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Elon Musk knows nothing about government efficiency

Here is Elon again:

Good work! Except for one thing: $895 billion of his $900 billion is for two items. The first is interest on the debt, which Elon can't change. The second is government overpayments, which are a legit problem but not one that Elon has any idea how to fix. In other words, there's literally nothing here.

But it also highlights one of my pet peeves about these lists, pioneered decades ago by William Proxmire's "Golden Fleece" awards: They mostly mock trivial science projects with funny names like "Dr. Fauci's Transgender Monkey Study" that nearly always turn out to be perfectly sensible if you actually read them.

This particular one is a longtime conservative favorite sparked by PETA—strange bedfellows indeed. The actual study is simple and straightforward: trans women have high rates of HIV, so a Scripps researcher got a small grant to inject female hormones into male rhesus macaques to see if it made them more vulnerable to the HIV virus. It follows a well-established line of research going back years and there's nothing even remotely crazy about it.

If this is the kind of thing we can expect from Elon, his government efficiency project will turn out to be even stupider than it first seemed. But although it will likely accomplish nothing, I'm sure we can look forward to lots of dumb tweets and press releases along the way.

70 thoughts on “Elon Musk knows nothing about government efficiency

  1. FrankM

    Improper Federal Payments is a hobby horse that comes around from time to time, but upon investigation, always turns out to be a lot of nothing. IIRC, it includes both overpayments and underpayments. It also assumes, incorrectly, that these are not subsequently corrected. Everything else utilizes the "lots of zeros" technique, but as you point out, is in the rounding error of the total.

    1. HokieAnnie

      Yep, and a lot of the overpayments are intergovernmental payments not properly flagged. It's about the need for better accounting support in the US Government. Modern ERPs and a cadre of data analysts and accounting subject matter experts can get us to a better place.

      But nope like immigration, folks don't want to fix the problem, they want to use it as a hobby horse to bash the civil service.

  2. Josef

    There's no such thing as a transgender monkey. Gender is solely associated with humans. Animals don't have genders. As usual their argument is dishonest right from the start.

    1. Crissa

      This is... not quite right.

      Gender is a set of behaviors. Which yes, we have cultural hangups as Humans, but many other animals perform gender. From females raising offspring or male doing the same, those are gendered behaviors, and we've often found animals behaving outside their perceived roles.

      Sex is a set of structures, which may or may not align with behavior or even each other - because biology is messy and never entirely binary.

      1. mcirvin14

        This is just not correct; gender IS a set of behaviors, but not any old set, its grammar is socially constructed, and the constituent behaviors are learned. Comparing this to sexually defined behaviors in non-human animals (with some exceptions) is a category error. Also, humans tend to (erroneously) believe in free will; somehow imparting a new category of behavior to our species alone. It’s physics all the may down!

    2. cephalopod

      When I was In high school back in the last millennium we had this super woke science lab where we raised chickens and injected them with hormones to see how that would impact development.

        1. DButch

          In my case, on Oahu in the mid-60s, we turned almost all our chicks into roosters, rather than the expected result (without hormones) of a lot more chicks becoming hens. Didn't really last though, after the hormone treatments stopped, they slowly lost the cock features. It wasn't a change to the actual sex - more a temporary override.

          No farmers wanted to take them though. So a lot got adopted by families of students.

    3. OwnedByTwoCats

      In many languages, all nouns have gender. Including Monkey. In German, the word for Monkey is "Affe", and it's a masculine noun. So usage could be "Der Affe isst eine Banane" (the monkey is eating a banana). A transgendered monkey would be feminine or neuter, so "Das Affe isst eine Banane" or "Die Affe isst eine Banane". A German speaker would call those grammatical errors, though, because Affe is masculine.

      1. TedMcD

        I loved taking German in High School because I didn't have to memorize the crazy spelling exceptions English has -- words are spelled exactly as they sound.

        Then I realized the gender of nouns contained a long list of exceptions to be memorized. Doh!

