If anyone on the left should be rooting for Elon Musk, it’s me.
In 2011, the nonprofit I founded started bringing mostly young programmers and designers into government offices. We needed access to data systems to do our jobs, but many public servants were fearful that our teams might “move fast and break things” — so sometimes nothing moved at all.
Later, I helped found the U.S. Digital Service in the White House under President Barack Obama. The tech talent that came in was a little older and more experienced, but the dynamic was the same. Over time, I became frustrated with the layers of process and procedure that encrust so much of government operations, and the ways they can backfire, work against the public interest and erode trust in our institutions.
I’ve called for deproceduralization, a kind of deregulation not of the private sector but of government itself — from the Pentagon to the agriculture department to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — so that it can move faster, be bolder and get stuff done. I’ve come by my impatience honestly.
Now Mr. Musk is accused of many of the things I was criticized for: importing tech talent, impatience with the status quo and a desire for disruption. He has even taken the U.S. Digital Service as his vehicle, renaming it the U.S. DOGE Service, after his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
But my goal — the goal of many Democrats and Republicans alike — has been to revitalize government. Mr. Musk seems to be trying to destroy it. The events of the past week suggest a fundamentally different motivation.
Democrats must take care at this moment not to confuse tactics with goals. They shouldn’t define themselves simply as Mr. Musk’s operational opposite, leaving themselves defenders of a broken status quo. Their goal must be a muscular, lean, effective administrative state that works for Americans.
Mr. Musk’s recklessness will not get us there, but neither will the excessive caution and addiction to procedure that Democrats exhibited under President Joe Biden’s leadership.
By the measure of laws passed and dollars appropriated, the Biden administration can claim historic achievements. But voters measured tangible results. A $42 billion program for broadband internet, authorized under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, had not connected a single household by December. A $7.5 billion investment in electric vehicle charging stations has reportedly produced just 47 stations across 15 states. More than half of the $1.6 trillion appropriated under Mr. Biden’s four signature bills remains unspent and vulnerable to clawback by the Trump administration. These outcomes put at risk not just Mr. Biden’s legacy but also American competitiveness, climate goals and public safety. And they are typical results of our overburdened system of policy implementation.
Mr. Musk would pin this glacial pace on lazy bureaucrats. In fact, most of the public servants charged with carrying out these policies have been working tirelessly and creatively, but the obstacles they face are daunting.
Imagine you’re a federal employee diving in to help deploy funding under the CHIPS and Science Act and are drafting a simple web form to allow companies to express their initial interest. Imagine you are then told that in addition to extensive reviews by lawyers and dozens of other stakeholders in your agency and across the federal government, your form is subject to review by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a process that typically takes at least nine months.
In addition to preparing robust documentation, you must post your plans to the Federal Register, demonstrate you have adequately addressed the comments from the public, revise the form, post it again, and again address comments from the public. The procedures to hire a contractor to put your form online are equally onerous, as are a dozen other steps in the process.
You’d been eager to engage with the companies and understand what kinds of projects might be possible, but you soon realize all your energy will go to navigating the bureaucracy for months on end. The companies will have to wait.
At the same time, your team is trying to staff up. You’ve read the excellent Merit System Principles that supposedly govern human resources practices, but you quickly learn that hiring takes many months and you have little control over either the process or the outcome. More waiting.
Polling released last week highlights how fed up the public is with a government that waits. Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark described speaking with Biden-to-Trump voters in a focus group (including those who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 but supported Mr. Trump last November) who said that at least the president is “doing something” that “they can see.”
For now, at least, they will take action they dislike — and even fear — over the molasses of the status quo.
The examples above highlight the culpability of both Democrats and Republicans for this unacceptable slowness. The intense process of getting a web form approved is required by a law from 1980 (the Paperwork Reduction Act), written when information was gathered on paper, that Congress has not bothered to update for the modern era (aside from extensive revisions in 1995 that made it more cumbersome, not less).
Republicans could well champion these much-needed reforms while they enjoy a governing trifecta. But Democrats, as institutionalists, tend to see the value in any kind of safeguard that checks for possible harms before action, and may well resist, especially as havoc from Mr. Musk’s initiative creates a frightening sense of there being zero backstops.
This would be the wrong response. In fact, Democrats should make repealing the Paperwork Reduction Act and other barriers like it — such as reforming the current hiring process — a cornerstone of their own deproceduralization agenda, and get off the defensive.
Elon Musk’s initiative appears to be one of the most effective waves of the flood-the-zone strategy. Democrats cannot stop feeling overwhelmed, but we can control our own responses to it.
Anyone who cares about the core principles our government is built on will need to protect civil servants who defend the law. But a defensive crouch, one that draws on our most self-defeating instincts, is the wrong response. If you’re mad about what Mr. Musk’s initiative is doing to the institution of government, it’s time to go on the offense to reform it.
Jennifer Pahlka is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. She served as U.S. deputy chief technology officer under President Barack Obama.
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