Galt's Government

The Trump/Musk administration is attempting to pull off a reverse Rand. It could turn out very, very badly.

Photo by Siddhant Kumar on Unsplash

The central plot conceit of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is that the United States falls into dysfunction without its dynamic entrepreneurs and inventors. In Rand’s mammoth tome, genius inventor John Galt organizes a collective strike by the country’s greatest creators to "stop the motor of the world." They depart the public stage and hide away at Galt’s Gulch in Colorado, swapping gold coins with each other. In Rand’s mental model, this withdrawal leaves behind only the looters and moochers to run things — thereby guaranteeing the collapse of modern bureaucratic society that Rand despised. Whatever one thinks of her theory, one of the things Rand does well in Atlas Shrugged is to depict the slow erosion of American society as Galt’s plot unfolds.

Intentionally or not, the second Trump administration is engaged is a grand reverse experiment: rather than creating Galt’s Gulch outside the reach of the state, Trump has handed over the keys of the government to Elon Musk and his business associates. The question is whether it will work as intended or lead to an even greater cataclysm.

Spoiler alert: I think it’s gonna be cataclysmic.

Let’s start with Musk rushing in to seize the means of state production. The New York Times’ Theodore Schleifer and Madeleine Ngo recounted this dynamic earlier this week:

[Last] Friday afternoon, the world’s richest person showed up at what sounds like one of the world’s most boring agencies to demand a list.

Elon Musk had arrived at the Office of Personnel Management, a mundane-sounding agency with vast power overseeing the federal civilian work force. During President Trump’s first term, the nation’s leader used the agency to enforce loyalty to his agenda. During his second term, it appears Mr. Musk may try to use the office to enforce loyalty to his own agenda.

Mr. Musk has stormed into Washington with a host of friends and paid employees, determined to leave his imprint quickly. Never before in modern times has someone so rich played such a hands-on role in American government, with Mr. Musk making himself omnipresent in Washington since flying there for Mr. Trump’s inauguration. His plane has not left….

Taking to Washington with his trademark single-mindedness and bravado, Mr. Musk is reprising the tactics he deployed at Twitter, which he bought in 2022. He has brought to bear the full weight of his Silicon Valley network, installing some of the same executives who cut 80 percent of the social network’s staff, and even using the same email subject lines. He has promised “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” and is now racing to do just that.

Mr. Musk’s slash-first, fix-later approach to cost-cutting has been intentional throughout his career. And some of the early moves by the Trump administration to freeze funding for federal programs and entice federal workers to resign have led to mass confusion or are being legally challenged.

The Times’ Kate Conger and Ryan Mac also highlight how Musk has brought his Silicon Valley business associates and employees along with him:

Steve Davis, the head of Mr. Musk’s tunneling startup, The Boring Company, helped oversee cost-cutting at Twitter and now leads DOGE. Brian Bjelde, a longtime human resources executive at SpaceX who also helped during the Twitter takeover, is now an adviser to the Office of Personnel Management.

Michael Grimes, a top banker at Morgan Stanley who helped lead Mr. Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is expected to take a senior job at the Commerce Department.

One of Mr. Musk’s software engineers at Tesla, Thomas Shedd, was named the head of “Technology Transformation Services” at the General Services Administration, which helps manage federal agencies. Mr. Shedd promptly employed a Musk tactic: asking for proof of engineers’ technical chops.

Mr. Shedd asked for engineers to sign up for sessions in which they could share “a recent individual technical win,” according to an email sent to more than 700 employees on Tuesday night and viewed by The Times.

As Silicon Valley folks are coming in, longstanding government officials are heading out. During Trump’s first two weeks in office, both Trump and Musk have worked hard to alienate and drive away an awful lot of government expertise. Consider the following actions:

First, there has been a gutting of upper echelons of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID):

Politico goes so far as to ask in their USAID coverage, “is the goal to shut it down?”

Second, there is the ongoing purge at the Justice Department and the FBI. The Washington Post reports that, “A top Justice Department official on Friday ordered the firing of at least eight senior FBI executives and a sweeping examination of the work of thousands of other bureau employees, including all those who worked on investigations tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.”

