Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s vision for government is anything but efficient

There’s a scene in the 1990 film Goodfellas where Henry Hill is at his lowest and is convinced his mentor and closest friend, James Conway, is going to kill him. He tells us in voiceover how these things go down: “See, your murderers come with smiles. They come as your friends ... and they always seem to come at a time when you’re at your weakest and most in need of their help.”

I found myself thinking of this while reading Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, explaining their vision for the Department of Government Efficiency.

You’d be forgiven for getting excited about their promises. Life in America is hard in ways that are difficult to explain. Yes, stuff is expensive, but there is also an ambient feeling that we’ve all lost something, or that something is missing. Worse, we can’t really articulate what it is. But Musk and Ramaswamy have the answer: “tens of thousands” of “unelected bureaucrats” are wasting our money. If that’s the case, who wouldn’t be in favor of a little more government efficiency?

The reality, though, is they have the gun pointed right at you and me.

Let’s start with their claim that most of our nation’s legal edicts are promulgated without democratic input. That’s wrong. Go to www.federalregister.gov and you will find a list of proposed regulations you can make comments on. Before they go into effect, the agency is required to read and respond to your comments, or they could be subject to expensive litigation and the rule could be overturned.

That sounds democratic to me. When was the last time a politician gave you the chance to comment on a law they proposed?

Musk and Ramaswamy aren’t content with just misrepresenting basic civics, they also give you a misleading sub-Wikipedia summary of two U.S. Supreme Court cases, though I doubt either has ever read a SCOTUS decision. Strangely, the two entrepreneurs peddle high-flying rhetoric about democracy, but when it serves their purposes, they rely on decisions by unelected judges with lifetime appointments.

This all begs the question: Who are these unelected guys to tell us how the government should work? They promise to work with “legal experts” and use “advanced technology,” but this is just more twaddle. Trust me, I consulted some legal experts (me) while writing this.

These people act like our administrative state is staffed by grifters making your life more expensive. The reality is agencies keep our air breathable, our water drinkable, and our food edible. They protect our rights to work in a safe workplace and form unions. They protect our Medicare and Social Security. An agency got us to the moon. Musk makes, in President-elect Donald Trump’s words, “rocket ships to nowhere.”

Agencies keep our air breathable, our water drinkable, and our food edible. They protect our rights to work in a safe workplace and form unions. They protect our Medicare and Social Security.

The worst part is their promise to fire a lot of people. It only gets worse coming from a guy who designed the worst car you’ve ever seen and someone you didn’t know existed until a few months ago.

I would hazard a guess that most of the tens of thousands of employees they plan on firing are not the people at the top. Chances are you regularly interact with someone who has worked for a government agency, whether it’s Social Security, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, or one of the many others we come in contact with every day. Like many bosses, Musk and Ramaswamy want you to think they’re on your side, but the truth is that you’re much more likely to be an agency employee than you are a tech billionaire who is gleeful about firing them.

None of this is to say that the administrative state is perfect, or that there is no waste. I practice administrative law, and the government makes me want to slam my head against the wall at least once a week. But I also know that handing power over to a couple of unelected oligarchs who have never and will never have my best interests in mind isn’t the answer.

They’re smiling. They’re setting their sights on you. Don’t fall for it.

Mark Maher is an administrative law/public interest attorney working and living in Philadelphia.