Why Musk will Struggle to Downsize the Government
Most of what the government does has powerful supporters
The government does not have large projects (outside of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, & the Military). Instead it has departments that have projects that have initiatives. The money is down in all those myriad initiatives.
Let’s take a look at one - the Idaho National Laboratory’s work on Grid Enhancing Technologies. When you reduce or zero out funding to DoE, the end result is zeroing out funding to this program.
Guess who this program’s director can easily call up? The Senators and Representatives in Idaho. They are going to fight tooth and nail to keep all funding to this facility.
Guess who else is very interested in the results from this facility? Every utility and electrical grid operator in the country. Electrical demand is climbing and they not only need to produce that electricity, but they have to get it to the customers. The best way to increase the capacity of the grid is what comes out of this program.
Who will those utilities contact? Every Senator and Congressperson in their states. Even more important, they will contact Amazon, Microsoft, Google, & Tesla and point out that without these improvements, they can’t get them power for their datacenters.
And who will the big tech companies contact? Elon Musk. They’ll be pushing him hard to keep, and if anything increase, this funding. And Elon will want that, not only because he understands the need, but also out of pure self interest.
There are a million of these land mines in everything the federal government does. Work that is critically important to a set of companies. And those companies, and their employees, will exert significant political pressure to keep the programs they need.
They’ll struggle to get more than a few token wins on this.
