How Quickly Would Elon Musk Have Been Fired If He Worked in the Private Sector?

That seems like a good question to pose about the person who is leading up the “Department” of Government Efficiency (DOGE). After all, it would be reasonable to expect that a government agency committed to increasing efficiency in government would go about its work in an efficient manner. It would be pretty hard to make that case about DOGE.

To start with, as many have pointed out, Musk appears to have completely ignored all the work done by the Government Accountability Office and the various agency Inspector Generals (most of whom he fired) in identifying fraud and waste. Even if Musk had felt their work was inadequate, it’s hard to believe that it would not have provided a useful jumping off point for Musk’s efforts.

For example, the Office of the Inspector General in the Small Business Administration identified more than $200 billion in likely fraudulent payments in the Paycheck Protection Program. This was one of the pandemic relief programs that was set up under Trump in his first administration.

This is an order of magnitude higher than cost of the programs and contracts that Musk has posted on his “Wall of Receipts” that is supposed to show DOGE’s savings for taxpayers. Maybe Musk and his team might have benefitted by spending at least a little time looking at the work done by people who have spent decades trying to ferret out waste and corruption.

The failure to do adequate homework has characterized much of what DOGE has done since springing into operation. The first thing Musk did was offer almost all government employees a buyout program that encouraged them to leave their jobs. Musk has explicitly said that he wants to downsize the federal workforce even though the ratio of government employees to the total labor force has fallen sharply over the last half century.

Apparently in making this offer, Musk had not bothered to check the situation across agencies. He had to quickly rescind the offer at the Federal Aviation Administration, which already is suffering from a serious shortage of air traffic controllers.

Then Musk and his DOGE team went around making cuts at individual agencies. Here also he seems to have failed to do the most minimal homework. In his effort to shut down USAID, he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both insisted that they were not shutting down programs that directly saved lives.

Yet, Musk did shut down PREPAR the George W. Bush program that has saved millions of people from AIDS in Africa, at a cost of 0.09 percent of the federal budget. Maybe Musk thought this was too much money to spend, but if he doesn’t want to shut down life-saving programs then PREPAR certainly should still be operating.

Musk did no more homework before making cuts at other agencies. He did mass layoffs at the National Nuclear Security Administration before realizing that these workers were needed to ensure the safety of the country’ nuclear weapon stockpile. He then had to scramble to hire them back. This task was especially difficult because his team had immediately deleted their government e-mails, which made them difficult to find.

When his team went to the Social Security Administration, they became confused about the agency’s files, causing Musk to insist that millions of people over age 100 were still collecting benefits. Even the most cursory examination of the programs known payouts would show this claim was absurd, but Musk repeated it again and again and got Donald Trump to do the same.

Then we have Musk’s famous “Wall of Receipts” where he posts the savings from eliminating programs and contracts that his team has identified as waste or fraud. The items that appear on the wall are programs that Musk didn’t like. These were policy choices made by prior administrations, including some from Trump’s first term, all with approval from Congress.

One can argue about all the items on the list (do government agencies need subscriptions to major newspapers?), but the bigger problem is that Musk and his team can’t seem to get their numbers right. The Wall of Receipts includes many contracts that were ended long ago. Also, they repeatedly posted numbers that were hugely larger than the actual value of the contracts. In one case, they listed $8 billion in savings for a contract that cost $8 million and had already been terminated.

In their slightly over two months of operation, Elon Musk and DOGE have committed more major blunders than a million bureaucrats would do in a lifetime. Musk is a government employee, answerable only to Donald Trump, so apparently performance is not a factor in his job security.

But it is worth asking whether Musk would still be employed with this sort of track record if he worked in the private sector?