Tech insider sounds alarm that Musk’s 'highly disruptive' plan won't work for government

17 February

Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk gestures as he speaks about voting during an America PAC Town Hall in Folsom, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 17, 2024.

According to a Politico source with insider knowledge of activities at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), as many as 200,000 civil service workers who are in the probationary period could be laid off from the United States' federal government.

The second Trump Administration, with the help of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is pushing mass layoffs in a variety of federal agencies. And Democratic critics of President Donald Trump and SpaceX/Tesla/X.com CEO Musk are characterizing their efforts as a hostile takeover of Washington.

Politico's Derek Robertson discussed this government downsizing with a Silicon Valley insider: engineer and venture capitalist Rohit Krishnan, who emphasized that Musk is applying the tech industry's "highly disruptive" business model to the federal government — despite the fact that government and tech operate in very different ways.

Krishnan, in an interview published on February 16, told Politico, "On the regulatory and governance side, problems are solved through process. Everything has a process that you have to follow, and then things will come out in a way that most people are less unhappy about than they otherwise would be, because that's the way it’s done. But with DOGE, for example, if you go take over a company, you have to go fast, you have to go early, and you have to go with some level of certainty that you are right, because you can't wait. You don't dilly-dally trying to follow processes and procedures, because if you do that, nothing gets done."

DOGE, according to Krishnan, is using a "similar playbook to the way Elon took over Twitter."

"The difference here is that they're applying it to areas like the government, where maybe it has never been applied, or it's really hard to apply because the downstream implications are extremely complex," Krishnan told Politico. "It could cut off cancer research, or genomics departments are getting axed, or AIDS assistance elsewhere in the world. If any other administration tried to do this, they would put together a commission, put together a bunch of recommendations, they would get watered down from one committee to another — and by the time it came to implementation, everything would be incremental."

Krishna used a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) analogy to make his argument.

The Silicon Valley insider told Politico, "In some sense, everybody feels like they could run the DMV more efficiently, or whatever, and maybe they're right. But part of the problem is the fact that the government's apparatus needs to serve everybody. And if it needs to serve everybody, then almost by definition, you can't afford to slice your customer base into those who are easiest to serve, and therefore reduce the cost of service."

Politico's full interview with Rohit Krishnan is available at this link.

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