You have to admit: Silicon Valley has a knack for mantras.
From “people first, profits will follow” in the 1970s to “fail better” in the 2010s, California’s tech industry has coined some memorable phrases over the years to describe its uniquely American mix of New Age spirituality, self-help lingo and cutthroat corporate profit-seeking.
But one of its more recent mantras has already wreaked havoc on American society, and it’s now set to compound the damage with an assault on the federal government, thanks to President-elect Donald Trump and his new BFF (billionaire friend forever) Elon Musk.
The mantra is credited to Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, although the principles behind it are shared widely in the Bay Area. “Unless you are breaking stuff,” the quotes goes, “you aren’t moving fast enough.”
The idea was that Facebook staffers should focus on rapid innovation without worrying much about the potential consequences.
The idea was that Facebook staffers should focus on rapid innovation without worrying much about the potential consequences. As we now know, those consequences most likely included everything from a rise in eating disorders among teenagers to the passage of Brexit to that unsettling artificial intelligence-generated image of shrimp Jesus that your aunt posted on her wall. “Move fast and break things” worked great for Facebook’s bottom line but not so great for the rest of us.
It wasn’t just Facebook, either. In Australia, Uber agreed to pay $178 million to settle a class-action lawsuit from taxi and for-hire drivers that alleged that Uber, as it moved fast and broke things, used unlicensed cars and unaccredited drivers to skirt regulations and gain an unfair advantage. Everything from cryptocurrency to AI chatbots seems designed to shake up an entrenched way of doing things, whether that’s banking or news, without regard to what might happen next. It’s not even clear where some of these new ideas are supposed to be heading, but they are moving there fast.
Now Musk is bringing this same approach to the federal government with the Department of Government Efficiency, a planned presidential advisory commission that he would head with biotech entrepreneur and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Despite the name, a jokey play on an old meme, it’s not a department at all but more of an outside commission that will make recommendations for cutting the federal workforce.
Ramaswamy gave a sense of how it might work with a now-infamous thought experiment floated on X (where else?): What if the president just fired every federal worker whose Social Security number ended in an odd number?
On Day 1, *instantly* fire 50% of federal bureaucrats.
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) November 12, 2023
Here’s how: if your SSN ends in an odd number, you’re fired.
That downsizes government by half. Absolutely *nothing* will break as a result.
It doesn’t violate civil service rules because mass layoffs are exempt.
SHUT IT…
Ramaswamy notably felt the need to claim that “absolutely nothing will break as a result” of this proposed Thanos-snap of the federal government. But randomness is lumpy. What if a majority of nuclear power plant safety inspectors have odd-numbered Social Security numbers? Or, conversely, what if most of the IRS auditors assigned to comb through billionaires’ tax returns have even-numbered SSNs? Even Musk might not like the results of this thoughtless experiment.
The best-case scenario for this commission would be something like President Bill Clinton’s task force on reinventing government.
The best-case scenario for this commission would be something like President Bill Clinton’s task force on reinventing government, which cut about 250,000 jobs, or about a tenth of the federal workforce — far below what Musk and Ramaswamy are promising — while streamlining various programs and introducing customer satisfaction surveys for the first time. But that effort was boosted by a cut in military spending due to the end of the Cold War, while aging workers who retired early padded the numbers.
Musk is hoping to do something similar to what he did when he bought Twitter (since renamed X) and cut more than 80% of the staff, including a team that was devoted to stopping the spread of child sexual exploitation on the platform and engineers who helped keep it from crashing.
Despite the glitches, a lot of longtime users stuck with the site because of the cost of switching, even as their mentions filled up with pro-Nazi accounts and porn bots. But advertisers fled, talented engineers who weren’t laid off left for new jobs elsewhere, and, eventually, power users became fed up and switched to the fast-growing BlueSky social media platform.
Musk moved fast, but all he broke was his own site. Investment giant Fidelity now considers X worth about 80% less than when Musk bought it two years ago.
The damage wouldn’t be limited to the DOGE commission, either. Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has suggested he would cut as many as “600 people” at the National Institutes of Health on his first day, shifting the focus of public health programs away from infectious diseases and toward chronic issues like obesity. Kennedy has promoted conspiracy theories about vaccines and pushed risky ideas like drinking unpasteurized milk, which could also lead to a brain drain among public health workers who don’t want to work for someone who rejects the basic science behind their work.
Meantime, Trump adviser Kash Patel wrote a book calling for a “comprehensive housecleaning” of the Justice Department and firing the top ranks of the FBI, among other “drastic measures.” Trump called the book a “roadmap to end the Deep State’s reign.”
These efforts may not succeed. Republicans in Congress who care about stopping the next pandemic, keeping the nation’s food supply untainted or maintaining minimum standards for federal prosecutions can stop some of these nominations or add spending requirements to the next budget. Despite Trump’s views, the president is not all-powerful, and the federal government doesn’t generally move fast.
In the end, the American people aren’t shareholders, but citizens. They would like a government that’s more efficient but also more responsive. Moving fast and breaking things works fine if your goal is to pump up a stock price for another quarter, but it’s no way to run a country.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline.