“You cannot run such a business,” has long been a complaint registered against the government’s bureaucracy. The clear answer is that the government is not a business.
The Department of Elon Musk’s non-department for the government’s efficiency has been difficult at work by promoting a destroyed ball through the various bureaucracies that make up our federal government. Some of the fires had to be removed almost as soon as they were made, such as those in the National Nuclear Security Administration discussed in my last column. It turns out that we need those people to keep our nuclear arsenals safe, so it is not a bureaucracy where it makes sense to pen
Some of the fires ask unique ethical questions for the wider Musk’s business empire. For example, the Government Efficiency Department is reported to have ceased employees in the Food and Drug Administration who were considering clinical evidence for Musk’s brain implant company, Neuralralin. The National Labor Relations Board was conducting 24 investigations into Musk’s companies, but President Trump’s decision to light one of the board members in the agency has left him unable to continue in any decision.
We’ve seen this before. When Musk bought Twitter, he boasted that he fired about 80% of the workforce.
Sometimes a bureaucracy needs shake, both in business and in government. Bureaucracies are human creations and we human beings can become firm in our ways and our processes can be calcified. New technologies can sometimes direct the way we do things, but there is always a cost for any change. Am I the only person who hates to grip into those automated response systems in the bank or airline, trying to figure out how to get a real human being, breathing in line?
Would anyone oppose a thoughtful and careful approach to simplifying federal bureaucracy? Maybe but this “shoot first and ask questions later” gives the reform a bad name. And, in some cases, it endangers national security or endangers the lives of those who help with foreign aid.
Musk and his master seem to not care. One of Trump’s most disturbing qualities that his approach to governance is so clearly interpretive. He and Musk are not really looking for a certain outcome. They are looking for a certain picture, a certain position. The tough boys, shaking things. If there is no worker capable of controlling a nuclear head of dysfunction, or if an HIV-drug program in Africa should close, as long as Trump and Musk receive the titles they want, they do not seem to care. In the strict sense of the word, their approach is inhumane.
The tasks for which we have established our government is not easily given by the analysis of the end line. The founders said our government aimed to “form a more perfect union” and “create justice” and “to promote general well -being”. You need a non -numeric measuring stick to assess whether we are achieving those objectives, and even then, determining what is successful is open to extremely different definitions.
The founders were very concerned to avoid the emergence of political parties, or “factions” as they called them, but our politics immediately fell into two different parties precisely because the founders themselves had different meanings of how the government had to approach tasks for which he himself assigned to those wonderful words of the preface of the Constitution.
Democrats sometimes fall into this trap. Ezra Klein interviewed the Congressman of Massachusetts Jake Auchincloss. “Cost disease is the most important economic concept that policymakers are not aware of,” Kongressmen said. Returning to the high cost of housing as an example of “cost disease”, Auchincloss said: “Yes, we need zoning reform to expand supply. But we also have to rely on building abroad to turn The production of housing away from Stick-built from Stick, where it is very intense of service and towards modular construction, where it is more intense in the factory. ” I have many friends who build houses and listening to a breeze democratic congress discussing the elimination of their jobs is not the way the Democrats recover the support of the working class voters.
Liberals should be particularly allergic to implementing business models in government business. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. gave the best definition of American -style liberalism, one I have cited before, in his 1945 book The era of Jackson:
American democracy has come to accept the war between competitive groups for state control as a positive virtue – in fact, as the sole foundation for freedom. The business community has usually been the most powerful of these groups, and liberalism in America has usually been the movement by other sections of society to curb the power of the business community.
[1945DEMOKRATERSWANT[1945Kurdemokratëtfituanzgjedhjet
It is time to retire all the mythology of markets and business, from Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” to the mind that the economy is a kind of science. Above all, it’s time to expel the idea that business practices are favorable to government work. Elon Musk’s sledgehammer will not achieve good governance.