AlterNet - Tech insider sounds alarm that Musk's 'highly disruptive' plan won't work for government
Alex Henderson
February 17, 2025
According to a Politico source with insider knowledge of activities at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), as many as 200,000 civil service workers who are in the probationary period could be laid off from the United States' federal government.
The second Trump Administration, with the help of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is pushing mass layoffs in a variety of federal agencies. And Democratic critics of President Donald Trump and SpaceX/Tesla/X.com CEO Musk are characterizing their efforts as a hostile takeover of Washington.
Politico's Derek Robertson discussed this government downsizing with a Silicon Valley insider: engineer and venture capitalist Rohit Krishnan, who emphasized that Musk is applying the tech industry's "highly disruptive" business model to the federal government -- despite the fact that government and tech operate in very different ways.
Krishnan, in an interview published on February 16, told Politico, "On the regulatory and governance side, problems are solved through process. Everything has a process that you have to follow, and then things will come out in a way that most people are less unhappy about than they otherwise would be, because that's the way it's done. But with DOGE, for example, if you go take over a company, you have to go fast, you have to go early, and you have to go with some level of certainty that you are right, because you can't wait. You don't dilly-dally trying to follow processes and procedures, because if you do that, nothing gets done."
DOGE, according to Krishnan, is using a "similar playbook to the way Elon took over Twitter."
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