Management experts say DOGE is a case study in bad management
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The reelection of Donald Trump brought Republicans a chance to realize their long-held dream of drowning bureaucracy in a bathtub. Since the Reagan era, many have tried; none have succeeded. But when Trump announced that Elon Musk would serve as cutter in chief and set up a Department of Government Efficiency, many believed the moment had at last arrived. So in November, I posed a question to management and policy experts: Could Musk's history of ruthlessly slimming down his companies and making them wildly successful give him the experience he needs to sniff out and cut Washington waste?
They predicted that Musk would have less unilateral power to enact his will than he does in the headquarters of X or Tesla. The federal government is not ruled by a king, after all, let alone an unelected "special government employee." But they didn't doubt Musk, given that he gutted Twitter's staff and — defying expectations that the platform would break — somehow kept it alive. As the Columbia Business School professor Michael Morris told me, sometimes it takes "creative destruction" to make radical changes to large organizations. On the whole, the experts were cautiously hopeful.
That was the fall, when all anyone could do was speculate. Today, six weeks into DOGE's existence, we have a lot of data. DOGE has created a dizzying tornado of news. Musk has used it to test the limits of the law, such as by dismantling USAID, a move that many legal experts have called unconstitutional. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been hastily fired; some, such as those who regulate the nation's food supply, were rehired once their necessity was recognized. Engineers loyal to Musk have infiltrated government IT systems.
So I went back to the experts and asked for their assessment of how things are going so far. For the most part, their hope had morphed into serious concern. They described DOGE's tactics as "clumsy," "wrongheaded," and full of "political recklessness."
"The arrogance of the whole thing is pretty stunning — even for someone with an ego as large as Elon Musk," Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, tells me. "It appears as if the objective is just to blow things up and hope something better emerges."
Bilmes says Musk's approach thus far has been a huge "missed opportunity." In November she told me she hoped Musk would seek counsel from those who know best where government waste is, including the Government Accountability Office, the inspectors general, and federal workers themselves. DOGE has barely interacted with the GAO, which last week released its latest road map to improving government efficiency. Trump has fired more than a dozen inspectors general as part of the purge of government workers. And Musk has painted federal workers as his enemies rather than his partners. For two weekends in a row DOGE has sent an email to all federal workers asking for a list of their weekly accomplishments; if DOGE deems them lacking in productivity, they could be terminated.
Last month, onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Musk wielded what he called "the chainsaw for bureaucracy." But if Musk were truly interested in understanding the government to root out inefficiencies, Bilmes says, the memelord would have led with an image of a giant ear or telephone. "The wrongheadedness of the approach can be summed up in the image of the chainsaw," Bilmes added.
Two business school professors I talked to said the imagery harked back to "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. In the 1990s, Dunlap wiped out thousands of employees at the toilet-paper giant Scott, facilitated the sale of the company, and walked off with a $100 million paycheck. Dunlap then took his brutal methods to the appliance maker Sunbeam, where share prices soared in anticipation of his plan to halve the company's staff. But that alone couldn't save Sunbeam. After several quarters of disappointing profits and a scandal involving falsified accounting documents, Dunlap was fired. Sunbeam went bankrupt, and Dunlap was hit with a shareholder lawsuit accusing him of inflating stock prices to acquire two other brands, as well as fines by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused him of misrepresenting Sunbeam's financial results. (He settled both.) All that chainsawing left a trail of destruction. "He substituted one kind of trauma for another kind of trauma," Morris says.
Musk is jogging memories of Chainsaw Al because his tactics aren't about simply cutting back on government waste, which can be achieved through things such as killing the penny (Trump did order this), getting rid of unoccupied office space, and telling the Pentagon that its days of lobster dinners are no more. It's about pushing the federal workforce to the brink and expanding the power of the executive branch.
"I'm both appalled and hopeful," Morris says. "Letting young kids who don't know anything about the context just gain access to all kinds of records that it's not clear they're legally allowed to be looking at, that opens the door to privacy issues, to espionage, to all kinds of problems."
On the other hand, Morris maintains some optimism that Musk's wrecking-ball approach may still be the best bet yet to break through entrenched government waste. "Bureaucracies grow because politicians make calculated moves based on the constituencies that they're trying to keep for the next election. You have inertia, you have this snowballing bureaucracy, and that's part of the problem," he says. "It's relatively rare to have an administration and an administrator like Elon Musk with complete political courage, political recklessness even."
The world's richest man doesn't answer to voters, and he even said during Trump's campaign that Americans should expect economic "hardship" as a result of his slicing of government programs and workers. And Trump is only giving Musk more power, requiring agencies to create a centralized system managed by DOGE where they record and justify payments. He has even said he'd like for Musk to "get more aggressive."
Morris says that when bold figures like Musk try to bring about rapid change in business, they create shocks to the system that usually lead to blowback. And that blowback is building. On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the firing of probationary employees at some agencies. DOGE is drawing ire not just from federal workers and Democrats but from within the MAGA movement. Steve Bannon has called Musk a "truly evil person" and last week told an interviewer that Musk "wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country's history, values or traditions."
Recently, federal workers were sent a now notorious email asking them what they accomplished in the past week. They had little time to respond, with the threat of termination hanging over them if they left the email on read. Chaos ensued. Federal workers felt harassed and intimated, and many mulled resignation. Management experts largely told my colleagues that this type of leadership was harmful and could hurt worker morale. Then another email hit workers' inboxes, asking for a list of accomplishments to be sent every Monday. The emails are just the latest example of the ways DOGE and the Trump administration have wreaked psychological havoc on government workers, and Bilmes described them as "total nonsense." Many workers in the government are focused on preventing bad outcomes, such as the spread of disease or terrorist attacks — that work doesn't necessarily lend itself to ideals of efficiency.
Joseph Fuller, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, says that DOGE's tactics largely show that "at the root of what they're trying to do, they're trying to get the data." That could allow the government to push toward automating more tasks of its office workers. "In some ways, what they're trying to do is get a better map of how these places work so that they can start using tech to reduce costs and reduce deficits," Fuller says. But the disarray and confusion created by DOGE's tactics could outweigh any benefit. "The extent to which that agenda is overthrown by this kind of almost comically clumsy initiative might be something they regret," he says.
Fuller says tactics similar to the accomplishments emails happen in the corporate world in companies "under pretty significant financial duress." "It's a little bit of a 'break glass, pull lever' mechanism," he says, that "can be useful to allow you to make rapid cuts, which might cause you to live to fight another day in a corporate setting." The federal workforce is heavily unionized. The sources of funding are not controlled by a CEO. The government is not a company that needs to make it through the next quarter in hopes of being acquired. It needs the resources to carry on in perpetuity. DOGE did not respond to questions about whether it plans to work with the GAO as it continues to recommend spending cuts going forward.
The federal government isn't Sunbeam. Or Twitter. Or Tesla. Or SpaceX. When you cut half the people who work at Twitter, it glitches — even if it eventually recovers. When you eliminate USAID, people can die. How are we to measure the efficiency of programs that keep the country safe from terrorist attacks or nuclear disasters? The purge of employees can lead to gaps in systems we can't afford to break now and fix later.
The US government is not a corporation. And it's not a startup, the vast majority of which fail. Some are acquired, which is seen as success. Few turn out like Tesla and SpaceX. Their founders move on to try again, to come up with something new and take it back to investors for another go. The government cannot be put to the same tests — what it does is too important.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
