"Move fast and break things", a phrase popularized by Mark Zuckerberg in the earlier years of Facebook, has become the best way to understand Musk's approach to his takeover of businesses (particularly X), and now of the US Government via DOGE (which he isn't officially a part of?) .

The sentiment is understandable, too often decisions are bogged down in bureaucracy and committees, and being too risk-averse can have detrimental effects to a business. Additionally, when a system has been perceived as already 'broken', with polling showing American's views of the government being at or near all time lows, it's hard to argue against taking a sledgehammer to it.

One big problem: The US Government is not a business.

Moving fast and breaking things can work in business because the stakes are contained, if you break something critical to the business, say for instance your user-facing website, you learn about the problem quickly and can also usually fix it quickly. You might lose revenue during the downtime and maybe lose a couple customers, but the stakes are relatively low and acceptable, after all if you want your business to survive you sometimes need to take risky actions. Again, at the end of the day the stakes involved are relatively low, businesses fail all the time and bankruptcy exists for a reason, rarely are people losing their lives when a business goes under.

It's also worth noting that moving fast and breaking things doesn't always work, especially if you don't fully understand the business. So far X has been a good example of this. Although Musk obtained the business at a high premium shortly before a market correction, revenues continue to remain near half of what they were prior to Musk taking over in spite of the market and revenues recovering for competitors. There's also no denying the degradation of moderation, support services, and other Trust and Safety protections, such as the combatting of bot accounts, scams and fraud, that have led to the user experience becoming significantly worse than what it was in 2022.

Perhaps in the coming 5-10 years the degradation will turn around, or a case can be made that Twitter was never going to succeed on its prior trajectory and the funding of the support, moderation, and trust and safety teams and systems was shortsighted and a degraded user experience and increase in bot and scam activity won't actually prevent the business from being successful. I would argue that Musk clearly did not intend for this to be the path when he took over, as was evidenced in how much he railed against bot activity which he no longer mentions and has made easier to coordinate, in addition to the lawsuits he's launched complaining about advertisers who have pulled out after his moderation failures and active hostility towards them. But Musk has enough resources and talented people willing to work for him or currently working for his other businesses that X can continue as a failing business for many years to come with little to no high-stake negative effects and it'll be a long time before we're able to accurately assess whether the "move fast and break things" was an effective approach.

Despite this, and lack of tangible success, Musk's cavalier approach is already being publicly lauded by MAGA, Republican members of Congress, and his tech allies. DOGE doesn't just have a 'mandate' in their eyes, many of them see it as a divine directive, one they're already very successful on. This is despite the fact that no allegations of waste, fraud, and abuse, have been substantiated. So far the majority of savings, which are being massively inflated, are from employment cuts and ending Congressionally approved and funded programs (which is being found by judges on both sides of the aisle to be unconstitutional). In the process of making these 'cuts' Musk/DOGE has already broken plenty of things including: information security practices (causing the resignation of multiple security chief and Trump-appointed agency heads), breaching and leaking classified information on the DOGE website, stranding USAID employees in foreign countries and isolating them from support and services they had no warning they would lose access to, and cutting off support to volunteers in the middle of medical trials. These are not the same low-stakes that make 'breaking things' acceptable in a business like X. These are quite high stakes, that can have life threatening consequences.

Thousands of government employees across numerous administrations and services are also being terminated. Many of these employees are 'probationary' which can mean anything from short-term services to those who decided to take a promotion to a manager or supervisor role which requires a probationary employment period. Some of these employees are veterans working for the VA in what are described as 'critical' roles by their supervisors. Some might argue these are necessary sacrifices in the greater good of austerity, but the question that makes this all the more infuriating is asking "to what end?" To what end are we upending the lives of veterans, of park rangers, of agencies and services dedicated to serving the people of the United States, not the rich, but average people who rely on government services on a regular basis? To what end are we exposing the country to massive infosec vulnerabilities, and allowing the world's richest man unfettered access to data and systems he can leverage to further enrich himself? To what end are we shutting down programs and teams dedicated to combatting and ending infectious diseases domestically and globally?

The answer is tremendously disappointing. The savings the American people are getting from ending the employment of good, qualified, hard working Americans, and shutting down programs that produce useful research and results and have run for decades, is actually no savings at all. That's because those savings are immediately being offset by a renewal of a tax cut package that threatens to add over $5 trillion to the National Debt over the next 10 years. That means even if we take DOGE's fake numbers at their face value, we're saving a penny for every dollar being added to the debt.

The government already has plenty of functions established and built in to detect waste and fraud, watchdogs, auditors, agencies all dedicated to ensuring good stewardship of the taxpayer money. Many of these operate quite effectively and produce real results, not the smoke and mirrors DOGE produces. We don't need wrecking ball Musk to come in and break and cripple entire agencies to find savings. To make measurable progress on reducing the debt we need a President and Congress willing to take tough austerity measures that traditionally include expanding the tax base, increasing tax receipts, making changes to benefits programs like social security and Medicaid, or finding ways to increase economic production. The problem is, these are hard and long-term problems, not quick fixes, and they often have political costs that people like Trump are keen to avoid.

I'm not sure what Musk and Trump's end goal is with DOGE, as they're almost certainly doomed to fail at making any measurable progress against the debt. As it stands, the only achievements they appear to be making are to make the government worse and less efficient, and whether that's being done intentionally in hopes of further eroding trust and feelings towards the government, pure greed and desire to enrich themselves, or out of misguided principles or understandings of the function of government, I'm not sure. Regardless, things are getting broken, and I can guarantee you that the interests of the average American are not being served by it.