Elon Musk is on a mission to dismantle the US federal government, reducing staff, budgets and entire agencies. His choice of young men, some reportedly still in their teens, for this stampede across the government is no accident.
It is deliberate and performative posturing grounded in an idea that has dominated the technology industry for 30 years; that only naive genius can deliver transformative change. Applied to democracy and global politics, it is deeply dangerous.
On the domestic front, Musk has gathered a small, secretive team under his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). This semi-formal entity’s staff appears to be a group of about 40 young people, many recent graduates. A good portion come from Musk’s various businesses, and have no experience in government, but have shown promise in fields like engineering.
US president Donald Trump claimed the group is a “force of super-geniuses”, but unleashed on the state they have embarked on something approaching institutional vandalism. They cut the whole team working to detect future pandemics and stopped agencies issuing vital updates on the potentially catastrophic bird flu outbreak. They offered voluntary redundancy to two million public servants and infiltrated public payments and tax systems.
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They tried to slash science and public health research. And they are also attempting to dismantle USAid, with Musk describing the aid agency which provides much of the world’s food assistance and anti-HIV medication as “a criminal organisation”.
Musk’s tone of disdain is nothing new. Writing in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes described the emergence of state institutions as a necessary but unpleasant evil, a “Leviathan” or serpent demon that emerges from the sea to seize control of an unruly and violent mankind. Fast forward to the 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s immortal line: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.”
In the Silicon Valley world view, “disruption” is the idea that only outsiders like entrepreneurs and start-ups are able to deliver truly transformative change. The term was popularised by Clayton Christensen in the mid-1990s when he wrote about “disruptive technologies” and argued that large established corporations were incapable of true innovation. No large hotel chain, for example, was going to build Airbnb.
One USAid worker told reporters that because of funding freezes that cut access to antiretroviral medications, ‘300 babies that wouldn’t have had HIV now do’
It is hard to overstate just how influential this thinking has been. I worked alongside start-ups in Shoreditch, London, during the early 2010s when everyone was trying to disrupt everything. We were living through a time when smartphones realigned whole ways of working across entertainment, commerce, and communication. In this era of peak techno-optimism, I sat in on hackathons where 20-somethings were convinced they could do anything from fight cholera to prevent war crimes over a weekend of sourdough pizza and craft IPAs.
Moreover, it wasn’t just tech companies who caught the disruption bug. Former US president Barack Obama introduced the “presidential innovation fellows” in 2012. These brought in “innovators” mostly from the tech sector on rotations within agencies to find new ways of doing things within government.
Yet “disruption” was already changing: from a mechanism for technological breakthrough, to something akin to a philosophical viewpoint. By 2003 Christensen had rebranded his concept from “disruptive technology” to “disruptive innovation”. This wasn’t about who had the best product, but about who could restructure and dominate entire markets. It was not the inventor of the automobile who changed transport, but Henry Ford’s ability to make the car affordable and open up new demand that had not previously existed.
Disruption became about the naive genius, the Zuckerbergs in their dorm rooms changing how we communicate and advertise. This was how Elizabeth Holmes, a 19-year-old college dropout, convinced investors she could radically transform medicine. She raised more than $700 million in investor cash for blood testing technology that did not, and scientifically could not, exist. She is now serving a prison sentence for fraud, but back in 2014 one of many glowing media profiles quoted her on the secret of her “success”; “we focus all the time on disrupting ourselves, and that’s one of the core tenets in the way we operate”.
While this approach may sometimes work in business, the notion that inexperienced “super-geniuses” can reform the State and realign global politics is dangerous. One USAid worker told reporters that because of funding freezes that cut access to antiretroviral medications, “300 babies that wouldn’t have had HIV now do”. On the international front, Musk has used his social media platform X and provocative public statements to boost far-right parties including Alternative for Germany (AfD), Britain’s Reform Party, and has forged a close friendship with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, as part of a plan to “disrupt” European politics which he views as ripe for transformative change.
It’s far from clear what he thinks should come next. “When a business is destroyed, a new one may arise, but that may be in a completely different field. When democracy is destroyed, a different social and ruling order emerges that does not have to adhere to the rules of the old ones,” as German sociologist Matthias Quent put it to The New York Times.
Governments are plagued with problems. Bureaucracy can be grindingly, oppressively slow. Ideas become entrenched and resistant to change. And private sector incentives to improve – forces of competition, investor demands – are largely absent. But some of this friction is warranted. We like that there are regulatory steps to approving new drugs before we ingest them. Knowing what is necessary infrastructure for a healthy society, and what is needless red tape, is difficult, complex and slow work. Governing is hard.
Rather than techno-utopian ideas of disruption, a foundation of government reform – and something that voters everywhere want – is increased accountability. Yet it is telling that one of the first cuts that the Trump-Musk regime made was to sack the inspectors general, the independent offices dedicated to finding fraud, waste and abuse.
The performative vandalism of Musk’s “super–geniuses” will at some point come to an end, but it will leave behind a state that is weaker, less transparent, and a threat to the most vulnerable.
The real fear is that this is the true intention.
Liz Carolan works on democracy and technology issues, and writes at TheBriefing.ie
