Hey Elon, government isn’t X

Columnist based in New JerseyWith President-elect Trump having promised a substantial role for entrepreneur Elon Musk in his administration as the head of a Government Efficiency Committee, Musk is about to find out how different govt is from the companies he runs. As Truman said about his successor, General Dwight Eisenhower, “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen…He’ll find it very frustrating.” Musk has promised to cut trillions in waste from the US budget, while furthering policies that would benefit his companies – and, in his view, humanity – but the biggest of these promises are likely to run into the same problems that Truman predicted Eisenhower would face.After Musk bought Twitter (now X), he pledged to cut costs and did so largely by firing much of its staff. Despite predictions that the website would soon collapse without the workers who had been let go, it has continued to function, though some departments and functionalities have disappeared. This seems to be the most likely path for Musk to make good on his promise to enact draconian cuts in the federal budget, to do just as he did at Twitter, and cut jobs that he sees as being unnecessary. In this view, federal govt, just like his social media site, can fulfil most of its core functions with a much smaller staff.Of course, the amount of savings Musk and Trump have talked about cannot be realised just with staff cuts, but even getting rid of federal workers has proven to be difficult for past administrations. US federal budget is enormous – but much of that is spending on healthcare, Social Security, and the military, which have been off the table in past attempts to cut spending. The President makes about 4,000 appointments in federal govt, and he could simply decline to appoint anyone to those positions (something he did to an extent in his first term), but that’s a drop in the bucket of the nearly 3mn people who work for federal govt in some capacity.Most of those workers are protected by civil service laws, which are designed to insulate them from politics, and from changes in administration, and this means that they cannot be fired without cause.Moreover, eliminating departments in federal govt is politically treacherous. Every Republican President since Reagan has pledged to eliminate the Department of Education, for instance, but none have been able to do so, because those departments exist for a reason. Congress creates departments because there is political demand for them, and Congress is loath to eliminate them, and potentially alienate voters who like what those departments are doing.Certainly, some functions of federal govt could be fielded out to the states, but this wouldn’t mean lower taxes, or less spending – just more taxes and more spending in state govts, who would be doing the same things, just less efficiently.On some individual issues, Musk is likely to have more success in bending govt to his will. Support for space exploration – and thus for Musk’s company, SpaceX – is likely to be a legislative priority for Musk. Support for space exploration has traditionally been bipartisan, and a Republican President could likely shepherd support for increased funding through Congress. Similarly, Musk’s Tesla company would benefit from increased federal support for electric cars, either through rebates for purchases, or improvement of charging infra. These have traditionally been Democratic priorities, making it relatively easy for a Republican President to get them passed.In recent years, Republicans have also pushed for increased oversight of social media companies, but it’s hard to imagine that they’ll continue to do so while Musk has the President’s ear.Over the decades, Congress has ceded a lot of power to the President and his advisers, and there is a great deal – tariffs, for instance – that a President can now do on his own, with or without Congressional approval. When the actions Musk wants to push Trump to take fall into these areas, he’s likely to be successful. But the areas that Congress cares about most, especially taxes and spending, have been jealously guarded, and Presidents can only make big changes by working with Congress. Even with Republican control of both the House and the Senate, any substantive bill requires the support of 60 votes in US Senate to overcome the delaying tactic known as a filibuster. That means the sort of large-scale changes that have been promised – like cutting trillions from the budget or firing swathes of federal workers – would require buy-in not just from sceptical Senate Republicans, but also from hostile Senate Democrats. Past efforts to try and bypass Congress on matters like these, such as Nixon’s use of impoundment to cut funding for programmes he didn’t like by refusing to spend money allocated by Congress, have fallen short. Moreover, any attempt to circumvent Congress in areas it cares about tends to poison relations between the President and Congress, making it hard for him to get anything passed later on.Musk’s biggest promises – cutting $2tn in spending – would be difficult or impossible to carry out, but even the smaller promises are likely to be much harder to achieve than he realises. Unlike companies, govt is designed to be inefficient, to be slow to change, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.The writer is Professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University