Frogs as Lubricant: The Good, the Bad, and the DOGE
My guide on a tour of an ancient windmill, dressed as the 18th-century miller, explained with a nasty smile that he used frogs as lubricant. “Not the best lube,” he chuckled, “but widely available and virtually costless.” Simple and effective, like all ingenious things. Indeed, if cost-cutting is your only concern and “biotic resources” are abundant, this approach makes perfect sense. And if you value “human resources” not much higher than “biotic resources,” then Elon Musk’s approach to government efficiency – treating federal employees as disposable components rather than valuable assets—suddenly becomes perfectly logical.
The GOOD: Success Traits Worth Acknowledging
Let’s give credit where it’s due. Both Musk and Trump possess some important traits that drive success:
Relentless Goal Orientation: This trait helps anyone succeed, regardless of profession. More importantly, the goal must be clear and meaningful to all parties. The latter is not always the case with Musk’s opponents.
Long-Term Vision and Risk Management: Musk has demonstrated impressive long-term thinking in his business ventures. He’s willing to take financial blows (that would destroy most ordinary people) if he believes in the eventual payoff. His Twitter/X losses looked catastrophic, but they were calculated steps toward expanding his influence and power that now almost guarantee stable government contracts expanding his influence even further. This week’s $100 M donation to “Trump political operation” must have already paid off after Trump participated in the Tesla promo.
The “Hard Work” Mythology: Both men glorify “busyness” and praise subordinates who demonstrate the same, even when nothing substantive gets accomplished. Just look at how Musk boasts about sleeping on the factory floor during “production hell” or Trump’s constant references to his “tremendous work ethic” and “working harder than anyone.”
To be honest, not everyone would count this last trait as good. This industrial-era glorification of “hard” over “smart” work reveals leadership trapped in outdated paradigms. But here I am contradicting myself: their goal is to make their acolytes feel valued on the way to The MAGA Pleasure Island, and not to analyze virtues and paradigms.
The BAD: Dunning-Kruger Like You’ve Never Seen Before
Here’s where the DOGE hunt goes rabid:
The Fatal Fallacy: The implicit rationale feeding both co-presidents’ arrogance is simple—if they’ve achieved such extraordinary success (one holding the highest office, the other being the world’s richest man who has just bought this highest office together with its holder), they must be the smartest people alive. That’s what they both openly think. And that is demonstrably false.
The Loaded Coins: Imagine flipping 1,000 coins. About 500 will land heads-up. Flip those 500 again, and roughly 250 will be heads-up twice in a row. Continue until you have two coins that have consistently landed heads-up throughout the exercise. Would you assume these two coins are “smarter” than the other 998? Of course not. That’s pure probability.
Now, consider 1,000 startups navigating the challenges and filtering processes of real-life markets – the statistical outcome will be similar: business success depends significantly on unpredictable random events. However, this ‘predictability’ gets significantly skewed when your coins are ‘loaded’—or when a businessman starts ‘loaded’ with inherited advantages, as both Trump and Musk did with family wealth. Their success isn’t evidence of superior intellect; it’s the predictable outcome of privileged starting positions combined with statistical inevitability.
Executive Exceptionalism: This Dunning-Kruger effect directly manifests in how DOGE operates—Musk believes his success in rockets and cars automatically qualifies him to restructure complex government institutions that have evolved over decades, despite having no relevant experience in public administration.
Likewise, Trump sincerely considers himself “a stable genius,” although his admirable ability to sail through numerous business failures and bankruptcies definitely deserves a thorough investigation.
The DOGE: Chainsaw Management at Its Worst
Flawed Diagnosis, Fatal Prescription
Musk, arrogantly confident in his infallibility, has pledged to uncover so much “waste, fraud and abuse” in government that he believes it would take a chainsaw to clean it up. Among other accusations, he claims the government bureaucracy “lacks logic” and that “departments don’t communicate.” These observations are likely accurate because most organizations have this problem. I would also agree with him that alleviating this problem always, inevitably, and significantly boosts organizational efficiency.
But here’s why Musk’s “solutions” are fundamentally flawed:
Amputation as Weight Loss: Any reorg is an operation on a living body. It is painful and never without side effects. Firing thousands of people overnight is like helping your patient lose excessive weight by amputating limbs with a chainsaw and without anesthetics. Granted, the “cured” patient will certainly weigh less, but at what cost to overall health and functionality?
The Kevin O’Leary Philosophy: Trump’s ardent follower and unsuccessful Canadian impersonator Kevin O’Leary tried to prove himself even cooler than Musk. He recommends cutting “20% more than the slack you see,” and then hiring back if necessary. Even Trump suggested Musk’s firings “should be more precise.” When your approach makes Donald Trump look measured, you must have entered dangerous territory.
The Unintended Consequences
The Rehire Fantasy: When you terminate skilled knowledge workers, they sooner or later find new employment. The best will find it sooner. “Hiring back when necessary” means you may only get the worst performers back, driving efficiency further down while incurring additional costs. (Think: “OK, let’s reattach his limbs… No can do? Let’s get him a prosthetic limb then.”)
The Morale Death Spiral: As one proverbial CEO declared, “We will continue firing people until morale improves!” Resolving communication problems by eliminating communicators follows the same broken logic.
The Trust Massacre: Every mass firing, in addition to the obvious institutional knowledge loss, demolishes organizational trust. In today’s knowledge economy, trust is the most important factor: it drives engagement, and engagement drives performance. According to Gallup research, business units with high employee engagement show, on average, 23% higher profitability and 18% higher productivity. Musk, Trump, and their acolytes don’t even consider trust as a factor. Most likely they do not understand the meaning of the word, because trust isn’t part of their transactional worldview.
In summary, Musk’s DOGE exercise will never achieve its stated goals. It is simply impossible to reduce costs by doing what DOGE is doing. On the contrary, it will introduce additional costs, especially when many of the effected changes, cuts, and “improvements” will have to be rolled back. Sure, you can show the best year-over-year numbers by selling all your assets – but then go out of business the next year, guaranteed.
In addition, DOGE is inflicting almost irreversible damage on the entire Federal government culture. And the very DOGE initiative demonstrates that, after all, humongous and slow as it is, this government bureaucracy is far from being the worst. When scrutinized, the DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” has considerably less real savings than it claimed – and incomparably less than Musk’s estimate, even the latest, trimmed-down one.
Most probably, Musk is using the noble declared goal – to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse” – as a means to reduce scrutiny of his companies, which are currently the subject of over thirty federal investigations across dozens of agencies… But this is beyond the scope of this article.
So let’s take the best from Musk – and stay focused on the goal: finding ways to eliminate federal debt. My analysis and experience with other organizations suggest it is possible to drive down the cost of the federal bureaucracy, sustainably balance the budget, and eliminate federal debt. Coincidentally, the ballpark savings I estimate align with Musk’s “updated” $700 billion figure—without gutting social programs or disrupting millions of American lives. The key lies in understanding how engagement, professional leadership development, and strategic attrition rather than destructive cost-cutting can drive sustainable efficiency gains.
Let’s talk about that in Part 2.