My latest article: Elon Musk's war on the government

Carmageddon comes to the federal bureaucracy

My latest piece for The Economist (limited gift link - click quick!) is on what Elon Musk is doing to the federal government. The evisceration of USAID is one of the most astonishing things I have ever reported on. Years ago I covered the outbreak of famine in South Sudan, and so I know first hand what it means that food aid has now suddenly stopped.

The only relationship this has to my book is of course, Elon Musk as a carmaker. Parts of the book give some sense of his previous lack of realism and his willingness to break things to get what he wants. But if I am honest, I did not appreciate how far it could go.

I’m going to try to send out everything I publish on this Substack, though I have promised that before. But to make it a more credible promise, I’ll keep it short.

The past couple of weeks I’ve been working basically as hard as I have in years. I am exhausted, manic, exhilarated and depressed all at the same time. I do not intend on stopping soon.

Below are a couple of key paragraphs. Please do share the full story though.

The takedown of USAID is the most dramatic example of what seems to be Mr Musk’s plan for the whole of government. It is drawn from his playbook as a corporate boss. Just over two years ago Mr Musk took over Twitter in a messy $44bn deal. Within a few months, much of which he spent at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, he had reduced the company’s headcount by around four-fifths. A third of the staff accepted buyouts; many of the rest were fired. They included senior executives who were sacked instantly to stop their stock options vesting. Every decision, such as those about which Twitter accounts to ban, was put directly into Mr Musk’s hands.

Now he is trying to do the same thing with over 2m federal employees, in an attempt to cut $1trn—more than half of all discretionary spending—out of the federal budget. It is, says Donald Kettl, of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, like nothing that has ever happened before. “On a scale of one to ten, this is about 145. It’s so far off the charts,” he says. Richard Nixon was the most recent American president to govern as if the laws of the land did not apply to him, but “this is far beyond anything that Nixon even attempted”.