With Doge, Elon Musk is doing the right thing the wrong way

The US Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, is shaking up the country’s federal government through its disruption of many long-standing programmes. However, in public administration, rooting out waste and corruption requires a balanced approach that emphasises transparency and inclusion. If Doge, led by Elon Musk, eschews these principles in favour of forthright opacity, the damage to American society could take decades to repair.

Organisations throughout history have suffered from waste and corruption, intermittently spawning efforts at “cleaning house” by a new incoming principal. However, the key question that stakeholders should be asking themselves is: is this drive to improve efficiency an attempt elevate the organisation’s performance? Or is it a front for an attempt by the new boss to remove adversaries from the organisation regardless of their impact on efficiency?

The Soviet Union became the poster child for this latter, distorted approach, taking the form of sporadic purges.

At times, the accusations levelled against those purged were entirely fictitious, with the general public unable to access the data that would allow them to decide for themselves. At other times, some officials were indeed guilty of waste and corruption, but at no greater a rate than those on more favourable terms with the general secretary of the governing Communist Party.

As a result, their removal simply led to their replacement by equally corrupt or wasteful officials, making the entire exercise useless from an efficiency perspective. Rather than motivating functionaries to innovate in the pursuit of productivity, they were incentivised to cosy up to the political elite.

When Mr Musk took over Twitter – now X – he supposedly laid off about 80 per cent of the staff. This extreme brand of downsizing harked back to the crude method of studying brain function pioneered by the French physiologist Pierre Flourens, whereby he would surgically remove parts of the brain and then observe behaviour to determine the functions served by each part.

Mr Musk had the choice of actually asking people what they do – Flourens could not speak to parts of animal brains. However, he preferred the swiftness of the “keep firing people until something stops working” approach. Regardless, as the owner of the social media platform, from a legal standpoint, it was his organisation to control as he saw fit.

The same is not true of the US federal government, which is owned by all American citizens. While President Donald Trump announced his intention to establish Doge under Mr Musk’s leadership during his election campaign, voters ultimately voted for the incumbent for a wide range of reasons that were not necessarily related to the department. Moreover, even if it were a single-issue vote, Mr Musk did not provide a detailed plan up front that can be used to legitimise his actions.

Of particular concern is the extreme opacity of Doge’s processes: similar to a government intelligence service, where the only person that stakeholders even know works in the organisation is the head. Mr Musk intermittently posts on X highlighting a case of waste or corruption that he detected, but beyond what he chooses to share, Americans are completely in the dark.

As of the end of last week, Doge dismissed more than 9,500 workers who handled a range of functions from managing federal lands to caring for military veterans. An additional 75,000 workers – about 3 per cent of the government’s civilian workforce – have taken a buyout. There have been reports that the speed and breadth of these cuts have left White House staffers frustrated over a lack of co-ordination.

It is, of course, early days yet. But some critics have said Mr Musk’s modus operandi has the hallmarks of a Soviet-style purge, whereby programmes and personnel considered unimportant to the new president’s agenda are removed, regardless of whether they are associated with corruption or incompetence.

Former president Bill Clinton and his deputy, Al Gore, showed that it doesn’t have to be this way. In 1993, Mr Clinton launched the National Performance Review with the aim of boosting efficiency, cutting bureaucracy and empowering frontline workers. It yielded a 400,000-person reduction in the federal workforce, shrinking the government to its lowest level since the 1960s.

Critically, the processes adopted by Mr Gore when heading the review confirmed that this was a noble endeavour rather than a purge. They engaged all federal employees in a dignified manner, with the then vice president personally chairing town hall meetings and taking notes, making them feel like partners rather than intransigent sloths. Progress reports were regularly made available to the public, ensuring transparency. The people implementing the review were known and accessible to voters.

Moreover, the entire process was bipartisan due to the realisation that every element of government had waste. In fact, one of the exemplars that was used to inform policy was the state government of Texas, which was a staunchly Republican entity, despite the president and vice president being Democrats. Doge’s actions, on the other hand, have left congressional Democrats worried that the current administration is encroaching on the legislature’s constitutional authority over federal spending.

If the fears that Doge is just a ruthless purge are confirmed, it will fundamentally change incentives in federal government. Civil servants will fixate on a clientelist form of government where an incoming administration fills government entities with loyalists, causing severe damage to the quality of public policy.

The US lived through this during the 19th century, until industrialists and the general public formed a large coalition that eventually uprooted the clientelism. Repeating this cycle of corruption at a time when the US has a formidable geostrategic rival in the form of China would be self-defeating.