ER 35: On “efficiency”

Or, what happens when Silicon Valley comes to Washington

Welcome back to the Ethical Reckoner. We were off last week for President’s Day, but we’re back! And because it’s the last Monday of the month (how did that happen?) it’s time for an Ethical Reckoner. And buckle up, because we’re talking about DOGE.

This edition of the Ethical Reckoner is brought to you by… the worst holiday

Today, it’s time to address the elephant in the room, and that is the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE¹). I don’t normally get too much into politics in this newsletter, but suddenly a tech billionaire is also a major figure in politics. What I want to specifically talk about is how Elon Musk is bringing Silicon Valley attitudes to the White House, and what this means for the situation going forward.

Move fast and break things

Musk has been slashing-and-burning his way across the US government, laying off thousands of workers and canceling programs left and right. Probationary employees—generally those who have been on the job for less than a year—have been particularly impacted. Cuts so far include 1,000 Department of Veterans Affairs employees, 5,400 people from the Department of Defense, and hundreds each from the Education and Energy Departments, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Park Service. Expected future cuts include thousands at the Internal Revenue Service and the Agriculture Department. This is on top of the near-shuttering of the US Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This has led to some… blunders, to put it mildly. This includes firing workers who are responding to the bird flu outbreak and people working on nuclear safety, which caused outcry and a scramble to re-hire those workers—which proved difficult since they had already been locked out of their work emails and the agencies didn’t have alternate contact information. Efficiency!

The indiscriminate cuts to personnel and programs is a textbook example of the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” ethos. Musk is drawing on the same playbook he used at Twitter when he took over. And while “move fast and break things” is less bad when it comes to a social media site—although the amount of harmful abuse has increased and shouldn’t be ignored—it’s terrible when it’s the government. People depend on the government for more than a social media platform. Interfering with the body responsible for social security, national security, taxes, planes not crashing,² etc. is a big deal.

And this could cause irreparable harm. “Cut first, ask questions later” is ok with grass, but not a tree. Not if it’s impacting the organization protecting people from scams, the people making sure we don’t get bird flu, the organization making sure our nukes are secure. Ultimately, this approach will be less efficient, but the issue is we might not ever know the true costs. Take the National Institutes of Health caps on federal spending on operating costs for universities and research institutions. If they go into effect it is “simply the end” for basic scientific research, which includes things like cancer research. The impacts of this on the world won’t be immediate. They’ll be felt ten years down the line, when we don’t have effective treatments for diseases that we otherwise would (and all the other advancements that basic research can provide), which in turn will impact our quality of life and economy. But the thing is, you can’t prove a negative, so we’ll never truly be able to quantify the impact these cuts have.

This is, of course, on top of the basic human cruelty of suddenly uprooting people’s lives. I personally know two people who were fired at the CFPB. One was re-hired, but the other is suddenly job hunting, and both have been impacted by the stress and uncertainty that DOGE is creating. The Twitter layoffs were brutal and traumatic, but the market absorbed the 6,000 fired employees. If the government cuts go deeper, where will everyone go? One answer: not grad school; many universities are pausing admissions amidst NIH funding uncertainty.

Look, I’m not going to argue that the US federal government is the most efficient organization in the world (although it’s more efficient than some³). There’s certainly room to refocus resources and trim things. But there’s a major risk of being penny-wise and pound-foolish in the way these cuts are happening, which is not efficient, and the chaos it’s engendering is the opposite of efficiency.

It’s really all about how you define efficiency, or what “efficiency” is in service of. If your goal is to have a functioning government supporting programs that make people’s lives better, suddenly making these cuts is not in the long run efficient. It was the same with Twitter. The platform is not as good a user experience now, but it still functions. Again, this kind of performance degradation is more acceptable for a social media platform and significantly less so for a government. But you can argue that the goal of Musk’s cuts were not to cut staff costs, but to radically transform Twitter into the dominant right-wing-flavored social media outlet that it is today and advance his power and agenda. In that sense, his takeover was quite efficient, and his political donations more so. But for the everyday user/citizen? Not so much.