Third, as the Associated Press reports, Trump also cleaned house at DHS within 24 hours of taking office — including a key aviation security committee:

President Donald Trump moved quickly to remake the Department of Homeland Security Tuesday, firing the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and Coast Guard before their terms are up and eliminated all the members of a key aviation security advisory group.

Trump’s immigration policy changes drew the most attention at DHS, but he is also making changes at the rest of the massive agency.

Members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee received a memo Tuesday saying that the department is eliminating the membership of all advisory committees as part of a “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.”

The aviation security committee, which was mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, will technically continue to exist but it won’t have any members to carry out the work of examining safety issues at airlines and airports.

Fourth, there’s the Treasury Department — and this episode merits a lot of attention. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have reported on the departure of a top civil servant because he refused to let Elon Musk access the federal government’s payment system. Here’s the Times write-up:

The Trump administration pushed out a top Treasury Department official this week after he refused to give Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team access to the government’s vast payment system, part of a bid by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to choke off federal funding.

David Lebryk, a career civil servant who oversaw the more than one billion payments that the federal government makes every year, was placed on administrative leave this week after resisting requests from Mr. Musk’s lieutenants, according to people familiar with the circumstances, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal dynamics.

On Friday, Mr. Lebryk — who had briefly served as acting Treasury secretary until the confirmation of Scott Bessent this week — told colleagues that he would retire after more than 35 years of working for the government.

Mr. Lebryk’s abrupt departure raises questions about whether Mr. Musk will now gain control of the payment system — and, if so, how he could use it. His exit also underscores the extraordinary amount of power that Mr. Musk, whose current employment status inside the federal government remains unclear, is accumulating at the opening of the second Trump administration.

And here’s WaPo:

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration. Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive who has now been detailed to Treasury, is among those involved, the people said. Krause did not respond to requests for comment….

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate….

It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts….

Lebryk’s departure is expected to be a shock to Treasury personnel, among whom he enjoys a sterling reputation. The lifelong bureaucrat joined the department as an intern in 1989 and spent three decades at the agency under 11 treasury secretaries, serving as acting director of the U.S. Mint and commissioner of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, among other roles.

[UPDATE: 45 minutes after I published this the New York Times reported that Treasury had granted Musk and his DOGE minions “full access to the federal payment system.”]

Trump and Musk have used sticks to force out high-ranking civil servants. At the same time, Musk and his allies at OPM are also attempting to use a faux carrot to buy out other career civil servants. Politico’s Eli Stokols reports on the ongoing fallout from an OPM memo offering civil servants the opportunity to resign:

A federal workforce of some 2 million people is still reeling after receiving a mass email that offered them a chance to preemptively resign ahead of additional and unspecified Trump administration efforts to shrink government.

With the terms of a stark but murky ultimatum unclear and likely subject to legal interpretations and challenges, upwards of hundreds of thousands of individual employees were struggling with what to do, increasingly uncertain about the stability of their jobs and their agencies.

“Chaos, mistrust, confusion,” said one employee at the Department of Justice who, like others, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the situation without fear of retribution. “There’s also a deep suspicion, especially among people who think they may be on the chopping block, that this is the last lifeboat in town.”

Trump, who spent years decrying the “deep state,” has long wanted to reduce the government’s footprint. Frustrated over what he saw as overly lenient work-from-home policies nearly five years after the Covid-19 pandemic began, Trump has empowered Tesla CEO Elon Musk to help streamline government. But the vague order has nearly ground the massive bureaucracy to a halt, and has the potential to create the kind of crisis that might backfire politically.

So, to sum up: Trump has given Elon Musk and his business allies the keys to the government’s plumbing, endorsing their efforts to force out senior civil servants across the federal bureaucracy.

This is the Randian libertarian dream in two ways. First, if you accept libertarian dogma, the past two weeks are a best-case scenario. The wealthiest man in the world is taking a hatchet to the federal government, ejecting the looters and moochers who are viewed by many as the impediments to a dynamic society and economy. Surely the result will be a capitalist utopia.

The second way that it’s a libertarian dream? It’s not even remotely grounded in reality.