Like many people, I have watched Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government with everything from bemusement to unspeakable foreboding.
The bemusement comes from Musk’s own claims that he is making the government more efficient. If that was the real intent of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk would be equivalent of the kid whose dad throws him into a deep lake to teach him to swim. He flails around a lot but doesn’t accomplish much, and eventually he sinks out of sight. Musk has made many claims about how much he is saving the government, but the claims are not believable in the slightest.
Compare Musk’s approach to the investigation into Feeding Our Future, an organization that fraudulently billed the government for about $250 million. The investigation required numerous investigators, working for years, to bring charges against hundreds of individuals. By contrast, Musk claims to have uncovered billions of dollars in fraud in a couple of days. His pronouncements are difficult to believe considering how complex most government programs are. Just learning how a single program works would take Musk quite some time. Learning how entire departments work, reviewing their files, and ending the waste in mere days is beyond Musk’s (or anyone else’s) capabilities. As I said, Musk cutting staff and expenditures as fast as he can in an indiscriminate manner looks more like flailing than pruning.
But Musk’s approach isn’t focused on efficiency. Efficiency means doing as much as possible with the resources you have, but it does require resources. The federal government is responsible for many aspects of American life, and it needs people and infrastructure to accomplish its work. Getting rid of people without streamlining the work they have to do doesn’t increase efficiency; it reduces it. Trying to do the same amount of work with an inadequate workforce simply slows everything down and ensures that the work doesn’t get done.
This leads to the foreboding that I and many others feel. Musk obviously isn’t focused on efficiency. As much as I’d like to think he just doesn’t understand government, he has shown he understands large organizations, each of which needs to achieve their own levels of efficiency to succeed. Whatever else Musk might be, he’s savvy about running large organizations.
I don’t know what Musk’s end goal is. It could be anything from the satisfaction of having the power to reshape millions of people’s lives on a whim to domination of a large part of the globe. Whatever his goal, Musk has shown that he isn’t concerned with the wellbeing of those the government is supposed to serve, and that should be concerning for all Americans.
by Marti Maltby, Director Peace House Community – A Place to Belong
This article originally appeared in “The Alley,” the newspaper for the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.