Dog-eat-dog

Silicon Valley is a dog-eat-dog world. It’s gotten politer over the years, but browser wars, hostile takeovers, and employee poaching (and illegal “no poaching” agreements) show the brutality that the business and environment engender. Founders are encouraged—and rewarded for—doing what they need to do to get ahead. For example, in the 1990s, Microsoft started bundling Internet Explorer with Windows in order to crush the ascendant Netscape browser—to “cut off its air supply,” as a senior Microsoft executive put it. Despite losing an antitrust case, IE became the dominant browser, in part because of these tactics.

In a way, DOGE is a smart business move for Musk. He can lay off the FDA employees responsible for investigating Neuralink, make cuts to the commission that has investigated him, (attempt to) sell armored Teslas to the government, and generally secure more favorable treatment. There’s a reason other Silicon Valley CEOs donated to and attended Trump’s inauguration—in an increasingly personalist political environment, proximity to power and favor from those in power is itself a form of power, and so we’ll see who becomes the most-liked CEO after Musk—and what benefits they reap.

There’s also been speculation about xAI using the data that the DOGE team is accessing for training. To be frank, I’m not convinced that a bunch of tax returns will be much help training a generative AI model, which generally relies on free text data. You should still be concerned about random 19 year old engineers who go by “Big Balls” having access to your data, but you probably don’t have to worry about it being fed into an AI model.

Power accumulation

To be fair, this is less a Silicon Valley thing and more just a billionaire thing. America has a long history of billionaires gaining power and then using it to influence politics. JP Morgan basically ran the economy. John D. Rockefeller and other robber barons donated an incredible amount of money to William McKinley’s 1896 campaign and ensured his victory. The Koch brothers ran a network of donors through an infrastructure that “rivaled that of the Republican National Committee.” Basically, billionaires exerting political influence beyond traditional donations and super PACs is nothing new, and while Big Tech have historically been Democratic-leaning but haven’t explicitly involved themselves in politics (platform use/misuse excepting), we shouldn’t be surprised that Musk is leveraging the power that his money and influence afford him. The question is: to what end? What is this power for? Possibly it’s to benefit Musk’s companies (see above); this would be in the style of the robber barons. But it could also be to advance Musk’s “anti-woke” ideology; this would be more in the Koch vein. Or it could just be power for power’s sake. Who’s to know?

Diagnosis vs solution

DOGE represents the convergence of Silicon Valley attitudes and the American political system that permits very wealthy people to have an enormous amount of influence over the political system. In the pursuit of “efficiency,” it’s creating the opposite—unless the goal is to concentrate power in the hands of a technocrat, in which case this might be a fairly efficient way to get there. Assuming this is something we don’t want (the majority of Americans agree), the solution depends on where we think the problem lies. Is it a problem of our capitalistic system that allows people to accumulate this level of wealth and influence? Is it an institutional problem that our government can’t stand up to this kind of attack? Is it both?

Unfortunately, solving either would require massive political effort. But political effort is spurred by popular momentum, and Americans are flooding their representatives’ phone lines and town halls. It’s possible that opposition this time around is less performative and more substantive—but it still has to trigger action from elected representatives.

There’s also the possibility that the situation resolves itself while the underlying problems don’t. We’ve basically never had an unelected official wield this much power, and when politics are personalist, ego clashes and interpersonal conflicts can have a real impact. Trump-appointed officials are pushing back against some of the DOGE initiatives. If DOGE collapses, the immediate chaos will come to a halt and we’ll all breath a sigh of relief, although inefficiencies will continue as people spend time sweeping up the broken glass. But the underlying structures that got us into this situation? They’ll remain.

1. It’s named after a cryptocoin that’s in turn a joke about a meme about a Shiba Inu… it’s even dumber than it sounds, please don’t make me explain it.

2. I’m as skeeved out as anyone by the recent accidents, but statistically, flying is safer than ever (and there are fewer aviation incidents this year than in the same time period last year, though it may not seem that way because of reporting bias). Still, confidence in air safety has rapidly diminished.

3. I’m looking at you, Italy (land of “bring every document you have to a residency permit application appointment and sit for two hours praying they haven’t changed the requirements”).

Thumbnail generated by ChatGPT with a variation on the prompt “Please generate a brushy impressionist painting representing the concept of efficiency”.