Elon Musk at the head of a ministry. This is what Donald Trump announced on November 13. The president-elect will nominate the billionaire as Minister of “Government Efficiency”. His mission will be to make drastic savings.
Donald Trump himself calls it “the Manhattan Project of our time”, the Manhattan Project aimed to create the nuclear bomb during World War II. The Ministry of “Government Effectiveness” is a sort of committee outside the administration which will be for a fixed term. So they will not not direct the administration, but make recommendations.
The goal of Elon Musk and his friend Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, is toreduce bureaucracy and cut red tapethat is to say excessive regulations.
Too many regulations and too many officials
There are too many regulations in the United States and Elon Musk gives examples like SpaceX. The rocket launch company was asked to capture seals and listen to the sound of a rocket launch through headphones to see if they would be too disturbed during the real launch. The billionaire also explains that it takes longer to obtain authorizations than to build a rocket.
In the area of expenses to be eliminated, he also says that the federal state subsidizes absurd studies on the sexual behavior of Japanese quails when they are under cocaine or that he pays more than 300,000 dollars to Columbia University, already one of the richest in the world.
Elon Musk also wants to remove civil servants. We must remember that when he bought Twitter, he fired 80% of the staff, even if it meant rehiring them. In the United States, there are 2.1 million federal employees. This may seem like a lot, but it is exactly the same number as state civil servants in France, where the population is still five times smaller.
A possible conflict of interest?
It was his experience as a business leader, in the field of space, automobiles with Tesla, telecommunications with Starlink, and artificial intelligence, which exposed him to American federal regulations. And that’s part of the problem.
In reality, he is also there to remove the rules that hinder him in his own businesses. Which still puts it in a situation of serious conflict of interest. The stock market was not mistaken. Since Trump’s election, it has propelled the price by 40%, or $300 billion in additional market value for the company.
In France, we once tried to entrust state reform to a boss, the entrepreneur Christophe Cuvillier. An attempt which was no more successful than all those which had preceded it for 30 years, entrusted to politicians and, paradoxically, to senior civil servants. Clémenceau said that war is too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military. It’s the same with state reform, too serious to be entrusted to enarques.
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