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I think any effort will be ultimately doomed by corruption and inertia, but this would be amazing, there are no elements of the government that should be untouched, and Elon would be the perfect person to lead it (were he not already such a lightning rod for criticism).
I highly, highly recommend the recent Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk. It's a page turner.
I am also currently reading the book "Titan", a biography of J. D. Rockefeller.
Having consumed approximately 1200 pages of biography, I can tell you that both tycoons share a love for cutting waste and diving into small details of their operations. In the Musk biography, there's an anecdote about him going between stations at a factory. He finds a station where a machine appears to be operating slowly. He asks to make it go faster. Someone is found who can override the default settings. He turns it to max speed. It fails. Lowers the speed. Failure. Lowers the speed. Success. Now the station operates 3 times more efficiently.
Similarly, Rockefeller once saw that barrels were being sealed with 40 dots of epoxy. He says, try 38. They leak. Try 39. It works.
Musk succeeds because he pushes all the way to the point of failure and then pulls back. That's why was able to make a profitable electric car company when it was considered impossible and send rockets into space for 10% the prevailing cost.
How would Elon solve government waste if he were god-emperor? He wouldn't start by reducing headcount by 10%. He would eliminate entire departments then add back personnel as necessary. What would happen if we just erased the Department of Education? My guess? Nothing.
And yes, government waste is a huge and growing problem. Consider the Biden administrations effort to connect rural households to the internet. It's a $42 billion program and no households have been connected after 3 years. It might fail entirely. The CHIPS act, similar failure. We also recently spent $7.5 billion to build 7 electric charging stations.
These are deep failures in the government, driven by corruption and incompetency. We need to clean house. And to do so we need someone in charge who is unafraid to be unpopular.
Basically, we need this: https://old.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/15v90es/libertarian_javier_milei_shows_his_plan_to_reduce/
In IT they call this a 'scream test'.
Unplug stuff, and if you hear screaming, plug it back in.
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I won't say that my mouth didn't water a little bit at the thought, but eliminating dots of epoxy is one thing and eliminating people is another. If you lay off the entire department and it turns out that you still need them, how many are going to be willing to return? How many of the key people who actually get things done are going to be willing to return? That comes down to the motivations and alternatives available to those people, which is not really legible (in fact it's probably not even legible who these people are).
Removing unnecessary people is in fact the key to Elon's efficiency. In the biography, he is cruel to his staff and it seems to be effective. He is constantly firing key staff the moment they start to rest on their laurels. No one is irreplaceable.
Furthermore, his denial of praise seems to motivate people to perform at a level that would otherwise be impossible. It's the same sort of philosophy employed by Asian tiger moms and the band director from the movie "Whiplash". Never say good job.
At some place like the Department of Education, the cuts would be deep. People don't choose that job unless they are in it for an easy paycheck. But, deep in the bowels of the department, there are probably still some young people who would relish the chance for rapid advancement once the cruft has been removed.
How many times does Elon fire someone, regret it, ask for them back, and they come back? He fired a lot of Twitter people and it mostly still works, but I can't see shit without logging in and that smells like a load shedding strategy to me.
No one is irreplaceable, but that doesn't mean that you can fire anyone and everyone with no impact on operations.
Certainly. The trick is to not fire those guys too.
I wonder if it was also to try to get people to get an account, instead of merely lurking? That would raise engagement with the platform. (I know people who have done so, though I've stubbornly stuck to what's left of nitter for now.)
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I think it actually happens a bit. I read the book awhile ago, but I remember a case of this exact thing happening. The person had gone to another company and was bored so came back despite Elon being a dick.
The trick to Elon's efficiency is to cut all the dead wood and half the live wood, going all the way to failure, and then adding back the necessary parts. And... it works.
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The tiger-mom kid who was a violin virtuoso wound up quitting the instrument because of the pressure, which is one argument against a Whiplash-style approach.
Yeah, probably a bad idea to try this with your kids since replacement cost is high.
But enforcing it on everyone else, that’s fine?
I’m sympathetic to Elon’s management style, and I give it credit for a lot of his results, but I would be miserable working at SpaceX. Suddenly importing that culture to the nation’s largest employer would be a disaster. The civil service isn’t supposed to be populated by rockstar engineers doing the impossible. It’s not supposed to be high-risk, high-reward at all.
The government is rarely in the business of visionary promises, so the upside is capped. It doesn’t have long tails for compensation, so it’s not going to attract top talent. There’s not much room for out-of-the-box solutions, so the potential savings are mostly careful execution. There’s a case for handing that over to Jeff Bezos or the ghost of Sam Walton, but Elon Musk? Not my first pick.
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Top people at SpaceX will cash out tens of millions of dollars if it goes public at its current valuation. The most he can offer at the Department of Education is what, $150k and a nice pension?
Yes, but he could offer status. The low-level drones are stuck behind 12 layers of bureaucracy. They can't advance until someone retires. Or... is fired.
Change offers opportunity. J Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI at age 29.
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Possibly not even the pension if people stop trusting the government to live up to it's long term financial obligations.
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Maybe you only cut the ones without legible outputs.
James Scott, telephone!
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Legible output selects for departments engaging in fake performance. Like health centrals that focus on dealing with non-sick people or police departments boosting numbers using speed traps instead of following up on rape cases. This shit is absolutely rampant and without an in-depth understanding of what the organisation does and what the "legible output" actually means, making cuts based on that is a godawful idea since most of the most important people don't have legible output and the least important and the actively parasititic often have large legible output.
Indeed, beware of mean chickens.
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I think what makes this impossible is unions. If you just broke all the public sector unions, then allowed public sector managers to hire and fired as they wished without union interference, that'd solve a lot of the worst issues without even needing a business genius to step in and try to optimize.
I don't think so. The incentives of public sector managers are still to get their budget increased. So instead of expanding jobs for featherbedding employees, you'd expand jobs for featherbedding managers.
It wouldn't be a perfect system still, but the unions are the biggest barrier to improving.
Bigger budget is one incentive of managers, but they're also incentivized to do a good job to get promoted, and also most people just want to do a good job in general. Getting rid of unions will remove a lot of the worst distortions.
The public sector has very regimented advancement compared to private industry. There are hard caps on how fast you can get promotions or even raises. If I had to guess, this is an intentional countermeasure against nepotism/graft, but I suppose tall poppy syndrome is also an option.
I expect it's both anti-nepotism and anti-tall poppy. The public sector workers don't want any coworkers to be working hard so they're revealed to be lazy/incompetent. Just busting unions I expect will have large ripple effects. And I'm still a big fan of chesterton's fence; no need to make bigger changes than necessary. Just getting rid of the unions and slowly reworking contracts is much safer than trying to jump in and firing tons of the pubic sector.
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