Tue Nov 19

Elon Musk’s new job will bring tech ‘disruption’ to the US government – and history says it won’t be pretty

Written by: Hallam Stevens, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, James Cook University

On November 12, United States president-elect Donald Trump announced he would appoint Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to lead a newly constituted Department of Government Efficiency ^[1] alongside fellow tech billionaire and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The new department will be tasked with reining in government bureaucracy, curbing government spending, and reducing regulation.

Musk has been outspoken in his support of Trump’s campaign, which included potentially illegal financial “giveaways”^[2] to voters. Although Musk’s direct involvement in electoral politics is new, attempts by technology companies and their leaders to reshape public policy and governance have a long history, from transport and housing to town planning.

By looking more closely at some of these initiatives, we may be able to get a preview of what Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will attempt to do, what government-by-tech may look like, and what might go wrong.

Replacing public services

In 2013, Musk himself proposed a new form of public transport called the “hyperloop”^[3] to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. And Musk’s SpaceX is his attempt to out-compete the publicly funded NASA in building rockets.

But other tech companies have had similar ambitions.

Uber has made a series of attempts to replace public transportation ^[4]. Companies such as Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet) have made efforts to substitute for urban infrastructure ^[5] by building so-called “smart cities” that collect and analyse data about people’s behaviour in order to make decisions about providing services.

An economist has even suggested ^[6] that Amazon bookstores might replace public libraries. Tech companies have challenged public offerings in fields as diverse as education ^[7], identity verification ^[8] and housing ^[9].

The limits of disruption

One thing many government-by-tech projects have in common is a belief that government is fundamentally inefficient, and that (unregulated) technology can provide better solutions.

Silicon Valley tech companies have long espoused “disruption ^[10]”, the idea of overthrowing a moribund status quo with innovation. Unlike public bureaucracies, the argument goes, companies can “move fast and break things ^[11]” to find new and more efficient ways to deliver services and value.

Tech companies following this philosophy have certainly offered services that benefit many of us in our day-to-day lives, and made huge amounts of money. But this doesn’t mean the Silicon Valley model makes sense for public administration. In fact, the evidence suggests something more like the opposite.

A history of failure

Tech’s forays into the provision of public services have had mixed results.

In 2017, the Canadian town of Innisfil replaced all its public transit with Uber ^[12]. The result was spiralling costs for the city (in fees paid to Uber), more cars on the road, and higher transportation costs for low-income residents.

Sidewalk Labs’ smart-city experiment in Toronto was abandoned in 2021 ^[13] after running into objections related to privacy and planning.

In the case of housing, the tech industry disruption has made existing problems worse, with Airbnb and other short-term rental companies contributing to the housing crisis ^[14].

Narrow solutions for narrow problems

Technology companies also tend to focus on a relatively narrow range of problems. Silicon Valley has helped us to find a taxi, pick a restaurant for dinner, navigate efficiently around a city, transfer cash to our friends, and search for the best rental for our vacation.

It has provided fewer solutions for finding low-income housing, providing care for the aged, or reducing our energy consumption. There are important reasons for this: tech companies want to generate revenue by tapping upper-middle class consumers with disposable income.

But these gaps also reflect the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley itself ^[15]. Tech remains mostly white, mostly male, mostly upper-middle class, mostly highly educated. This impacts the kinds of problems Silicon Valley sees and the kinds of solutions it produces.

All this is bad enough for the private sector. But the job of the government is not merely to look after shareholders or customers (or even just those who voted for it), but rather to look after all its citizens.

Services for the few

The concern here is that the kinds of solutions and “efficiencies” that Silicon Valley produces may end up serving the few at the expense of the many. Some “inefficiencies” of public services arise from the fact they are designed to take as many people into account as possible. Provisions and protections for older people, for those with disabilities, for those who may not speak English as a first language, for example, all create the need for more bureaucracy and more regulation.

Musk has said public transit is a “pain in the ass ^[16]” where you have to stand next to potential serial killers. Of course, in many places ^[17] public transport carries no such stigma. What’s more, many of those who might like to commute in private jets (or even Teslas) may have little choice but to subject themselves to the vagaries of a public bus.

One of SpaceX’s goals is to reduce the cost of a trip to Mars to under $US1 million. This would be a remarkable achievement, but it means that Musk’s imagined Mars colony would remain incredibly elite. Spaceships and hyperloops are woefully inadequate as public policy.

Unsexy necessities

While the philosophy of disruption tries to downplay the importance of existing infrastructure and institutions, the tech industry itself relies on them. Uber depends on cars and roads (including the governments that maintains them), Airbnb depends on brick-and-mortar buildings (and the labour that builds them), and Amazon and eBay depend on transportation infrastructure and postal services.

All tech companies rely on established and enforced systems of finance, property, and taxation. These old infrastructures and institutions may be unsexy and even inefficient.

However, these so-called inefficiencies have often evolved in ways aligned with fairness, justice, and inclusivity. The record of Silicon Valley tech companies does not suggest that they share such values.