Americans Overestimate the Value of Business Skills in Government
In The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam demonstrated that private-sector skills have no place in government.
Illustration: Dagou for Bloomberg
A newly elected president looking to inject private-sector energy and efficiency into a sclerotic government bureaucracy assigns the task to one of world’s best-known business leaders, the chief executive of a major American car company. To identify waste, cut spending and increase productivity, the businessman gathers around him a posse of bright young systems analysts and statisticians. Soon, they’ve identified millions of dollars in savings that can be achieved with a stroke of the presidential pen.
If the assault on the US government by Elon Musk and his cohort of cost-cutters feels like a movie you’ve seen before, then either you’re old enough to remember the early 1960s or an admirer of The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s magisterial account of the last time an American president empowered a businessman to trim the budget and reduce red tape. The president was John F. Kennedy, and the business leader he appointed as his secretary of defense was Robert McNamara, chief executive officer of Ford Motor Co.