delete”—Musk’s mantra according to a recent biography by Walter Isaacson. Musk insists “if you don’t end up reintroducing 10 percent of what you delete, you didn’t cut enough.” The tech mogul has been lauded for leading innovative companies, often deploying this efficiency-by-deletion approach to trim costs. He has, for example, reportedly replaced $1,500 latches on one of his rockets with repurposed bathroom stall locks. But his most dramatic cost-cutting tactic has been firing workers en masse—in part to ensure they never form a union. Layoffs and union busting are hardly new to corporate America. Yet these tactics are being repackaged and sold as a groundbreaking good-government initiative despite clear evidence to the contrary.

For all the satellites and rocket ships, hyperloops and cybertrucks, Musk’s efficiency ploy is just an extreme version of a tired conservative tactic: Break the government and then tell the country it does not work. Rinse and repeat. Proposing ideas like firing civil servants at random based on their Social Security numbers, he hopes to run the government like one of his businesses. This is what every billionaire-turned-politico inevitably suggests.

A recent example should be familiar to all: Donald J. Trump. In 2017, President Trump appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner to lead a “SWAT team” of consultants to fix government by relying on ideas from the business world. “The government should be run like a great American company,” Kushner said at the time, adding that he hoped the team could achieve “efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.” That team became the Trump White House’s Office of American Innovation (OAI), which was immediately plagued by transparency and conflict of interest concerns. Beyond convening tech executives, OAI’s major achievements, both in its first year, were publishing IT modernization proposals (many of them not new) and establishing the Centers of Excellence within the General Services Administration (that’s right, a new government program).

Of course, running the government is nothing like running a business, nor should it be. Government and business have fundamentally different responsibilities, constituencies, and incentive structures. Businesslike efficiency in the abstract seems laudable; who wouldn’t want the government to spend less and accomplish more? But aspiring to a version of “efficiency” that emphasizes dollars and cents but not consumer protection, public safety, environmental health, or basic fairness is a recipe for disaster. Running the government like a business doesn’t lead to efficiency. It leads to system-wide collapses like the Flint water crisis, the greatest man-made environmental catastrophe in American history, precipitated in part by a private-sector executive–turned-governor who, like Musk, prioritized cost cutting above all else.

The DOGE affair reminds me of a speech then President Obama gave at a 2016 White House innovation conference, undoubtedly filled with techno-optimist disrupter types. “Government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs,” Obama said, “because, by definition, democracy is messy.” He continued:

This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with. So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences … then I think those suggestions are terrific.

If the government only produced rocket ships, Musk’s counsel might prove more valuable. But it doesn’t—in fact, the government no longer produces rocket ships since we privatized NASA a decade ago, handing the keys over to Musk and fellow space-obsessed billionaire Jeff Bezos. The federal government is a sprawling institution designed to balance competing interests, protect the vulnerable, and give everyone—not just the wealthy and powerful—a say. Its inefficiencies, which of course we should work to minimize, are often, as Obama noted, the result of balancing other values: inclusivity and accountability and, above all, democracy itself.

Of course, Musk and Ramaswamy don’t seem interested in the project of building accountable government as much as in the thrill of destroying it. If taken seriously, plenty of actual inefficiencies within the federal government could be fixed. The Department of Defense just last month, for example, failed to pass an audit for the seventh year in a row. But slashing the federal workforce is likely to worsen the functioning of our government, which is plagued not by overstaffing but by diminished state capacity that must be rebuilt and reconfigured for the 21st century. In fact, the Government Accountability Office—the existing agency already tasked with monitoring and improving government efficiency—found that the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations wasn’t as efficient as it should be because it has too few staff.

As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama noted in a recent public letter to Musk, “there are basically the same number of full-time federal employees today as there were back in 1969, about 2.3 million,” even though the government “disburses more than five times as many dollars as it did back then.” Musk’s efficiency-by-deletion approach betrays a lack of knowledge of how public institutions operate, which is perhaps why DOGE was conceived as a blue-ribbon panel outside of government rather than an actual governmental agency.

Ironically, the very government bashed for its ineffectiveness serves billionaires like Musk quite well: He and his peers have built their empires on a foundation of public investment—Tesla and SpaceX have received about $15.4 billion in government contracts according to the New York Times, and even the success of X, formerly known as Twitter, owes to laws like Section 230 that shield the platform from liability. Tesla’s success was jump-started by a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy in 2009. Yet these same individuals portray the public sector as an obstacle to progress, a dinosaur that must be disciplined to death by the all-knowing entrepreneur.

In fact, DOGE is setting itself up to define “inefficiencies” selectively and in ways that make it better serve the wealthiest. The DOGE project is also propelled by a basic contempt for fairness and competition, rooted in Musk’s own grievances with agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). We saw this play out in June, when Musk railed against the Biden administration’s $42 billion investment in rural broadband, part of the bipartisan infrastructure law. “This government program is an outrageous waste of taxpayer money,” he posted on X, “and is utterly failing to serve people in need.” What Musk glossed over is that in 2022, the FCC had rescinded a $900 million Rural Digital Opportunity Fund grant to Musk’s Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, because it did not meet the minimum connection speed and latency requirements. With DOGE as a vehicle, Musk can simply declare that government programs and initiatives that do not serve his personal interests are “waste” and recommend cuts or even “impoundment”—the thwarting of funds already appropriated by Congress.

Projects like DOGE are not about making government work better; they’re about undermining public institutions and privatizing public functions to further strengthen the would-be oligarchs’ hand. These functions—air traffic control, veterans’ health care, cancer research, nutrition programs, funding for students with disabilities, etc.—cannot be stripped for parts without harming millions of people and degrading the government’s capacity to do basic things. Perhaps that is the point.

If you ask Eleanor

“There is no criticism of a connection with big business. There is criticism of being too subservient to it.”

– Eleanor Roosevelt, If You Ask Me (February, 1957)