But It’s The Type Of ‘Reduced Functionality’ That’s A Good Thing!

Elon Musk formally exited his role in the Trump administration on Wednesday night, ending a contentious and generally unpopular run as a senior adviser to the president and de facto head of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge). Though he promised efficiency and modernization, Musk leaves behind a trail of uncertainty and reduced functionality.

Good, because it’s in all the areas where increased functionality is a bad thing!  All the places where we’d rather the government was a little less effective.

The timing of Musk’s departure lines up with the end of his 130-day term limit as a “special government employee” but also plays a part in an effort by the billionaire to signal a wider shift away from Washington as he faces backlash from the public and shareholders.

So the departure isn’t the gotcha moment the progressive press thinks it is?

Musk’s initial pitch for Doge was to save $2tn from the budget by rooting out rampant waste and fraud, as well as to conduct an overhaul of government software that would modernize how federal agencies operate. Doge so far has claimed to cut about $140bn from the budget – although its “wall of receipts” is notorious for containing errors that overestimate its savings.

Errors like the ones governments always make, you mean? 

Doge’s cuts have targeted a swath of agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization, which handles weather and natural disaster forecasting, and plunged others such as the Department of Veterans Affairs into crises. Numerous smaller agencies, such as one that coordinates policy on homelessness, have been in effect shut down. Doge has brought several bureaus to their knees, with no clear plan of whether the staff Musk leaves behind will try to update or maintain their services or simply shut them off.

When Doge staffers entered the General Services Administration agency that housed the 18F Office, former employees have said they appeared to fundamentally misunderstand how the government operates and the challenges of creating public services.

Well, yes, clearly - they thought these organisations, drawing as they do on US taxpayer funding, should work to provide the US population with improvements to their lives, when in reality their function was to ptovide sinecires for the useless sons and daughters of politicians, or provide people inforeign countries with things or services US politicians thought they should have, but which their own governments wouldn't ptrovide for them. 

Is there something wrong with that?

While Musk is returning to his tech empire, (Ed: errr, not quite) many of the former employees and inexperienced young engineers whom he hired to work for Doge are set to remain part of the government.

So the experiment begins - will they go native? 

What seems farther away than ever in the chaos, however, is Musk’s promise to make the government more efficient and better serve the public. “You don’t need that many people to decide to just cut things,” 18F’s Young said. “But if you actually want to build things, that takes thought. It takes effort.”

It takes the effort to stop funding the things you shouldn't have been funding so that you have the resources to build those things, though...