Let’s suppose you’re a fitness trainer — I know, this isn’t a brain space most of us occupy frequently — and you’re faced with a morbidly obese patient who is in denial about his failing vitals and pitiable condition. Your job is simple: move him enough to get him to lose a few pounds.
If your patient is like any human ever, he’ll probably put up a weak, half-hearted fight the first time you ask him to go for a walk. He knows it’s good for him, but he can’t help muttering a couple of obscenities under his breath as he waddles down the sidewalk for a five-minute-out-five-minute-back walk. More profanities will be hurled when the stash of potato chips in the cabinet mysteriously disappears.
The U.S. federal government is a bit like this reluctant patient: it’s bloated from years of poorly written legislation and needless hires, it has been an easy vehicle for fraud and abuse (as have all governments), and it’s grumbling as loudly as it can at being forced to answer an email. (READ MORE: 31 Days That Shook the World)
A fitness trainer wants to get his morbidly obese patient to something approximating athleticism; Elon Musk wants to get the federal government to something approximating a business.
Government lends itself rather well to a comparison with business (although the political scientists cited by the Business Journal don’t seem to think so). A private company has to answer to investors — a government answers to voters. One has to make a profit, the other has to return value to its citizens in the form of lower taxes and better infrastructure. Both should desperately try to avoid going bankrupt. To do all of that, it helps to run efficiently.
So, as you’ve probably heard by this point, federal employees received an email last Friday asking for a bullet-point list detailing what they had gotten done that week. Musk later said that the email was simply a test to make sure the 2.2 million federal employees allegedly working for the executive branch were actually checking and answering emails. He and his team apparently have no intention of reading the emails or even plugging them into an AI bot to synthesize the responses. All he wanted to do was “check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email.”
If Musk’s email test sounds familiar, it should. He took much the same approach to Twitter when he bought the company and then fired three-quarters of its staff. It’s a bit of a bulldog approach. Musk likes to go in, scrap the company, figure out what he broke (and by doing so, figure out what is actually necessary), and then rebuild by hiring competent people for those roles. He’s admitted, “We are moving fast, so we’re going to make mistakes. But we’ll also fix mistakes.” (READ MORE: A Letter to a Young Realist)
It might seem like an unwise or ill-advised approach. After all, Twitter wasn’t trying to run the country, it was just a relatively small portion of the public square. But we, apparently, can’t live without the benefits the U.S. government provides, or so Elaine Kamarck, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, told the Wall Street Journal. To be fair, organizations like the National Institutes of Health or our National Security Agency are supposed to be doing more important things than Twitter did (and X now does), although whether that’s all that’s getting done at those organizations is up for debate.
On Tuesday, Christopher Rufo and Hannah Grossman published an article in the City Journal revealing that employees at the NSA spent time on the job engaging in a sex chat on the organization’s official channels (employees apparently sign documents agreeing not to publish “non-mission related material” on those channels). I’m not going to repeat the kinds of things being posted in that chat, but suffice it to say, they make you wonder if these people shouldn’t be getting mental health treatment rather than working for our government.
No one expects government employees to be models of virtue in our society, but some basic decency and restraint on the job would be nice. If Musk can scare these people into doing their jobs to protect us or replace them with committed individuals who will, that would be nice. As it turns out, most Americans like that idea.
Despite their penchant for getting into debt and not understanding personal finances, Americans like a well-run business. There’s something about that kind of efficiency that’s satisfying, which is why a recent poll found that 72 percent of Americans support having a federal agency dedicated to government efficiency.
For years, Americans have been promised government transparency and efficiency, and nothing else has worked. The instinct to scrap everything, fire everybody, and then start over fits the mood of the time. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll work, and we’ll be able to cut the fat and shape our government into something approximating a well-run, well-organized, and productive business.
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