    4. TheMelancholyDonkey

      Their argument seems dishonest to you because you don't understand it. The experiment had nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not there are transgendered monkeys. What they were investigating was whether or not injecting a male monkey with female hormones makes them more susceptible to HIV. That doesn't require that any of the monkeys involved actually be transgendered.

      Beyond that, as was pointed out by several others, you don't actually understand what gender is.

  3. Yikes

    I'm sure there is a chart to be had pointing out that people are no smarter today, and are every bit as dumb, as they ever were.

    I have been hearing this Republican wasteful government bullshit for at least five decades, and its the same crap every time.

    1. Overpaying government contractors, especially military ones, is never included in the concept of "waste."

    2. "Waste" is always defined as a give away to the lazy poor, or, just for fun to a government employee. Again, with an exception for government employees that conservatives like.

    The lie is that category 2 accounts for any significant portion at all of the Fed, or, for that matter State level government spending. Anyone who thinks that its easy to cut trillions of dollars has no clue at all about the Fed budget. You don't need some joke list, since the actual federal budged is publicly disclosed.

    FFS, we spent billions on some sort of half destroyer thing which is completely cancelled and I guarantee no republican will mention that.

    1. MikeTheMathGuy

      Every time there is a government commission on "waste, fraud, and abuse," it comes with a report more properly titled "list of programs commission members don't like."

        1. d34df4n

          Conservatives generally don't like things they can't understand. So, both of you are right.

          I think this simple fact largely explains why they are constantly angry about everything. They desperately want the world to be a simple place governed by 'common sense', but it stubbornly refuses to comply. Most things just aren't black/white or right/wrong, and this causes a lot of anxiety in the conservative mind.

    2. memyselfandi

      If you consider interest payments on government debt waste, and think it is a good idea to ignore the constitutional requirement to honor the national debt and are willing to default on said debt (which conservatives have repeatedly made clear they really want to) then it is easy to cut massive amounts of money from the deficit and completely destroy the world economy.

  4. rick_jones

    I was wondering when a Proxmire reference would appear 🙂

    The example someone in a hallway conversation brought up was shrimp on a treadmill. Haven’t found it yet to see if there was a reason behind it. Thought perhaps wanting to know how far shrimp could travel in a given time.

    1. cephalopod

      The shrimp on a treadmill was measuring the impact of water quality on how animals function. Since we eat a lot of shrimp, understanding how their environment affects them can be economically as well as environmentally useful.

      Other times scientists use animals on treadmills to learn how to build robots that are better at moving around. Why reinvent a wheel evolution has already designed?

    2. jolocamp

      I remember Proxmire savaging a researcher because he was studying the sex lives of moths. Years later, because of this research, foresters had Gypsy moth traps that use the female gypsy moth's sex pheromone to attract and catch male gypsy moths.

  5. D_Ohrk_E1

    They're misunderstanding the "pot of cash for political campaigns."

    That's the Presidential Election Campaign Fund money that's been accumulating over the years from all the folks who checked off the $3 donation on their federal tax return. No modern campaign wishes to be restricted by the rules for accepting money from the fund, with the last person to accept money from the fund being John McCain in 2008.

    The DOGE is a misnomer. It should be called DUMB:
    Department Under Megalomaniacal Bros

    1. emjayay

      I'm sure that Vivek and Elon, two of the most egocentric self important individuals on the planet, will work together perfectly well on running their not a department.

      1. jeffreycmcmahon

        Vivek is a toady at heart though, way more than Elon, so any meeting of them will involve Elon making a lot of terrible jokes and Vivek pretending to laugh at them, which will encourage Elon to make more awful jokes, and so on forever.

        1. aldoushickman

          Also, Vivek, though (probably?) a billionaire, is a piker compared to Musk, who has a net worth >300x that of Vivek. There's no question who will be sucking up to whom.

  6. gibba-mang

    I thought "No New Wars" Trump would make a drastic reduction in the military budget since he's now the savior making peace around the globe!

