The US government is not a startup
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This week WIRED Start considers the apparent takeover of government by Elon Musk, who is moving fast and breaking things that can’t afford to be broken.
It feels like no one should have to say this, and yet we are in a situation where it needs to be said, very loudly and clearly, before it’s too late to do anything about it: The United States is not a startup. If you run it like one, it will break.
The onslaught of news about Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government’s core institutions is altogether too much—in volume, in magnitude, in the sheer chaotic absurdity of a 19-year-old who goes by “Big Balls” helping the world’s richest man consolidate power. There’s an easy way to process it, though.
Donald Trump may be the president of the United States, but Musk has made himself its CEO.
This is bad on its face. Musk was not elected to any office, has billions of dollars of government contracts, and has radicalized others and himself by elevating conspiratorial X accounts with handles like @redpillsigma420. His allies control the US government’s human resources and information technology departments, and he has deployed a strike force of eager former interns to poke and prod at the data and code bases that are effectively the gears of democracy. None of this should be happening.
It is, though. And while this takeover is unprecedented for the government, it’s standard operating procedure for Musk. It maps almost too neatly to his acquisition of Twitter in 2022: Get rid of most of the workforce. Install loyalists. Rip up safeguards. Remake in your own image.
This is the way of the startup. You’re scrappy, you’re unconventional, you’re iterating. This is the world that Musk’s lieutenants come from, and the one they are imposing on the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration.
What do they want? A lot.
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Until next time
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Discipline-Agnostic Systems Thinker | MBA | BA Psychology | BA English
7mo(1) Changing the rules of the game to increase your own personal odds of winning is a weak move. (2) This isn't a game.
Retired
8moThe OIG should be doing this work.
Senior Program Manager @ Amazon | Program Management, Customer Experience (views are my own)
8moThis. You cannot govern countries like start-ups, and even not like companies in general. It's good and valuable to include more entrepreneurial spirit into politics, definitely. But a strategy that relies purely on disruption, ends up either in destruction of democracy or in failing of the strategy. Also it creates severe security leaks, that can and will be abused by foreign players that are not entrepreneurial and not democratic at all. As a European I am very concerned about the US government breaking down every barriers against influence of authoritarian players like Russia or China, questioning the checks and balances that made the US a stable democracy. At the same time Us politicians like Vance or Musk try to export their not success proven model to other world regions like Europe. In a way that is destroying long-term alliances and also: mutual trust.
Insightful