See Elon Run
The rudiments he will learn in his first year at DOGE school.
Just five weeks in, Elon’s Department* of Government Efficiency* is starting to wobble. Trump’s congressional bootlickers are drawing constituent flak. MAGA devotees-turned-DOGE roadkill are pissed off and don’t care who knows it. James Carville thinks the whole thing will go tits-up, as the British say, within 30 days. This is what happens when you subject the fate of critical government programs partly to the judgment of technobrats who’d get carded at Hooters. Meet Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, all of 19. Elon has hair plugs that old.
Lest anyone be confused, DOGE is not a good-faith effort to get federal spending under control. If the administration were serious about that, the least it would do is not extend Trump’s criminally reckless 2017 tax cuts. Elon calls DOGE “tech support,” which is like calling Timothy McVeigh a redecorator. In fact, it’s just another Trump scam, not much different than the gimcrack Trump University or the self-dealing Donald J. Trump Foundation.
Elon’s toy
For Trump, then, Elon is right on brand, a profoundly unserious, cosplaying man-child. Look at the chainsaw-wielding clown in the photo above and try telling yourself that this is a serious adult — or an adult. A full-grown serious person would have hired experienced public administrators to help dismantle public agencies in the least disruptive way. But disruption is Elon’s goal. Plus it’s fun, like spray-painting graffiti on your ex’s garage door. DOGE is Elon’s newest toy and the civil service his sandbox. Alert readers will have noticed that people who move fast and break things are usually breaking other people’s things.
But poetic justice still lives, for the pushback has begun. Public support for the junta is sinking fast. Democratic AGs are firing back with lawsuits. A district court judge has sustained a temporary hold on the firing of a key federal watchdog. As the stock chart below shows, Elon’s own brand is now toxic. And DOGE, having FAFO’d itself into a corner, is quickly backing and filling.
“The Energy Department is scrambling to rehire people abruptly let go from the National Nuclear Security Administration,” says the Washington Post. “The Federal Aviation Administration is struggling to explain why 400 staffers were let go mere days after one of the deadliest airplane crashes in U.S. history. And the Agriculture Department is attempting to bring back people fired despite being part of the effort to stop avian flu, which has decimated chicken farms and sent egg prices soaring.”
Simple people
Perhaps the root problem here is Elon’s simple-minded definition of efficiency, which contains the childish assumption that regulation is necessarily inefficient. Actually, the reverse is often true, as you figure out real quick when you pull up to a busy intersection where the traffic light is off. The light is a government regulation, and its operation is what keeps the traffic flowing efficiently. It’s when the light goes out that the traffic becomes inefficient.
Likewise with, say, financial regulation. It’s government-imposed rules — not anything-goes markets — that encourage investor confidence. Investors know that there are rules protecting them from scams and requiring full disclosure of relevant corporate information. You wouldn’t touch a stock market without such rules, for the same reason you wouldn’t drive a car if you knew it had no brakes. An unregulated market would therefore be less efficient than a regulated market.
Elon is too full of himself to know it, but he’s about to experience the stunning revelation that federal agencies exist for a reason, and that “lazy” federal employees actually labor harder than other workers. If he pays attention in class he’ll also learn that we don’t want everything done “efficiently.” For some things — like national security, local policing and public health — thoroughness is the goal, not efficiency. Thoroughness is often the opposite of efficiency. And efficiency, borrowing from Emerson, is often “the hobgoblin of little minds.”
*It’s not a department.
*It’s not about efficiency.
Thank you for sharing!