Management experts say that Musk’s Doge is a case -end management case study

Donald Trump’s re -election has brought the Republicans a chance to realize their longtime dream to drown the bureaucracy in a bathtub. Since the Reagan era, many have tried; None have succeeded. But when Trump announced that Elon Musk would serve as a chief cup and set up a Government Department of EffectivenessMany thought that the moment had finally arrived. Thus, in November, I asked experts in management and politics: could Musk’s story of the ruthlessly reduction of its companies And make them succeed in succeeding in giving him the experience he needs to sniff and cut Washington waste?

They predicted that Musk would have a less unilateral power to promulgate his will than in the siege of X or Tesla. The federal government is not governed by a king, after all, not to mention an unadorized “special government employee”. But they did not doubt a musk, since he Twitter staff for empties And – defying the expectations that the platform would break – maintained it in a way alive. Like Professor Michael Morris, the professor of the Columbia Business School, sometimes asks me, it takes “creative destruction” to make radical modifications to major organizations. Overall, the experts were cautiously full of hope.

It was the fall, when everyone could do was speculate. Today, six weeks in the existence of Doge, we have a plot data. DOGE has created a dizzying tornado of news. Musk used it to test the limits of the law, as by dismantling USAID, a decision that many legal experts have called unconstitutional. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been hastily dismissed; Some, such as those who regulate the country’s food supply, have been rehired once their necessity has been recognized. Engineers loyal to Musk have Infiltrated government computer systems.

So I went back to experts and asked for their assessment of how things are going so far. For the most part, their hope has turned into a serious concern. They described Doge’s tactics as “clumsy”, “unhappy” and full of “political carelessness”.

“The arrogance of all this is quite surprising – even for someone with an ego as tall as Elon Musk,” said Linda Bilmes, lecturer in public politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. “It seems that the goal is fair to explode things and hope that something better emerges.”

Bilmes says that Musk’s approach so far has been a huge “missed opportunity”. In November, she told me that she hoped that Musk would ask for advice from those who know the best where the government wasted, including the government’s responsibility office, the general inspectors and the federal workers themselves. Doge barely interacted with the GaoWho published his last roadmap last week to improve the effectiveness of the government. Trump has drawn more than a dozen general inspectors in the purge of government employees. And Musk painted federal workers like his enemies rather than his partners. For two consecutive weekends, Doge sent a E-mail to all federal workers Ask for a list of their weekly achievements; If Doge considers them lacking in productivity, they could be terminated.

Last month, on stage at the conservative political action conference, Musk exercised what he called “the chainsaw for the bureaucracy”. But if Musk was really interested in understanding the government to eliminate ineffectiveness, says Bilmes, the memelord would have led with an image of an ear or a giant phone. “The bad point of the approach can be summarized in the image of the chainsaw,” added Bilmes.

Two business school teachers I spoke to say that the imagery returned to the “chainsaw” Al Dunlap. In the 1990s, Dunlap suffered thousands of employees in the Scott toilet paper giant, facilitated the sale of the company and left with a pay check of $ 100 million. Dunlap then brought its brutal methods to the manufacturer of Sunbeam devices, where the share price has climbed in anticipation of its plan to make the company’s staff. But that alone could not save Sunbeam. After several quarters of disappointing profits and a scandal involving falsified accounting documents, Dunlap was dismissed. Sunbeam went bankrupt, and Dunlap was struck by a trial for shareholders accusing him of having inflated shares to acquire two other marks, as well as fines of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused him of having distorted the financial results of Sunbeam. (He settled both.) All that the chainsaw left a trace of destruction. “He replaced one type of trauma for another type of trauma,” said Morris.

Musk jogs the memories of the AL chainsaw because its tactics only just concern reducing government waste, which can be carried out through things such as Kill the penny (Trump ordered this), getting rid of the unoccupied office space and tell the Pentagon that his lobster dinners are no longer. It is a question of pushing the federal workforce to the edge and to widen the power of the executive power.

