If anyone can do the impossible and rewire US government, it’s Elon Musk
It’s hard to tell when Elon Musk is joking. The man who fitted a fart-sound button as standard in every Tesla (he considers it his “finest piece of work”) says and does improbable things. During the American election he offered to run a Department of Government Efficiency for Donald Trump and said he could cut state spending by about a third. Now that the new government is picked, his bluff is being called. We will soon see what role, if any, he’ll perform.
There are reasons to take Musk seriously, as well as literally. The car company he created is now worth more than its ten biggest rivals put together. He has put more satellites in space than the US government. Once a Trump critic, he now sees himself as a fellow disruptor and fellow target of the American Left. Elizabeth Warren, a (now re-elected) Democratic senator, once accused him of dodging tax. He replied that he pays more tax than any American in history ($11 billion). “Don’t spend it all at once,” he told her in a Tweet. “Oh wait, you did already.” This is what he plans to remedy now.
He has his ways. While Steve Jobs took little interest in how Apple products were made, Musk is obsessed with process. The story of SpaceX and Tesla is the story of his redefining what was possible by marching around factories on a never-ending war against waste. He asks managers to compile an “idiot index” of what a part costs to buy, relative to the cost of its basic materials. “If the ratio is too high,” says Musk, “you’re an idiot.” He’ll ask factory workers why four bolts were being put in a panel rather than two, then order a change. Such micro-management has led to achievements previously regarded as impossible.
Might the same work for government? Musk has a formula – he calls it his “algorithm” – aimed at dissolving bureaucracy. The idea is to empower and trust workers, telling them to regard every rule as stupid unless proven otherwise. They are asked to simplify, innovate and “delete” as many requirements as they can, adding them back later if need be. “If you do not end up adding back at least 10 per cent,” he tells staff, “you did not delete enough.”
This could have been a recipe for chaos, shoddy work and rockets that fall apart. But instead, a team of just 500 workers in SpaceX became the first to send a privately-built rocket into orbit. (Boeing’s equivalent division has 50,000 staff.) Musk has built his empire on a very specific modus operandi, tearing up rules and regulations and instead placing faith in the common sense of workers. The phrase “war on red tape” is a political cliche but Musk has turned it into the basis of a new industrial revolution.
Applying this to government is harder, because its rules are laws. Skip them and you can be sued in a judicial review, as is now happening to a paralysing extent on both sides of the pond. Worse still, government is often about the illusion of power as ministers are not necessarily in control. The UK Health Secretary, for example, doesn’t really run the NHS, made “independent” by David Cameron. Requests can be made of the operationally-independent NHS England, but no edicts can be issued.
I’ve spent much of this week in a brilliantly-run NHS hospital, watching my younger son recover quickly with world-class care. If every hospital was run as well as the Chelsea & Westminster, there would be no problem in our health service. But examples of best practice are not copied by other NHS trusts in the way they could be – and no Health Secretary has the power to order otherwise. This may be why Wes Streeting’s proposed healthcare reform is taking so long: the system is out of his control.
Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Free School can claim to be the Tesla of state education, showing how the right culture and discipline can get stunning results from pupils of all backgrounds. But other head teachers are in no rush to follow her into the valley of political death seeing how often she has been attacked, sued and even hauled into the High Court by enemies of school reform.
Legalistic weeds have now grown so high in government as to require thick textbooks of regulations to help officials navigate them. If the smallest rule is not followed (or is “deleted”, to use Musk-speak) then government can be sued. Welfare reform tends to be thwarted in this way. Ditto attempts to address illegal immigration, as Trump will soon find out. To diverge from the norm – to attempt even a fraction of the Musk “algorithm” – is to risk being sued: as presidents, prime ministers and teachers find out.
Business leaders, too. When Next couldn’t find enough warehouse staff, it upped their pay. Quite rightly: this is tough, gruelling work. But a few weeks ago, Next was found guilty of gender discrimination because its mostly-male warehouse workers ended up being paid more than mostly-female shop assistants. Harriet Harman’s Equality Act was never intended to be used to stop such pay rises. Nor was it intended to stop Muslim, Jewish and Hindu school pupils from eating lunch together (the Michaela Free School was sued for insisting upon this). When a legal system gets out of control, this is the result.
All over the democratic world, we can see versions of this: laws preventing new governments from governing, reforming or delivering what they promise. The result is disillusion and, in many places, the rise of populism. All the worse in Britain because Brexit was supposed to remedy this, to take back control. But leaving the European Union simply made it possible for ministers to conduct a legal clear-up, to do the legal weeding. It’s a huge job of work, never attempted.
Keir Starmer will be facing similar headaches, starting with legal challenges over his plan to tax school fees. But he came to prominence as the Gollum of this legal underworld and is unlikely to dissolve it.
Kemi Badenoch should take note: any serious Tory agenda would be doomed without root-and-branch legal reform.
As for Elon Musk, we should perhaps not be surprised if he never signs up for the job. He says he’d like to cut $2 trillion from government spending but also says he’d like to colonise Mars. He may well conclude that the latter mission is probably easier.