The ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Administration
5 min read
As promised, Donald Trump has given Elon Musk a job in (or at least adjacent to) his second administration, in a brand-new extragovernmental organization named for a meme turned cryptocurrency: the Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. DOGE. The Trump campaign has already started selling T-shirts to commemorate the occasion, featuring Trump, Musk, and dogecoin’s Shiba Inu mascot, with the Martian landscape in the background—because in addition to his formal role, Musk is primed to become Trump’s unofficial space czar. (Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former presidential candidate whom Trump appointed to lead the effort alongside Musk, does not appear on the T-shirt.)
Musk’s role is a glaring conflict of interest; SpaceX has been an aerospace contractor for years and could stand to profit nicely from the creation of DOGE, which could shift government functions to private companies in the name of cost cutting. But it also raises a question with real stakes for Americans. How might Musk—the centibillionaire, innovator, right-wing activist, and relentless troll—actually steer this new effort? His leadership of his businesses, especially SpaceX, suggests that he’ll throw himself into the job with zeal, casting government efficiency as an existential effort, just like the quest to make life multiplanetary.
SpaceX is the most successful rocket company in America, and it became successful by not behaving like a government organization. It ascended under Musk, who adopted Silicon Valley’s “Move fast and break things” philosophy and displayed a willingness to blow up rockets until he got the recipe just right. The approach suggests that, in a SpaceX-inspired government, Musk would not just cut through red tape, but annihilate it with a flamethrower. In yesterday’s announcement, the president-elect sounded equally eager to break things, saying that “the Great Elon Musk” would lead DOGE to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”
Even before his official appointment, Musk had identified one federal agency he’d like to retool: the Federal Aviation Administration, which is in charge of approving launch licenses for rockets. On X last month, Musk wrote of the FAA, “Unless Trump wins and we get rid of the mountain of smothering regulations (that have nothing to do with safety!), humanity will never reach Mars.” SpaceX is in the midst of a ferocious development campaign for its most powerful rocket, Starship, and has sought launch licenses at a faster pace than the FAA is willing to grant them. Now the FAA, already short-staffed, could be at the mercy of Senior Adviser Elon Musk, given carte blanche to explode regulations by a president who has expressed a desire to see American astronauts land on Mars while he is in office. Musk would also have something to gain by overhauling national space policy. NASA has hired traditional aerospace contractors, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to build the rocket that will transport astronauts to lunar orbit. But that rocket is so expensive to launch that even NASA’s own inspector general has recommended that the agency consider alternative options for future space missions. Lawmakers would be loath to cancel the program, which has supported jobs in every state. But with Musk in his ear, Trump could certainly try.
Regardless of which agencies he’s targeting, Musk will almost certainly throw himself into the DOGE job, as he did in the early years of SpaceX. Despite appearances, he has the time: Although there’s no doubt that his singular talents drove the firm to pull off incredible feats, other executives now oversee day-to-day operations at SpaceX without his input. The same is true at Tesla. That combination of dedication and availability could make him an effective facilitator of the government-efficiency department’s mandate.
But Musk and Trump share a governing style that involves making surprise decrees that leave their staff scrambling. In 2014, when Musk publicly unveiled a new version of SpaceX’s cargo capsule reconfigured for future human passengers, he said that the vehicle would be capable of landing anywhere that engineers wanted upon its return to Earth. This was news to the SpaceX engineers, who had designed the spacecraft to parachute down to the ocean. Engineers set aside their existing designs—conventional, sure, but ready to go—and focused on Musk’s new vision. Eventually, it became clear that the design wasn’t workable for NASA’s deadline, and the engineering team managed to convince leadership that the effort wasn’t worth pursuing any further. (Years later, SpaceX managed to guide its rocket boosters out of the sky and to a gentle touchdown.) Former SpaceX employees have told me that Musk’s occasional fixation on certain business operations has occasionally slowed down their work. Some of his decisions appear to simply be bad ones, such as discouraging workers from wearing yellow safety vests because he dislikes bright colors, as Reuters reported last year. It is a particularly baffling move, considering that SpaceX has a very high rate of workplace injuries; the Reuters investigation revealed at least 600 previously unreported injuries at SpaceX in the past decade, such as electrocutions and amputations.
Musk also maintains a work environment with its own form of bureaucracy, organized around appeasing the boss’s whims. In 2022, SpaceX fired a small group of employees after they sent a letter to senior executives describing Musk’s public actions as “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.” The letter was signed by hundreds of employees, but management deemed the effort a diversion from SpaceX’s founding mission to reach Mars. Former SpaceX employees have told me that they often couched feedback in the glossy terms of that mission, so as not to displease Musk. Instead of coming right out with safety concerns, for example, they would advise against certain decisions because of the mission. Such overly cautious managing up, one could argue, is not very efficient.
According to CNN, Musk has spent nearly every day since the election at Mar-a-Lago, joining the president-elect for meals on the patio and rounds of golf. Of the two DOGE chairs, he is clearly Trump’s favorite; the Mars hype and memery are only just beginning. But the very fact that Musk and Ramaswamy were appointed jointly—two leaders where presumably one could do—undermines the very premise of the Department of Government Efficiency. Even in his mission to rid the federal government of every bit of wasteful spending, Musk still has to kneel to someone else’s version of bureaucracy.
