At
the recent “Future of the Blue Economy” conference in Newport, Rhode
Island, entrepreneurs and their investors were talking about
breakthroughs, but the term they used — replacing “Sputnik moment” — was
“SpaceX moment.”
That
was a salute to the extraordinary precision engineering that enables
the booster stage of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket to reposition itself on
the launch pad after firing. It is inspiring to watch, but there must
have been untold preparation, thought and planning to bring about that
seemingly miraculous engineering feat.
All hail Elon Musk, boss of SpaceX!
Sadly,
none of that precision preparation, thinking and planning has gone into
Musk’s latest venture, the Department of Government Efficiency.
It
has raged across the government, leaving a trail of havoc, shattered
careers, broken departments, endangered missions: techno-barbarians
running wild inside the government.
In
the history of social engineering, nothing as vast and self-defeating
has been attempted since Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution set China
back decades.
Prepare
for a similar dividend from the President Trump-Musk efficiency team.
If they had approached launching a rocket the same way they have sought
to make the government more efficient under the mantra “waste, fraud and
abuse,” they would have piled a jerry-built rocket atop a pile of
explosives and lit a match. Result: a catastrophic failure.
There
are things here which are beyond explanation. Trump has run businesses.
He knows if you fire half the front desk staff in a hotel, things
aren’t going to go smoothly. If you berate the staff and accuse them of
waste, fraud and abuse, essentially stealing, morale will plunge.
In
the Soviet Union there was an adage: They pretend to pay us, and we
pretend to work. An awful lot of government workers who haven’t lost
their jobs but are disconsolate will be pretending to work for the rest
of the Trump administration. Efficiency? Hardly. Many will efficiently
do nothing.
Everything
about the unleashing of the DOGE suggests that it had little
preparation and little planning. Particularly, Musk and his crew knew
nothing about the departments they were savaging. Hence, the
embarrassment with the nuclear workers at the Department of Energy. Or
the folly of shutting the window through which most of the world saw
America’s goodness, the U.S. Agency for International Development.
We
have as a society a tendency to believe that those who are good at one
thing must be good at everything, something which might be called
“success syndrome.”
This
was on display during the energy crisis which erupted in the fall of
1973 with the Arab oil embargo and lasted through the Iranian revolution
of 1979 and beyond, toppling governments and driving inflation. Many
thought that proven inventors, like Edwin Link, the creator of the first
flight simulator for pilot training, and Edwin Land, creator of the
Polaroid camera, were expected to be able to invent us out of the oil
shortage. They didn’t.
Good, patient science, regulatory reform and entrepreneurial courage did that.
Another
myth is that if only you put a tough businessperson in the White House,
someone who will apply their foot to the rear end of the bureaucracy,
wondrous things will happen.
We
have a businessperson and a brilliant inventor at the controls in
Washington, and so far, the kicking of the bureaucracy with the aid of
high-tech tools has produced chaos in the government workplace and
devastating consequences globally.
Taken
together the evidence that you can’t run a government as a private
company and great inventors —even one so remarkable that he has made the
greatest fortune ever — can’t reinvent government without some coherent
planning.
Musk
was given a chainsaw as a symbol at the CPAC meeting in Washington.
They are useful but dangerous tools, as any emergency-room physician who
has had to sew up an over-exuberant operator can tell you. Trump and
Elon Musk appear to be attempting what should be delicate surgery with
one.
A
restraining of the bureaucracy may be overdue, but the bloodbath is
going to weaken the patients, rendering them unfit for duty at a
critical time.
A chainsaw moment is not a SpaceX moment.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2