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The Long View
Musk the destroyer
By: Manuel L. Quezon III – @inquirerdotnet
Philippine Daily Inquirer / 04:55 AM February 19, 2025
The saying goes that the private sector is fast because it’s imperative is to turn a profit and thus, efficiency is the key to unlocking the cash register. Government, on the other hand, is in the business, such as it is, of public service, which does not depend on turning a profit. This is why, for example, most public transport is done by the government, which subsidizes it. At a certain point, however, the slowness of government exasperates the public it’s meant to serve, who resents government demanding taxes while providing services that fail to meet the efficiency or speed of the private sector.
Recently, reading the May 26, 1940 diary entry of Winston Churchill’s assistant private secretary, Jock Colville, I found a comparison of socialism and private enterprise that foreshadowed present-day events.
“Private enterprise,” Colville wrote, “is valuable because it is efficient, while state control makes for petty tyranny by government officials and for lack of drive or imagination. Local government is now in socialist hands and the result has been overspending of public money and the spread of corruption in local government. The Conservatives, on the other hand, have failed to take sufficiently strong measures. As was said of Erasmus, they have ‘sought to heal by incantations a wound which required the surgeon’s knife.’”
This phrase can be found in a 1995 speech by Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri who orated during a budget debate, “You cannot heal by just speaking words those things which require the surgeon’s knife. The truth of the matter is that we are in a condition in this country where the scalpel of surgery needs to be applied to the cancer of national irresponsibility. We need to have the scalpel of the surgeon’s knife cut out the unwanted and malignant growth which is taking over and depriving us of the ability to make good decisions regarding the future of this country.”
Fast forward to 2025 when Anne Lewis, who used to head the American government’s Technology Transformation Services, described what Elon Musk is doing to the United States government in this manner: “That’s taking a machete to something as opposed to making surgical cuts that try and improve the functioning of the government.” And being rabidly applauded for it by many Americans.
Everyone is against government waste, but what seemed impossible on arcane paper proved remarkably easy to do, once the formerly unthinkable became possible. All that was needed was to ignore precedents, regulations, and the entire philosophy of Republican government in pursuit of exercising what Filipinos like to call “political will.”
But will needs a way. According to the historian Lawrence Zhang, Musk is now referred to in China as “Secretary Ma ???” as in “party secretary aka the real holder of power.” Musk occupies a unique place as a person with government authority who remains in the private sector, who has unleashed teams of young programmers in a kind of Spanish Inquisition-style, rooting out of what Musk believes to be waste or impermissible (because unaligned with Trump priorities) programs. Along the way, he has embarked on massive cuts to the Federal bureaucracy, justifying it on something similar having been done before. Given the task by President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore cut over 377,000 Federal jobs by offering early retirement as well as taking advantage of significant Pentagon cuts with the end of the Cold War.
The key difference then and now is that a six-month review, then a message to Congress, which then authorized the program, took place under Clinton-Gore but no such thing has happened under Trump. He simply ignored regulations (such as conflict-of-interest rules and security vetting requirements) and unleashed Musk and his teams on the bureaucracy. Using X, the social media he owns, Musk then took to a kind of striptease-by-Tweet, making lurid assertions of odd programs and seemingly shocking expenses which, he said, his teams had identified, exposed, and ended–along with entire government agencies such as the US Agency for International Development.
Shocked and appalled, critics tried to protest but by then it was too late. Consider one example, supposedly anomalous fields in Social Security entries, which suggested many 150-year-old Americans receiving payments. COBOL was to blame, one argument went; something Filipino bankers might quietly admit to in their private moments (one legacy hire supposedly earns very well, kept on to maintain one bank’s systems). Banks, having to provide service, can’t just decouple; they have to keep functioning to the extent their systems, some programmers say, are held together “with duct tape and a prayer,” programming-wise.
But how to explain when, in politics, the moment you have to explain, you’ve already lost? There’s a saying in political communications that the moment you have to explain something, you’ve lost the argument. The framing of Musk and friends is as ancient as it is effective: We are doing good and we are exposing bad things; the more good we do, the more it offends the bad who did bad things; thus, anyone objecting to the good we are doing is bad.
