“You are very much at risk of damaging the connective tissue across our innovation system.”
Innovation Killer
President-elect Donald Trump has appointed multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk and big pharma shill Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” (or DOGE, in a nod to a cringey memecoin) an effort to inflict “temporary hardship” on the American people by making massive cuts to the federal government.
And even if it were to successfully do just that — something experts have plenty of doubts about — chopping down the “discretionary” budget could be a disaster for innovation in the country.
As Politico reports, indiscriminate budget cuts could sever key public-private partnerships and leave United States startups behind.
“If you are indiscriminately cutting these expenditures or staff, you are very much at risk of damaging the connective tissue across our innovation system,” Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow Sujai Shivakumar told Politico. “This is a time when we actually need to be doubling down and reinforcing our innovation system, and we would hope that any department looking to create efficiencies is mindful of that.”
Mass Firing
Musk’s approach to cutting budgets, which has historically involved mass layoffs and the dissolution of entire vital departments across his companies, could end up being more of the same when it comes to DOGE.
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy detailed how they’ll fire people across the federal government.
But whether applying that kind of Silicon Valley-style thinking to government bureaucracy will prove effective remains dubious at best.
“I think [Musk and Ramaswamy are] focused on the fact that having civil servants is the problem, and that they need to be like tech company employees,” Bay Area venture capitalist Rohit Krishnan told Politico. “I’m not sure it’s true. Because there is a lot of operational work needed, and actual negotiation to make things work.”
Now that Musk and Ramaswamy are searching for people with a so-called “high IQ” who are willing to work for no pay on the former’s social media platform, their ability to fill the massive civil servant hole they want to bore sounds highly questionable.
In short, by ripping up the established connections between entrepreneurs and the government, the DOGE department could be devastating to American innovation.
But whether they’ll even have a chance to tear down these relationships in the first place is far less clear. The so-called “department” will be operating from outside the government in what increasingly sounds like an advisory role.
In other words, Musk and Ramaswamy will need to get Congress on board with their indiscriminate mass culling of civil servants — which could prove far more difficult.
More on DOGE: Elon Musk’s “DOGE” Department Sounds Like It Might Be a Fake Thing to Make Him Feel Important
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