Elon vs. the USG, pt. 2
"In DC, nothing is ever a complete waste of time."
The other day I talked about Elon Musk’s plan for Washington. Or lack of a plan.
In general, if you come into a difficult situation without a plan, you are either a sucker or a genius. Oddly enough, Washington has seen a few suckers and knows what to do with them. The Post explains:
“As President Trump has said, Elon Musk is a genius, an innovator, and has literally made history by building creative, modern and efficient systems,” said Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior adviser. “The commission will ultimately be staffed and dedicated to this mission, and President Trump is committed to having Mr. Musk lead this commission to analyze the functionality of our government.”
People familiar with Musk say he is focused on winning the election and hasn’t done deep planning on DOGE beyond conversations and memes. That hasn’t stopped a universe of conservative think tanks — long focused on shrinking the government — from formulating plans for the commission they hope could be presented to the tech billionaire.
Advisers to the campaign have proposed the commission be led by private-sector leaders and have a staff in the hundreds, potentially drawn from conservative think tanks and congressional offices. The staff would come up with recommendations to present to a board of directors, led by Musk and other prominent executives.
How do you solve a problem like Elon? Easy. You turn him into food. Career food. He may not be a sucker, but he is behaving exactly like a sucker. “A staff in the hundreds.” All over Northwest DC, Pavlov’s bell is ringing. It’s time for lunch. Stroke ego and eat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Elon, obviously, is busy. He doesn’t want to do this work—to get bureaucracy all over his hands. No problem! A staff of hundreds stands ready. And for everyone who gets this gig, there are ten people who want it. It’s temporary, of course…
Let’s finish the story with the parts the Post leaves out, decorously, to protect the innocent and hungry. What will these recommendations be?
I could write them myself. Well, I couldn’t, I’m not that close to the process. I could call a guy. I know exactly whom I’d call. He is extremely competent, extremely based, and extremely cynical. He would be moderate and restrained, I’m sure, in connecting his recommendations to his (numerous) corporate clients. Paid or free, they would all be good ideas. I’m sure of it. In fact, if Trump wins—I’m sure he’ll be at the barbecue.
The ideas produced, after much straining and groaning and a whole lot of lunch, will emerge shyly from their burrow in a 150-page loaf, with 3-page executive summary. The contents of this sweet brown treat will be in two categories. One: ideas not requiring Congressional legislation. Two: ideas requiring Congressional legislation.
One: pointless fluff. Two: things the President, yea tho Mighty Leader of the Free World he be, can’t actually legally do. Note that always and everywhere, the set of things agencies don’t want to do is a subset of the set of things requiring legislation.
You see, in America, we are governed by the rule of law. Law! Lose our respect for law, and we are no better than shoplifters. We become a nation of shoplifters. Everything will have to be locked up. You’ll press a button for an associate if you want to so much as call your Congressperson. Is that what we want? Turning our nation’s capital into the Duboce Triangle CVS? Waiting five minutes to unlock a razor? Didn’t think so.
Most of the ideas in both these categories will go no further than the DOGE report. Like baby turtles, the cold air and the seabirds will winnow them. But some are lucky. Some will always be lucky.
The lucky ideas in category one will end up in Executive Orders. An EO is like a tweet, but without a character limit. What it lacks in reach and impressions, it makes up in grand and lofty prose. But all the agencies will read it. Or some junior lawyer there will. Probably he will write some other report about what the agency must do about this Imperial Rescript, this bolt of lightning from the Czar’s finger, this sermon in the resounding voice of God’s new orange vicar on earth, this EO.
The actual action items, if any, will consist of (a) things the agency doesn’t want to do, and occasionally (b) things it has wanted to do for a while but hasn’t had the energy to push over the line. It would be cynical to suggest (and I am never cynical) that (b) must be the empty set. It may be the empty set. But it is probably not quite empty. In DC, nothing is ever a complete waste of time.
The real meat is in category two. Since the government is actually run by Congress (lol fooled u), this report goes to the Hill. It will be read there, too. Where its action items align with the desires of the three forces which create policy on the Hill—lobbyists (Republican), activists (Democratic), and of course the agency itself (bureaucratic)—they may be acted on.
They might have been acted on anyway, of course, but there is no harm in having them in some kind of report. It might add energy. Then again, this is DC and ideas don’t come from nowhere—anything in the report will already be in the policy mix. When you hire a staffer, you hire his connections and his pet ideas. There are no new ideas, ever. There are new crackpot fantasies, but they don’t make it into the report.
Elon, certainly, means well and is very capable. But he is used to operating in the real world. Even old Twitter, as out to lunch as it was, was the real world. If comparing new Twitter to old Twitter is comparing a 2024 Tesla to a 1984 Mustang, comparing old Twitter to DC is comparing a 1984 Mustang to the chariot in King Tut’s tomb:
When you think about DC, imagine this rickety pile of obsolete parts, times a million. Then imagine that everything you say about it has to be expressed as if it was a fleet of Lamborghinis.
How can we make our Lambos more fuel efficient? How do we tune them for better 0-60 performance? How will we best maintain them for long-lasting reliability under the unrelenting duty cycle of hardcore street racing? Words, words, words, all words, up into the air like smoke. We know one thing DOGE will generate. It will generate words. The words, unlike smoke, will be with us forever. But no one will read them.
This is why I can’t get my dick hard about this election. Maybe I’m just too old. Really—I envy you if you can. If we win and you do go to DC, don’t forget to bring a tissue.
Could it be that Elon is a genius, not a sucker? Could it be that he won’t stand for being treated this way? It could. What might he do about it? Flounce off to Texas. What else could he do? Absolutely nothing. Washington is serious. Its enemies are not. When it looks at them, it sees bums. Is it wrong? And the bums will always lose.