Elon Musk's Useful Experiment

"Elon Musk's main asset, I said as soon as DOGE was announced, was his 217-million-strong Twitter following.

For all the Cultural Revolution-flavored hysteria, the real pith of his project is a bunch of outside eyes looking and seeing. This is what terrorizes Washington. What will Mr. Musk's acolytes see and report next?

How the U.S. Agency for International Development is often little more than a slush fund for the activist left?

That 50% of National Institutes of Health grants sometimes go not to medical research but to swell the ranks and salaries of university administrators?

Mr. Musk also terrorizes the media, whose job you might have thought was policing public spending.

Whether wisely, the government can do one thing efficiently: transfer money to citizens who then spend it on whatever best serves their needs, as with Social Security recipients.

At the opposite end is the program Social Security is often paired with.

Medicare doles out reimbursements for services that may or may not be real, helpful to the recipient, or reasonably priced. It's very hard to know. Congress doesn't want doctors and hospitals back home closely policed. Result: Medicare controls spending, perversely, with blanket low reimbursement rates for necessary and unnecessary services alike.

The Pentagon, which Donald Trump has actually named as the next Musk target, presents the same problem. What's it getting and at what price?

Yes, Mr. Musk and his young team are seeing confidential government data. But he's also the second most closely observed person on the planet, the exact opposite of the thousands who already have access to government data and stay invisible until they turn out to be Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Charles Edward Littlejohn or Jack Teixeira.

Mr. Musk is said to be causing chaos but government programs are born in chaos -- with congressional horse trading and payoffs to appease interest groups. That's why government programs make so little organizational sense. Remember when we had to pass ObamaCare to find out what was in it? ("Two thousand pages of nonsense," said Warren Buffett at the time. "The problem is incentives.")

Likewise the Biden and Obama administrations received no expert advice that subsidizing green energy would reduce emissions, but the opposite. It didn't matter. And now perhaps $1 trillion has gone down the hole.

Social Security and Medicare could have been designed for the long haul (as savings programs). Instead, Congresses at the time knowingly gave us the demographic disasters both have become.

All that said, the Musk moment somewhat recalls the heyday of Chairman Mao, when slogans and directives from his lips were enough to cause furor throughout the land.

But the differences are also obvious. Mr. Musk's DOGE actions will be subject to court review; voters will have their say -- early voting in the 2026 congressional primaries starts in little more than 12 months in some states.

"So far, the Trump administration is largely abiding by the court orders," says New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein, who then makes a 14,000-word "constitutional crisis" out of a tautological JD Vance tweet defining legitimate presidential actions as those that judges aren't entitled to mess with.

Question: How else did our reactionary media imagine a reform movement might be kick-started (and that's all Mr. Musk is doing) in a federal establishment no longer capable of prioritizing its own efforts and resources intelligently? That can't control its debt and deficits. That labors in thrall to an administrative state that has steadily lost sight of the common good.

We come finally to the singular person of Mr. Trump. My every instinct rebels against his approach. When you have a strong economy, leave it alone. Don't inject uncertainty and disruption. Don't spend political capital recklessly when you have big opportunities like Ukraine and deregulation and renewing the 2017 tax reform.

But -- look at the approval surveys -- Mr. Trump is creating political capital. The public likes what he's doing. He was cheered at the Super Bowl. (Taylor Swift was booed.)

So the mystery: Mr. Trump orchestrated one of history's startling comebacks. informing a grudging intuition in some quarters that he might know what he's doing.

Jibing uneasily, though, is the help he received from his enemies, even the degree to which the Biden administration deliberately sought to re-empower him because he was the one opponent Joe Biden might beat. Mr. Trump didn't just hit a ground ball and then shrewdly take advantage of Democratic errors to land on third base. Team Biden, intentionally in some sense, put him on third.

Yet Mr. Trump also has garnered real legitimacy from public perception of Democratic incompetence. It accounts for the public's willingness to ride with him now. The best hope perhaps lies in his knack for reading the markets, media cacophony and polls and knowing when a change of tack would best serve one Donald J. Trump." [1]

Was Taylor Swift booed? It turns out that just showing a half-naked ass isn't enough. You also need to have some sense, even for a single woman with a cat.

1. Elon Musk's Useful Experiment. Jenkins, Holman W; Jr.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 Feb 2025: A15.