If you ask average Americans from either side of the aisle whether they believe Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth with hundreds of global businesses, would subordinate his economic well-being, a mega sacrifice, to do what’s best for the United States, what do think they would say? If there is lingering skepticism, the belief lingers that he has economic expertise at such a level that he “understands” how to implement efficiency is soon dwarfed by the fact that his massive wealth, benefitted by many billions when Trump was elected, a vast multiple of his campaign contribution to elect Trump. Given how many of his companies are major vendors to the federal government, he is the oligarch most likely to get vastly richer under the new administration.
Officially, Musk is not becoming a formal part of the federal government. He is just a private advisor and confident to Trump. Really? Under the title once applied to each of the autocrats who ran medieval Venice, the Doges, the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is the vehicle through which Musk will “advise.” He doesn’t want direct federal office or control, since that instantly imposes all sorts of conflict-of-interest legal restrictions on him and his assets, so DOGE will not be an official federal agency and will have no legal authority.
So, who exactly is Elon Musk? The November 21st issue of The Economist describes Trump’s “disruptor in chief” as follows: “Weeks after helping Mr Trump win the election Mr Musk has climbed to the apex of power. The president-elect has appointed him to a new advisory body… tasked with slashing spending. Mr Musk is already in touch with foreign leaders and [those] lobbying for cabinet appointments. It is hardly the first time a tycoon has had extraordinary influence in America. In the 19th century robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller dominated the economy. In the early 20th century, when there was no Federal Reserve, John Pierpont Morgan acted as a one-man central bank.
“Mr Musk’s firms are more global than the big 19th- and 20th-century monopolies, and smaller if measured by profits to GDP. Musk Inc is worth the equivalent of just 2% of America’s stockmarket. Its main units are Tesla, an electric-car firm; SpaceX, his satellite-communications and rocket business; X, formerly Twitter; and xAI, an artificial-intelligence startup that was valued at $50bn in a deal this week. These mostly have market shares below 30% and face real competition. The Economist reckons that 10% of Mr Musk’s $360bn personal fortune is derived from contracts and freebies from Uncle Sam, and 15% from the Chinese market, with the rest split between domestic and international customers…
“His desire for freer action helps explain his contempt for orthodoxies, including what he regards as woke conformism. From the bureaucrats who allowed the American government’s space-launch market to be rigged by defence firms to the Californian box-tickers who regulate Tesla’s factories, he views the state as an impediment to growth.”
And what is that secret sauce that would enable a virtual dismantling of the federal bureaucracy? Hint: Counting on a Trump reconfigured Supreme Court. With help from his fellow (and vastly less powerful) DOGE partner, Vivek Ramaswamy, their cost-cutting drool is remarkable. After mentioning an impossible goal of slashing $2 trillion/year from the federal budget, the pair have announced their methodology to engage to cut federal agencies, focused reducing agency staffing to the bone, vitiating civil service protections and drilling down on eliminating most of the regulatory personnel.
Writing for the November 20th issue of the Independent, Alex Woodward explains this approach: “[They] will be looking to the Supreme Court to unilaterally gut federal agencies and cut funding… Their newly created ‘Department of Government Efficiency’… will be guided by a pair of Supreme Court rulings that legal scholars have warned will turn the courts into weapons against federal regulations that right-wing groups have spent years trying to undermine… Musk and Ramaswamy have said they want to reduce annual federal spending by $500 billion — specifically, by cutting $1.5 billion earmarked for “international organizations,” another $535 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds hundreds of locally owned public radio and television stations, and gutting $300 million for ‘progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.’”
You know they will have to ruffle a lot of MAGA congresspeople, tearing at pet projects essential to the states from which they were elected. As for those civil services protections, Trump’s strategists are expected to revive a plan to convert some employees to "Schedule F," status which strips them of job protections, among other efforts to cut the workforce. “The duo pointed to recent Supreme Court decisions to argue the incoming president has the executive power to nullify many regulations unilaterally without Congress, pursue ‘large-scale firings’ of federal workers and relocate some agencies outside of Washington. They said ‘a drastic reduction in federal regulations’ would require vastly fewer federal employees.
"DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions, ‘their op-ed reads.’… In the WSJ op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy cited the Supreme Court's 2022 West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and 2024 Loper Bright v. Raimondo decisions [effectively limiting federal agencies’ deference to agency expertise in interpreting complex issues] to argue ‘a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.’… Their group plans to install legal experts within federal agencies to review regulations before presenting a list of rules for Trump to consider halting through executive action and initiating a process for review and rescission.” Joey Garrison, writing for the November 20th USA Today
What can we learn from Musk’s past efforts within his own companies? Chris Stokel-Walker, writing for the November 18th FastCompany.com spoke with a few individuals who worked with Musk: “‘He’s very ruthless and very involved in understanding what you’re trying to do and how you’re doing it,’ says Jim Cantrell, who worked at SpaceX in the early 2000s. ‘He has no fear of failure. It’s almost naïve in its lack of fear, but his performance has shown it’s anything but naïve.’
“Musk’s unorthodox attitude can be costly, too. While he successfully defeated a legal challenge that would have cost him $500 million or more for unlawfully denying Twitter staff severance payments they thought they were owed, he did have to pay an Irish Twitter employee $580,000 for being fired for not replying to an email asking to remain with the company. More financial pain could be coming for Musk from his other companies, too. Former SpaceX employees are seeking financial redress for being fired after blowing the whistle on what they claim was bad behavior by employees within the company. The National Labor Relations Board is also investigating.
“‘Musk treated his employees and the work we’d done with open contempt, says Melissa Ingle, who worked as a senior data scientist at Twitter when Musk took ownership of the social network. Ingle was among the 80% of staff laid off shortly after Musk’s $44 billion acquisition. ‘There was absolutely no wind down,’ Ingle says. ‘One Thursday Musk came in and announced layoffs would be happening, and the next day half the permanent employees were gone. The next week almost all contract employees were fired.’ (Neither Musk nor X responded to a request for comment.)
“Ingle says Musk’s drive for cost-cutting came at the expense of operations. ‘These firings seem to have been undertaken with no regard to the actual work that needed to be done, since after the firing, there was mass chaos as the remaining managers still had to get their work done but had been forced to fire anyone with actual experience performing the work,’ she says. The chaos that ensued after the mass firings because of short-staffing and the loss of institutional knowledge has been documented in a number of places, including by Walter Isaacson, who reported in his biography of Musk that the billionaire railed against the idea that Twitter staff should cherish ‘psychological safety.’ Musk also had to be dissuaded from firing random engineers, according to Isaacson. ‘Any remaining employees will likely face tremendous pressure to perform to Musk’s extreme standards,’ says Ingle, who now works as a chief data scientist at the firm Technology Partners.” Stand back, and standby.
I’m Peter Dekom, and Musk’s ruthless disdain for human values and powerful affinity to effect and relish chaos (a Trump trait too) suggest that post-Trump federal agencies may have a lot in common with the aftermath of the WWII bombing of Dresden.
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