Since the Reagan era, many have tried; none have succeeded.
On the whole, the experts were cautiously hopeful.
That was the fall, when all anyone could do was speculate.
Today, six weeks into DOGE’s existence, we have alotof data.
DOGE has created a dizzying tornado of news.
Engineers loyal to Musk haveinfiltrated government IT systems.
So I went back to the experts and asked for their assessment of how things are going so far.
For the most part, their hope had morphed into serious concern.
“It appears as if the objective is just to blow things up and hope something better emerges.”
Bilmes says Musk’s approach thus far has been a huge “missed opportunity.”
Trump has fired more than a dozen inspectors general as part of the purge of government workers.
And Musk has painted federal workers as his enemies rather than his partners.
Two business school professorsI talked to said the imagery harked back to “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap.
But that alone couldn’t save Sunbeam.
After several quarters of disappointing profits and a scandal involving falsified accounting documents, Dunlap was fired.
(He settled both.)
All that chainsawing left a trail of destruction.
“He substituted one kind of trauma for another kind of trauma,” Morris says.
It’s about pushing the federal workforce to the brink and expanding the power of the executive branch.
He has even said he’d like for Musk to “get more aggressive.”
And that blowback is building.
Recently, federal workers were sent a now notorious email asking themwhat they accomplished in the past week.
Chaos ensued.Federal workers felt harassed and intimated, and many mulled resignation.
Management experts largely told my colleagues thatthis pop in of leadership was harmfuland could hurt worker morale.
Then another email hit workers' inboxes, asking for alist of accomplishmentsto be sent every Monday.
That could allow the government to push toward automating more tasks of its office workers.
But the disarray and confusion created by DOGE’s tactics could outweigh any benefit.
The federal workforce is heavily unionized.
The sources of funding are not controlled by a CEO.
It needs the resources to carry on in perpetuity.
The federal government isn’t Sunbeam.
When you cut half the people who work at Twitter, it glitches even if it eventually recovers.
When you eliminate USAID, people can die.
The US government is not a corporation.
And it’s not a startup, the vast majority of which fail.
Some are acquired, which is seen as success.
Few turn out like Tesla and SpaceX.
The government cannot be put to the same tests what it does is too important.
Amanda Hooveris a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry.
She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
