Efficiency by Inefficiency: How Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Could Take a Page From Reagan’s Playbook
In a twist that only our brave new timeline could produce, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been handed the reins of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a yet to be created agency created to identify and eliminate bureaucratic inefficiencies, reducing waste and ensuring effective government operations. If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from Reagan — and really, when isn’t there? — it’s that sometimes the best way to fix a bureaucracy is to let it idle itself into oblivion. The Community Services Administration (CSA), which Reagan successfully eliminated in 1981, provides a the perfect case study for Elon and Vivek, as they try to steer the DOGE in their quest to bring efficiency, or perhaps glorious chaos, to Washington.
Back in the Reagan era, the CSA, once a symbol of LBJ’s idealistic but clunky War on Poverty, found itself in an interesting predicament. After Reagan set his sights on reducing government bloat, the CSA’s employees went through a “Close-down Period,” a bureaucratic purgatory in which they were explicitly instructed to do absolutely nothing. They came to work, they sat at their desks, they stared at blank pages and empty desks, and they weren’t even allowed to pass the time with a good book. You could almost hear them counting ceiling tiles, one at a time, while contemplating the meaning of “government service.”
This quaint episode — the ultimate bureaucratic version of “hurry up and wait” — lasted several months. It’s a sobering, yet oddly hilarious reminder of the absurdity that unfolds when an inefficient entity is left to its own devices in a fog of political deadlock. It’s also a great pointer for Elon and Vivek: if you want to get rid of an agency, you might not need a wrecking ball. Sometimes all it takes is to turn off the metaphorical engine and let the government workers ponder existence under florescent lights for a few months until the inefficiency becomes unbearable.
Elon, with his ironical embrace of memes and Vivek, the voice of the pragmatic outsider, could both take a page out of Reagan’s playbook — the one marked, “Don’t dismantle it; just let it collapse under its own weight.” Instead of battling the machine with flamethrowers — though let’s be honest, Elon would probably love to — they could just lean back, let the department grind to a halt, and watch the gears seize up from a lack of purpose. Bureaucracy is like a shark; it has to keep swimming — keep moving, producing reports, holding meetings, filing forms — or it dies. Force it to tread water and, like the CSA in 1981, it will eventually succumb to its inherent pointlessness.
Reagan’s journey wasn’t without its detractors. Congressional opponents, mostly Democrats, fought tooth and nail against his plan to shrink the federal apparatus, fearing what would become of their beloved CSA programs. In the end, it was simply a matter of waiting them out — for every bureaucratic warrior on Capitol Hill, there is only so much political capital they’re willing to spend keeping idle desk-sitters afloat. Reagan waited, and the CSA folded, and before you knew it, funds were redirected, employees reassigned, and the bureaucracy vanished — not with a bang, but with an extended whimper.
For Elon and Vivek, leading the DOGE, the trick isn’t just to swing a hammer; it’s about bringing a sense of showmanship while convincing the public that trimming the fat is in the national interest. Imagine Vivek walking into a press conference, his sleeves rolled up, with Elon beaming in from Starship, to announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, today we ask every member of this office to ponder the existential question — ‘Why am I here?’” Cue a month-long suspension of work assignments, while DOGE employees contemplate Kafkaesque nothingness.
The ultimate goal here is something like a bureaucratic Détente: Make the inefficiency so palpable, so obvious to all — including those in the inefficient roles — that Congress can’t help but take action, even if they’re loath to give Musk and Vivek a political victory. After all, political calculus always trumps actual governance. Perhaps Elon can convince one of his X engineers to make a “DOGE Work Efficiency Tracker”, an app that tracks the number of productive hours per employee in each division of the government — real-time transparency in bureaucratic stasis.
They should also take note of Reagan’s use of executive orders to clear the bureaucratic underbrush. Executive Order 12301 — designed to promote efficiency — could serve as inspiration, or at the very least, as a historic precedent when critics inevitably scream that you can’t simply shut off the spigot of government work. Sure, the left will shout about Trump’s autocratic tendencies, the horror of which they’ll compare to Reagan’s supposed “legislative wizardry.” But, in truth, there’s little difference between leveraging executive power to make government more efficient, and allowing it to reveal, on its own, that its perpetual self-expansion is inherently self-defeating.
And let’s not forget the humor angle — Elon, after all, has a certain genius for trolling, and Vivek’s charisma makes him the perfect foil. While government employees across Washington sit idle, Musk could flood X with memes: an empty office captioned, “Government hard at work!” paired with Reagan’s iconic grin. Nothing exposes the farce of over-governance quite like a well-placed meme.
The Reagan model, a true paradox of action through inaction, is perhaps the best case study for this Musk-Vivek experiment in government efficiency. Elon’s techno-libertarian zeal, paired with Vivek’s wonky outsider flair, is ideally suited for an exercise in controlled chaos, with an underlying nod to the inefficiencies that have plagued our republic for generations. They might just get to a point where, like Reagan, they have the satisfaction of seeing an entire segment of the federal machinery implode by virtue of its own pointlessness, brought on by an expertly orchestrated slowdown.
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