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During the conversation on X between Musk and Trump, they floated the idea of Musk leading a 'government cutting commission' or basically a setup where Musk would come in and cut the fat from the government.
This idea fascinates me, and while I'm sure there are all sorts of reasons it may be terrible, I fear that financially the U.S. may need to do something dramatic like this in order to get the debt under control, etc etc. Also I, along with many other mottizens, am just pretty bearish on the efficacy of most government. Especially federal officials.
The question for me is - how would this work? Which areas do you think would get cut the most? (education was mentioned here specifically) Which areas are critical and should remain mostly untouched? (post office?)
On top of that, if this were to happen, what would be the primary blockers? Do you think Elon is the right man for the job without political connections? Are there ways in which the President can be prevented from firing large swathes of the federal admin? Potential disasters that could happen if critical employees are in fact fired?
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/
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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