Musk’s Efficiency Department Is Highly Inefficient
It’s probably asking too much of cowboy CEOs to know that the government already has an agency to cut waste or that it clawed back $74 billion in fiscal 2023 alone.
The federal government and cowboy CEOs are a bad mix.
Photographer: Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images
After spending $118 million of his personal wealth on the campaign to reelect Donald Trump as US president, billionaire Elon Musk has been tapped to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency in the new administration with Vivek Ramaswamy, the chief executive officer of a pharmaceutical company and (very) brief Republican presidential candidate. It’s no coincidence that the acronym for this new department is DOGE, which happens to be the name of a cryptocurrency hawked by Musk.
Musk might find this amusing, but for the rest of us it can be downright Orwellian, the notion that the path to efficiency is through additional administrative bureaucracy, especially when that bureaucracy that will have tenuous, if any, authority. You see, Congress controls spending, not an executive agency, and actions it tries to implement will likely be met with significant legal challenges. If anything, DOGE shows how blustering campaign promises are built on fiction, reflecting a lack of knowledge of how government works. (Spoiler alert: It’s not a company.)