Trump’s Elon Musk experiment will either crash through or just crash | Samantha Maiden
Given both Donald Trump and Elon Musk upset everyone they work with this will make interesting viewing from Australia, writes Samantha Maiden.
Opinion
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When the world’s richest man Elon Musk took to the social media site X to post a doctored image of himself carrying a sink into the White House, it quickly went viral.
“Let that sink in,’’ he wrote.
It was an obvious reference to his original takeover of Twitter, when the eccentric billionaire signalled a changing of the guard by marching in with a sink to taunt his detractors.
Now he’s planning something similar, on a larger canvas: the United States government under the second coming of Donald Trump.
The President-elect has now confirmed the appointments of Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the “Department of Government Efficiency.”
“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement,” said Mr Trump.
This, Mr Trump announced, “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies”.
President-elect Trump pledged the pair would help him “dismantle” government bureaucracy and “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful spending.”
“A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” Trump said in the statement. “I am confident they will succeed!”.
Even his billionaire hire is ramping up the chaos angle.
“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!’’ Musk said in a statement.
And while mass sackings won’t happen overnight, there’s no doubt that slashing red tape – and jobs – is Mr Musk’s modus operandi.
Back when he took over Twitter, he promptly hit the eject button on 6000 workers’ jobs or around 80 per cent of the workforce.
Subsequently, he also dialled up his support for Donald Trump in words and deeds. He officially endorsed Trump after the July 13 assassination attempt at his Butler, Pennsylvania rally and joined him on the campaign trail in October.
In his own victory speech, President-elect Donald Trump spent nearly four minutes hailing Elon Musk as a “super genius,” and declaring “a star is born—Elon!”
Is this likely to end well?
Probably not given that both men have a habit of falling out with colleagues but buckle up because Donald and Elon are still in the honeymoon phase.
And at the very least, this crash or crash through style does hold the prospect of providing the world with a real-time experiment on actually reducing government spending, for better or worse.
It could even put pressure on other countries including Australia to think creatively about cutting government expenditure to bring down pressure on interest rates.
The billionaire Elon Musk has certainly put his money where his mouth is.
He is estimated to have donated $75m over the last three months to America Pac, the political action committee he founded that backed Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
In 2022, he swiftly reinstated Donald Trump’s banned X account by running a poll after he acquired the platform. “The people have spoken,” Musk shared, claiming 51.8 per cent of more than 15 million X users wanted the ban lifted.
The former US president’s X handle was banned after his supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington DC.
But now he’s on to bigger experiments.
His collaborator Mr Ramaswamy is a Yale-educated entrepreneur who wrote a popular book among Republicans: Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.
So what’s that likely to look like?
Trump’s purge of government workers is billed by some as the biggest change to the federal workforce since the late 1800s.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail,” Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “He will deliver.”
Another long-held pipe dream is abolishing the Department of Education.
Republicans argue the department is unnecessary and a tool of a “woke” culture war, with the states best left to administer education.
State and local governments already provide 90 per cent of the funding and set most of the rules in the education space.
Abolishing federal grant programs would get rid of an $18.4 billion program that provides supplemental funding to high-poverty K-12 schools, as well as the $15.5 billion program that helps cover the cost of education for students with disabilities.
The federal agency is also charged with enforcing civil rights laws that bar discrimination in federally funded schools on the basis of race, sex and other factors.
Perfect fuel for the culture wars that Donald Trump and his supporters love to ignite.
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