Federal workers are not clueless children and don’t need a multipage memo to tell them when it’s a good idea to buy bottled water for thirsty troops, nor are they hobbyists who enjoy writing such inane documents. Employees write those memos because they are documents workers can point to when a judge or a committee asks them why they did what they did.
A turnaround expert, having assessed these realities, would understand that they needed to reform the system, not the head count. They’d have gone to Congress with a package of major civil service and procurement reforms that made it easier to hire and fire workers for good cause but, more important, made it easier for those workers to do a good job. And they’d have identified a leader to implement this turnaround who can spend the years of single-minded focus it will take to build a better system, rather than giving the job to a CEO on a time-limited break from running his other companies.
Instead, Musk entered the political spotlight for a few months, started tinkering with the system before he understood how it worked, and left when the president’s attention wandered. The result was just one more failed government program.
It wasn’t designed to fix anything. It was designed to deregulate, and to steal data.
The op ed writes:
U.S. DOGE Service didn’t work, because it really would be better if the U.S. government could match the productivity and innovation of America’s private sector.
Counter point: the American private sector is not actually that productive or innovative. At least not to the mythical degree the op ed author imagines. This is doubly true for Silicon Valley. Most of what they do is try to create rent collection schemes. Which is about as far removed from productive and innovative as you can get. And Silicon Valley is pretty much the model environment for fraud and waste. Why anyone should expect an internet troll from the most wasteful sector of American industry to be some sort of efficiency expert is beyond me.
Also Silicon Valley got even worse once Musk fired most of the Twitter employees and got it still working with a skeleton crew, although at a much worse state. Most of those “AI firings” are actually trying to follow the footsteps of Xitter, especially at corporations that have de facto monopolies.