“I am both dismayed and full of hope,” said Morris. “Leave young children who do not know anything about the context access to all kinds of files that it is not clear that they are legally authorized to look at, which open the door to confidentiality, spying, to all kinds of problems.”

On the other hand, Morris maintains a certain optimism that the approach of Musk tickets could always be the best bet to unravel the rooted government waste. “Bureaucracies grow because politicians take movements calculated according to the constituencies they are trying to keep for the next elections. You have inertia, you have this bureaucracy snowball, and that is part of the problem,” he said. “It is relatively rare to have an administration and an administrator like Elon Musk with full political courage, even political insruption.”

The richest man in the world does not respond to voters, and he even declared during Trump’s campaign that Americans should expect economic “difficulties” as a result of his sulling of government programs and workers. And Trump only gives Musk more power, forcing agencies to create a centralized system managed by Doge where they record and justify payments. He even said he would like Musk to do “become more aggressive. “”

Morris says that when daring figures like Musk try to cause a rapid change in business, they create shocks to the system that generally lead to flame return. And this flame return is built. On Thursday, a federal judge made a temporary prohibition order blocking the dismissal of the probationary employees of certain agencies. DOGE gets angry not only from federal workers and Democrats, but from the interior of the Maga movement. Steve Bannon called Musk a “really perverse person” and last week told an interviewer that Musk “wanted to impose his bizarre experiences and his act of play like God without any respect for the history, values ​​or traditions of the country”.

Recently, federal workers have received an email now notorious asking them What they did last week. They had a short time to answer, with the threat of dismissal which suspended them if they left the email in reading. Chaos ensued. Federal workers felt harassed and guestsAnd many thoughtful resignations. Management experts have largely told my colleagues that This type of leadership was harmful and could harm workers’ morale. Then another email struck the reception boxes of the workers, asking for a list of achievements to send every Monday. E-mails are only the latest example of the ways in which Doge and the Trump administration have wreaked to be psychological on civil servants, and Bilmes described them as “total nonsense”. Many government workers focus on prevention of poor results, such as the spread of diseases or terrorist attacks – this work does not necessarily lend itself to ideals of efficiency.

Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, said that DOGE tactics show largely that “at the origin of what they are trying to do, they try to obtain the data”. This could allow the government to push to automate more tasks of its office employees. “In some ways, what they are trying to do is get a better card of the functionality of these places so that they can start using technology to reduce costs and reduce deficits,” said Fuller. But disarray and confusion created by Doge’s tactics could prevail over any advantage. “The extent to which this program is overthrown by this kind of almost comical initiative could be something they regret,” he said.

Fuller says that tactics similar to achievements occur in the business world in businesses “under a fairly large financial constraint”. “It is a bit like a” Break Glass, raising sweater “mechanism”, he says, that “can be useful to allow you to make fast cuts, which could make you live another day in a business setting.” Federal workforce is strongly unionized. Financing sources are not controlled by a CEO. The government is not a company that must pass over the next quarter in the hope of being acquired. He needs resources to continue life. DOGE did not answer questions to find out if it plans to work with GAO because it continues to recommend discounts of spending in the future.

The federal government is not Sunbeam. Or Twitter. Or tesla. Or spacex. When you cut half of the people who work on Twitter, that is a problem – even if it is finally recovered. When you eliminate USAID, people can die. How to measure the efficiency of programs that keep the country safe from terrorist attacks or nuclear disasters? Employee purge can lead to gaps in systems that we cannot afford to break now and repair later.

The American government is not a society. And it is not a startup, the vast majority of which fail. Some are acquired, which is considered a success. Little turn like Tesla and SpaceX. Their founders continue to try again, to find something new and bring it back to investors for another blow. The government cannot be put in the same tests – what it does is too important.

Amanda Hoover is a main correspondent at Business Insider covering the technological industry. She writes on the largest technological companies and trends.