Penny wise, Trump foolish
Many Americans reacted pointedly to Elon Musk’s “5 bullets” email ultimatum to 2.3 million federal employees on Saturday. Targets included “at least one judge and some law clerks.” * But Sen. Tina Smith (D) of Minnesota spoke for all of them, telling it like it is, just the way Trumpophiles like it: “This is the ultimate dick boss move from Musk – except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a dick.” **
Smith wasn’t done commenting on the Musk-Trump hostile takeover of the U.S. government:
“It’s unclear what legal authority, if any, Musk is relying on” for this action, Politico notes:
Michael Fallings, an attorney specializing in federal employment law, told POLITICO the actions Musk described in the post would be illegal.
“I don’t believe it would be legal, and I don’t think he really understands right now how he will even do what he’s threatened to do,” Fallings said.
Beyond Musk’s illegal attempt to amuse himself by seeing how high he can get 2.3 million public servants to jump, other Donald Trump administration dysfunctionaries flatly told their people to ignore Musk’s directive.
Josh Marshall wrote Saturday night:
Over the course of the evening top leadership at the FBI, the State Department, the VA, the Department of the Navy (to its civilian employees) and other parts of the government have explicitly instructed employees in their departments and agencies to ignore the email. Meanwhile the DOJ seems to be instructing its employees to follow it. (And yes, FBI is sort of under DOJ and that’s kind of weird but that’s where we are.)
It’s important to note that these emails are authorized or allowed if not directed by the President of the United States. And yet whole wings of the government are saying to ignore it. I mentioned to someone this evening that they’re treating a presidentially authorized email as some kind of insider threat. And this person says, we’re surprised that Trump is an insider threat? To which I said, yes, I’m surprised that his own appointees are doing so.
We are watching state disintegration in real time, Marshall observes both wryly and with some trepidation. As one might treat fantastic statements from a parent in the throes of dementia, it seems to me.
Similarly disturbing is watching the press treat Musk’s antics seriously rather than comically disruptive for a supposed superpower that’s invested decades on preparedness for its military and for natural and manmade disasters.
People have a basic need to believe everything is going to be okay, and tomorrow will be like today, Anat Shenker-Osorio noted last week [timestamp 13:55]. To acknowledge the badness, she suggests, “requires a level of upset and … a level of awareness that is understandably difficult for most people.” (See system justification theory.) Our republic isn’t slowly boiling. We’re enjoying a cozy hot tub, right?
Just Security treats Musk’s trolling over two million federal employees far more seriously than some of Trump’s department heads, but notes his email follows the contours of “running government like a business,” as Smith observed:
The email follows a pattern of Musk borrowing tactics from the private sector in his efforts to shrink the federal workforce. Following his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, Musk instructed Twitter’s engineers to “email [him] a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.”
Brian Klaas describes Musk’s slash-and-burn tactics as shortsighted, and a “perfect illustration of the ‘penny wise, pound foolish’ principle.” Whereas Musk’s Silicon Valley brethren celebrate risk-taking and strive to cut waste to maximize profit, governments need to build in resilience:
As I’ve written previously, there is an inherent tradeoff in complex systems between resilience and optimization. Similarly, a system that is constantly taut with tension is more likely to catastrophically snap than one that stabilizes with some protective slack.
In the United States, the federal government is routinely tasked with tackling the unexpected. It is not always a nimble system, and it certainly does contain some waste, fraud, and abuse embedded in mismanagement of the public purse. But what Musk is touting as “waste” is too often simply the inevitable byproduct of a governance strategy that can respond effectively to crises that will crop up in such an uncertain world.
Furthermore, applying a private-sector mindset to public- sector operations is a profound category error, Klaas suggests. Something like assuming “dishwashers and washing machines are the same thing because they both use detergent to wash things.”
It’s one thing if Musk slashes his new Twitter workforce until the platform breaks down. It’s another thing to break government:
By contrast, if the United States federal government breaks—even just a bit—people will die. People have died, as a result of the chaos unleashed on USAID, and as reporting continues to flow in during the coming weeks, the unacceptable and needless scale of deaths will become apparent. Many more will inevitably follow—and that’s without any Black Swans walloping us from out of the blue.
Moreover, we are often saved from such needless disasters from an under-appreciated feature of public governance: that it has lower levels of risk tolerance than the private sector. Risk tolerance is a measure of how much you’re willing to experiment and try risky things—even if doing so might lead to failure.
“DOGE is on track to turn America’s public sector strength into a dangerous weakness,” Klaas concludes.
Others across the internet responded to Musk’s ultimatum with the ridicule it richly deserves. They suggested fucking with the fucker, so to speak, by sending their own mocking bullet lists of accomplishments to HR@opm.gov.
Nothin’ but Blue Skies from now on was happy to oblige (at top). Allison Gill compiled a short list of others.
If I were conspiracy minded, I’d view Musk-Trump’s attacks on government servants over the last few weeks not as reform, or even incompetence, but deliberate sabotage.
(h/t DJ)
* I was busy all day on the other side of the state reelecting Anderson Clayton for two more years as NC Democrats’ state party chair.
** I tried to send Tina Smith a Scoobie Snack only to find she’d announced ten days ago she would not seek reelection in 2026, thus freeing herself to let billionaire Musk know what she really thinks of him. Minnesotans, brace for impact.
