At first, Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” looks like the most Silicon Valley-style project one could imagine. The idea was first bandied about on social media; its name is a jokey reference to a crypto coin. Musk and co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy are hiring via X, and plan to govern it partially by podcast. But now that they’ve laid out their plans for the “department” (actually an advisory commission outside government) in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, concern is bubbling up — even in the tech world — that the project might suffer from a couple other very Silicon Valley qualities: ego and overpromising. It’s not clear to many experts that the pair’s plans, as detailed as they sound, are a serious toolkit for tackling the DC bureaucracy. There’s even concern they could backfire, and that two self-proclaimed innovators could end up tearing down much of the essential infrastructure that ushers along American innovation. “They’re making very large promises upon which it's not clear how they can deliver,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Kevin Kosar told DFD. For “innovation” mavens, the root of the concern is the vast support the federal government provides for critical American R&D. Musk has promised a massive cut to the federal government — and the “discretionary” budget that could be on the chopping block is exactly the money that funds agencies like the National Institutes for Health or the Small Business Administration (through its Small Business Innovation Research program) for key public-private partnerships. Sujai Shivakumar, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, compared the federal government’s role in enabling innovation to building a highway — and warned that extensive regulatory and civil service rollbacks risk riddling it with potholes.
“If you are indiscriminately cutting these expenditures or staff, you are very much at risk of damaging the connective tissue across our innovation system,” Shivakumar told DFD. “This is a time when we actually need to be doubling down and reinforcing our innovation system, and we would hope that any department looking to create efficiencies is mindful of that.” That concern extends to the tech world, even among those who share Musk and Ramaswamy’s desire to reinvent American government. Rohit Krishnan, a Bay Area venture capitalist who has written his own prescription for how an “anti-regulator” could roll back the state to boost innovation, said that while DOGE’s mission is salutary, he needs to see more details about how the commission would accomplish its goals. “Sweeping pointless regulations or outdated ones or even purely providing legal clarity so we can do things is underrated, [so] some blunt approaches therefore could be okay,” Krishnan told DFD. “But only if we can build back up the state capacity where it's needed.”
As the op-ed lays out, much of DOGE’s focus will be simply on firing people. While they make a genteel nod to the idea that “Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect,” the two have been quite brutal about workers in their own careers and remarks. Musk gutted Twitter’s payroll after his 2022 takeover, and Ramaswamy once mused about firing three quarters of federal employees through a random lottery. “I think [Musk and Ramaswamy are] focused on the fact that having civil servants is the problem, and that they need to be like tech company employees,” said Krishnan. “I’m not sure it's true. Because there is a lot of operational work needed, and actual negotiation to make things work.” Jennifer Pahlka, U.S. deputy chief technology officer under former President Barack Obama, offered qualified praise for the plan — but said Musk and Ramaswamy’s plan to fire large swaths of the bureaucracy is the wrong fix for a bigger structural problem.
“We need civil service reform that allows for firing underperformers, as well as hiring practices that actually assess candidates for their skills … There are so many amazing civil servants who would cheer from the rooftops if that were to happen,” Pahlka told DFD. “I've spent my career frustrated that government doesn't speed up. In this case, I'd like them to slow down a bit.” It’s not as if Musk and Ramaswamy lack for precedent, or advice to draw on. Similar agendas like the Reagan-era Grace Commission or former Vice President Al Gore’s early-1990s National Performance Review proposed reinvention of the bureaucracy to varying degrees of success. Proposals abound in the tech world and blogosphere as well, from the Foundation for American Innovation’s October report on “An Efficiency Agenda for the Executive Branch” to an influential series of articles from pseudonymous blogger Scott Alexander on the perceived shortcomings of the Food and Drug Administration. The experts surveyed by DFD largely agreed that the success of the commission will depend on turning the corner from “where to cut” to “how to build,” giving a slimmed-down bureaucracy clear guidelines and permissions to carrying out its goals. Both Krishnan and CSIS’ Shivakumar noted that the natural incentive within bureaucracy, and especially procurement, is simply not to do anything, in order to minimize error. They argued that the best form of “efficiency” is a government that makes it clear what agencies and companies alike can do and frees them to get out there and do it. “You need to look at efficiency from a dynamic perspective,” Shivakumar said. “How do you connect entrepreneurs with research, with commercial products, with markets domestically and abroad … that is our historic advantage vis-a-vis other countries, and that is what we need to be emphasizing.”
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