    I imagine Elon will recommend drastic cuts in Medicaid and Medicare and perhaps future reductions in SS.

    1. lawnorder

      Musk is a strange character. He's right wing without being conservative, which makes him a very unconventional Republican. I think he could use a check up from the neck up, but for whatever reason he's not entirely predictable. I would be completely unsurprised to see him recommend massive cuts to the military budget.

  7. rick_jones

    Let’s suppose that the hormone-injected monkeys were indeed more susceptible to HIV (via what means of infection?). What exactly would we change? Would we then discourage if not preclude such hormone injections in trans women?

    1. Crissa

      Well, we won't find that. We know no method for that to occur. But if it found something, it might reveal about the immune system we didn't know.

      But the thing is, until we do the study, that correlation will be used to deny treatment to trans women.

      Out in the real world, trans women are discriminated against in work, school, housing and a higher number therefore participate in the sex economy. Additionally, bottom surgery is expensive when paying retail, and so they have anal sex at a higher rate than cisgender women. These three things easily explain the difference individually!

      Last thing: We treat prostate cancer with cross hormones and hormone blockers (like in the study) as well as there being up to 2% of the population maybe having genetic chimerism would have their treatments informed by this study - and nearly all of them are cisgender.

    2. cephalopod

      Or we might prescribe anti-HIV drugs or encourage more frequent testing. Or we could simply let people know of their greater risk, so they can make more informed choices.

      That's how we deal with other situations where one treatment increases risks in other areas. For example, there are millions of people on blood thinners who have to deal with the potential negatives of their treatment.

    3. memyselfandi

      To become infected with a virus (or bacteria), there is a minimum number of active viral particle that must be introduced into your system. (And no, it is never one.) Compounds that change that number would alter infection rates .

  8. emjayay

    I think it was Sarah Palin who went on about a grant for a fruitfly study. No expert, but I think that fruitflies are used for genetic research because of their simple genome and really fast reproduction.

    Government efficiency is something that should be looked at constantly, not some giant slash two trillion bucks in a year deal. As a former federal employee in three agencies I'd say that typical bureacratic dysfunction as seen in both government and private corporations is something that's usually there and could always use addressing. It's been studied by academics and various management gurus for ages. A New Government Deming would be fine but these two (is Vivek still in?) aren't that guy.

    1. FrankM

      Of course bureaucratic waste exists in the government. It exists in every bureaucracy, private corporations included. At a certain level, it's unavoidable.

      1. DButch

        When I was working at DEC (RIP) in the mid-70s there was a story about the security chief at the Maynard (MA) civil war era mill building converted to computer manufacturing.

        The security chief noted that a guy in the janitorial crew was taking out lots of cardboard boxes in a wheel barrow every day to be broken down and hauled away (not much recycling back then). He decided that there as something fishy going on. But all the surveillance tapes and inspections showed nothing wrong.

        Finally the chief had the guy in and said: "Look, I know something is up but I can't figure out what it is! If you come clean I'll just drop the investigation since we have no proof of any wrongdoing."

        The guy asked: "No charges or firing?" Chief: "Promise, I just need to know!"

        Janitorial guy: "I was stealing the wheelbarrows."

        Probably apocryphal, but it was all over DEC when I started in 1974. And who am I to not propagate a good story.

    2. memyselfandi

      This was one of Bill Clintons promises the first time he was elected and he put Gore in charge of that after he assumed the presidency. From wikipedia "The National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) was a U.S. government reform initiative launched in 1993 by Vice President Al Gore. Its goal was to make the federal government "work better, cost less, and get results Americans care about".[1] The initiative aimed to streamline processes, cut bureaucracy, and implement innovative solutions. NPR was active until 1998. During its five years, it catalyzed significant changes in the way the federal government operates, including the elimination of over 100 programs, the elimination of over 250,000 federal jobs, and the consolidation of over 800 agencies. NPR introduced the use of performance measurements and customer satisfaction surveys, and encouraged the use of technology. "

      1. bouncing_b

        Yup. I lived through that.
        In my lab, the new model was for managers to be feds, with scientists and techs (previously mostly feds) turned into contractors of some kind, mostly as employees of a nearby university, without tenure or any job security.

