Elon Musk is a force of nature. He has assembled the greatest fortune (more than $450 billion) in the history of mankind with a maniacal work ethic and fearlessness in challenging orthodoxies or tradition. He is a one-man show at SpaceX, Tesla and X (formerly twitter), and is poised to dominate artificial intelligence. Mr. Musk is a marvelous combination of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison in the private sector.
We should rejoice that Mr. Musk has taken his superhuman talents to focus on the ultra-bloated federal government, which is bankrupt by any private business metric: a $36 trillion national debt, chronic budget deficits exceeding $1 trillion, millions of deadweight federal employees and contractors, and sub-mediocrity as the workplace ethos.
The federal Leviathan is so huge, it needs Mr. Musk's blunderbuss approach. A scalpel would take decades before real change could be discerned. Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has adventurously ordered a freeze on trillions in government spending, offered to buy out the contracts of 2.3 million government employees (tens of thousands have already accepted), and closed the doors of or downsized the useless U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Education, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mr. Musk has already saved taxpayers untold sums in wasteful spending and done more good for the American people in weeks than most elected officials accomplish in a lifetime.
An outsider like Mr. Musk with a wrecking ball is necessary to offset the natural urge of professional politicians to grow government to hand out figurative candy bars to their constituents. You can't run a political campaign on standing pat and letting the private sector flourish. Politicians need something concrete to take credit for -- even helping constituents navigate a dizzying bureaucratic maze that they created. The bigger the government, the greater the opportunity of elected officials to do favors in exchange for political support.
That dynamic explains why the federal government grows bigger every year, notwithstanding volumes of campaign rhetoric about putting the government on a starvation diet. Former President Ronald Reagan cut taxes, but federal borrowing kept the federal government fat. During President Donald Trump's first term, the national debt soared by $7.8 trillion. Candidates are eager to take "no new taxes" pledges but scamper away from pledges against new spending or freezing the debt ceiling. Unlike insiders, outsiders like Musk have no incentive to blink at reality to preserve their status, power and prestige.
With all due respect for his limitless business savvy, however, Mr. Musk is a political ingenue. He is accustomed to playing dictator or bull in a china shop in his own companies to maximize profits. Government does not work that way. The preamble to the U.S. Constitution identifies liberty and justice as the nation's glory. It features separation of powers as a structural shield against tyranny of the one, the many or the majority. In politics, you need to invite people to be with you on the takeoff if you want them by your side on the landing.
Government efficiency is not synonymous with government legitimacy. Not a single vote was cast for Mr. Musk in the 2024 elections. The United States is not yet a plutocracy. Process is even more important than policy. The government must turn square corners as an example for the citizenry generally.
Mr. Musk's blitzkrieg against the federal bureaucracy has been answered by a rising tide of lawsuits challenging the legality of his freeze on government spending, termination of government agencies, buyouts of the contracts of government employees, and access by untrained and unschooled Musketeers to sensitive private information -- Social Security numbers and bank account information, for example -- used in the handling and payment of trillions of dollars in federal funds. At present, Mr. Musk has lost every preliminary skirmish in courts. Instead of going back to the drawing board and dotting i's and crossing t's or asking a Republican-controlled Congress to amend or repeal relevant laws, Mr. Musk has raged at federal judges, steaming that U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer was "a corrupt judge protecting corruption" and "needs to be impeached NOW." (It has been established for more than two centuries since the failed impeachment trial of Justice Samuel Chase that judges may not be impeached for alleged erroneous decisions. Appeal is the proper avenue of redress.)
Musk needs trusted supervision and wisdom if all his remarkable talents and energies in streamlining the federal behemoth are not to go to waste, stymied by never-ending lawsuits. Is anyone brave enough to deliver the message to the world's richest man with a penchant for retaliation?
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