This article is written by James Hayton, a professor at a business school focused on "innovation" and "entrepreneurship", and who received funding from the Nuffield Foundation, founded by William Morris, one of the largest financiers of the British fascist movement.

Just to be clear about the ideological commitments of the author and his financiers. I would suggest taking this article with a lot of skepticism.

I mean, he knows how to gut things he doesn’t think are important.

That’s not efficiency, that’s just doing less stuff. Efficiency is when you do the same stuff but with lower cost and the same outcomes. That’s not what musk does.

Wow, that was an incredibly out of touch and frustrating thing to read. The author has no idea what they’re talking about.

in a highly polarised US political landscape, the anguish about his governmental role may be little more than a knee-jerk reaction from the millions of people whose side he did not choose.

No, it’s a reaction to genuinely absurd proposals for how to save money. For example, if they were able to successfully fire every single federal employee, it would save the government just over $100 billion. That money goes to pay the salaries of around 1.5 million federal employees. That’s nothing compared to the entire military budget, for example. So, even accomplishing their goal of firing as many civil servants as possible would save very little money in the scheme of things. All it would accomplish is ruining many basic services that people rely on every day to live a relatively safe and healthy life.

But what this article most glaringly ignores is that this Government Efficiency talk is disingenuous from the start. It’s not about efficiency, it’s about gutting as much of the government as possible so it breaks. That’s what they want, and they’ve been quite open about it.

Elon slashed twitters' expenditures too. That lowered the service/experience. Our social contract doesn't need the same.

Isn't the Department of Government Efficiency going to have 2 heads? Doesn't sound very efficient to me.

I worked at twitter when Musk acquired it. He asked everyone to print out their code. Its one of the stupidest things I have heard anyone say at work, ever. My code would be a stack of paper taller than me, mostly white space or generated code. No one would ever read such a thing, or be able to look through it. Its pathologically stupid. He's just a rich idiot who people work around, not a leader of any sort. Everything at Twitter is broken now. Thats what he will do to ythe government too.

Making savings ≠ increase efficiency

And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Hey guys, turns out you'll have lots of money if you stop paying pesky things like "employees" and "debt obligations"!

Hahahahahhahahahhahahahaha... deep breath hahahahahshahahahahahaaaah!!!

He's only the richest man in the world because of government contracts, not because he's a brilliant or a champion of efficiency.