        Of course those people have one foot out the door applying for real jobs, and their commitment and dedication to our missions is far smaller.

        But some money was saved - or at least taken off the salary/benefit ledger - by not paying for their benefits.

  9. cephalopod

    I remember Republican grandstanding about research on mosquitos back in the 1990s. And then we had West Nile sweep through. Haven't heard complaints about mosquito research since then.

    1. aldoushickman

      I remember Republican grandstanding about the supercollider in back in the 1990s. As a result, we only built half of it, and cutting edge particle physics experiments shifted to Europe and was probably set back a decade or so. But we saved enough money to pay for a couple of days of Iraq War, so it's all good.

  10. skeptonomist

    Another reminder that most of the interest on the national debt goes back into the economy. It goes largely to rich people, banks, etc. so conservatives should be happy with that; in principle it can be used for investment just like the money from tax cuts. Or it could be used to buy bitcoin.

    The potential problem is the part of the debt held by foreigners, which is a complex problem and is affected by the trade deficit.

    1. lawnorder

      Much of the national debt is held by the social security trust fund; that's going to have to be paid back starting soon as the trust fund reaches the point where outgo exceeds income.

      1. Joel

        The SS trust fund is already shrinking as it makes up for the fact that income isn't keeping up with payments to beneficiaries.

  11. paulgottlieb

    Proxmire was a flaming asshole: a doughy ball of smug ignorance. The fact that our prestige media eager lapped up that tew of smarmy ignorance he was serving was a sign of things to come

  12. dilbert dogbert

    Some of the audience might like this from Dan Davies:
    https://backofmind.substack.com/p/a-more-subtle-cost-disease
    Friday thorts … the Tony Blair Institute have published a thing, in which the following claim is made:

    We estimate that a full and effective adoption of AI by UK firms could save almost a quarter of private sector workplace time - equivalent to the output of 6 million workers

    Well, isn’t that. My problem with this is not so much with the estimate of how much time it could save, which I’m not in a position to gainsay. It’s more that even if this is correct, the underlying input-output model here doesn’t work for the kind of jobs that could use AI.

    I’ll put it this way. The Tony Blair Institute work in an office (I know this, because I’ve been there). The office has a coffee machine (I’ve drunk some). The staff often hang around drinking coffee, gossiping and telling jokes. (As I say, I’ve been there). Consequently, I cannot understand why they don’t see as clearly as I do that the impact on output of full and effective adoption of any technology that saved 25% of their time would most likely be much closer to “absolutely nothing”.

  13. Eric Nyman

    It's a shame Proxmire is primarily known for the Golden Fleece award because he was a Senator of incredible principle. He refused all campaign donations and would return your check to you if you tried to mail him one. His only listed campaign expense in his last two reelection campaigns in 1976 and 1982 was for the cost of filing the reelection paperwork. He even paid his Congessional travel expenses out of his own pocket instead of claiming reimbursement from taxpayers. He attended over 10,000 consecutive roll call votes (a record that will almost certainly never be broken) and also had a perfect record of attendance in the Wisconsin legislature. He gave the same speech daily for 19 years about ratifying the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide until it finally passed. He opposed NASA, but largely due to their funding of research into space colonization. And many of his Golden Fleece awards went to the military, despite his own WW2 battle record. And I've only scratched the surface.

    Just imagine what he would have said about Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

    1. weirdnoise

      He opposed NASA, but largely due to their funding of research into space colonization.

      So what do you think Mr Mars Colonization would have to say about that?

  14. realrobmac

    I remember a list like this 10 years or so ago that included a line about a crazy program to breed rats. I mean why is the government paying money to breed rats? It's not like rats are ever used in science experiments or anything.

