And now for some encouraging news: Elon Musk, the world richest man, is dying in the polls. Only 1 in 3 Americans support his rampage through the federal government with his chainsaw.
It’s a pity, in one sense, because the effort to build a better government, a leaner and more efficient one, is a noble mission. And Musk is making a mess of it, unleashing his posse of 20-somethings to throw grenades before they’ve done their homework.
It doesn’t have to be like this. You may remember Al Gore’s campaign to “Reinvent Government” begun in the Clinton years. It wound up reducing the federal workforce by more than 400,000. It closed 2,000 obsolete field offices. It cut the equivalent of 640,000 pages of agency rules. It did simple things, like saving $250 million in processing costs by expanding the use of credit cards. It took years of careful work and consultation.
“We cut government the right way by eliminating what wasn’t needed – bloated headquarters, layers of managers, outdated field offices, obsolete red tape and rules,” said Elaine Kamarck, who managed the effort for Gore.
And it worked. By the end of the Clinton years, a Gallup poll showed that faith in the federal government had risen to 60 percent, almost triple the level when he entered office in 1993.
Fast forward to Elon Musk and his chainsaw. He’s made ungodly money as an entrepreneur, grant him that. He won that game.
But he seems to believe that means he can excel at anything. Call it Billionaire’s Disease. He has no experience in government, and he’s not consulting Congress or government workers who might have a suggestion or two on how to cut costs.
Instead, he’s demonizing federal workers, firing many of them without regard to merit before stopping to consider the consequences. Among the targets were workers at the federal agency charged with ensuring the safety and reliability of our nuclear arsenal. Oops. (They’re trying to hire them back but are having some trouble finding all of them.)
Now Musk is threatening to fire all federal employees who don’t send a memo listing their accomplishments in the previous week. That’s caused a stir, even within the MAGA camp. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI director Kash Patel and National Security Advisor Tulsi Gabbard have all told their employees to ignore the demand. But Musk issued a second demand, with a more explicit threat of firing. What’s a federal worker to do?
President Trump was asked to clear up the confusion, but didn’t seem to know himself: “It’s somewhat voluntary, but it’s also I guess if you don’t answer, you get fired,” he said.
It’s tempting to laugh at this clown show, but it would be more sensible to cry. Musk and his crew cut food shipments to starving people in Africa and count it as savings. They’ve forced agencies to give up sensitive data on all of us and then left it vulnerable to Chinese hackers. And they vilify federal workers — the scientists, the park rangers, and the clerks who send our Social Security checks -- as if they are bad people because they work for the federal government.
USAID workers who toil away providing food and medicine to the world’s poorest people, Musk says, are part of a “criminal organization” and are acting as an “arm of the radical-left globalists.”
As for keeping score, that’s tough at this stage. Musk said he’d find $2 trillion in spending cuts, perhaps unaware that discretionary spending in the federal budget amounts to $1.8 trillion a year, about half of which is devoted to the Pentagon. He later retreating saying he has a “good shot” at saving half that amount.
Count me as a skeptic. Last week Musk posted a “wall of receipts” listing spending cuts he said saved taxpayer $55 billion so far. It was riddled with so many errors that he was forced within a few days to rescind the top five claims on the wall. My favorite: He bragged about savings $8 billion by cancelling a single contract, a sum that turned out to be $8 million instead.
Yes, the federal government is a behemoth that could go on a diet. And yes, fraud and waste drive up costs. A recent report from the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, estimated the taxpayer losses as $233 to $521 billion a year in contract fraud. Call it $1 billion a day, a sturdy chunk of change.
But to do this right, you need to do the homework, to learn how it works, to be careful. Musk cut nearly 7,000 jobs at the IRS, a move that will cost the federal government billions of dollars, according to several former IRS commissioners who protested the cut this week. And do we really want to cut 20 percent of the staff that provides relief to the emergency workers who responded to the September 11 attacks?
Musk seems to think he doesn’t need to do stop and listen, that he’s superman, that he could learn to play the saxophone by Tuesday if he put his mind to it. That’s the nature of Billionaire’s Disease.
The man is making a fool of himself. And unfortunately, we’re all going along for the ride.
Moran is a national political columnist for Advance Local and the former editorial page editor/columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be emailed at aquinas1222@gmail.com.