    And illegal South African immigrant Elon Musk gets to have the twitter handle "@American" now? Lord. Why is anyone ever on Twitter at all anymore?

  15. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    One of the things that makes me more optimistic than some of my fellow liberals is based on the Peter Principle. Trump is applying the Peter Principle in an accelerated way, advancing people far past their levels of competence. While that might seem at first like a Bad Thing, it means that the Deep State Government Bureaucracy can do what it does best: Turf battles and red tape.

    So while Elon Musk, et al can do a fair bit of damage, their lack of competence in government will limit what they are able to accomplish. That leaves them doing performative stuff to provide chum for the base, which is what Trump really wants. So they'll get high marks from Trump based on their ability to polish his boots on Fox News and in the media, despite their lack of productivity at tearing down the Deep State and draining The Swamp.

    Also, they will get bored, Musk in particular, and then want to exit to more profitable and personally fulfilling grifts.

    1. ColBatGuano

      These appointments remind me of the nutjobs who run for school boards to end CRT or DEI. They imagine there is some super secret file that will reveal the truth and end the threat. What they find is the boring reality of running an organization day to day.

  16. Ogemaniac

    The more I learn about Musk, the more I am convinced that

    1: Ultra-high incomes are luck
    2: There is some mental disease that affects many men in middle age that robs them of their reasoning abilities

    1. aldoushickman

      I think that you can combine the two. Ultra-high incomes (or more precisely, ultra-high wealth) has a tendency to rob a person of reasoning abilities.

      After all, for a person to have effective reasoning abilities, they need accurate information inputs and robust feedback/accountability mechanisms such that the consequences of their decisions and actions filter right back through to the reasoning process. This is tricky for a very rich person, since (a) nobody, rich or poor, really enjoys being told they are wrong, and enjoys _realizing_ they are wrong even less, and (b) very rich people can easily insulate themselves from things they don't enjoy. It's even trickier for the ultrarich, as the bigger a fortune is, the more that fortune can employ resources to protect and expand itself. For somebody like Musk, there is a vanishingly small likelihood that any decision, no matter how terrible, is going to negatively impact him.

      Musk has--quite possibly without ever realizing it--built himself one of the most invisibly robust coddling systems in existence. He is very likely incapable of making good decisions at this point. It would be pitiable if he wasn't so well off, and (more importantly) if his idiot decisions didn't have such significant consequences for the rest of us.

  17. jeffreycmcmahon

    They're not sure how much "Barbie doll photo" cost but they're pretty sure it's somewhere between $100 billion and $400 billion.

    1. aldoushickman

      You'd think that somebody with a fortune in excess of $300,000,000,000 would have an understanding of how trivial things even in the tens of millions of dollars range are to the overall budget.

      I mean, you could generate an image of the big pile of money that is the federal budget on the one hand, and another image that is the big pile of money with all the "wasteful" monkey study etc. money removed, and no normal human could even tell the difference between the two.

      1. lawnorder

        No large organization is or can be perfectly efficient. If the US government is 99% efficient (it probably isn't, but let's assume it) that's $60 BILLION a year in waste. It seems plausible that the irreducible amount of waste in the US government in a year is nearly equal to Elon's total fortune.

        It gives you some sense of the scale of the federal government when you realize that the total fortune of the world's richest person could fund the government for about 18 days.

  18. pjcamp1905

    Look, Elon Musk doesn't give two shits about efficiency. He wants to turn the US into an oligarchy just like Russia. It wasn't so long ago that his buddy Peter Thiel said that freedom and democracy are incompatible. That tells you all you need to know about what they think freedom means.

  19. kennethalmquist

    The list that Elon Musk posted is lifted directly from a “report” released on Dec. 22, 2023 by Sentator Rand Paul, acting in his role as ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

    If Musk is going to plagiarize, he might at least plagiarize something worth reading.

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