On Wednesday night, SpaceX’s Starship rocket erupted into flames shortly after takeoff, marking another high-profile failure in Elon Musk’s “fail fast” development tactics. But to Musk, failure isn’t a bug but a feature. His core philosophy in rockets and government reform? Break things, learn fast, iterate. The beleaguered rollout of the Department of Government Efficiency followed a similar plan.
That mindset might launch rockets, but it won’t as easily drain a swamp.
Formed in 2024 with the ambitious goal of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget, DOGE brought a Silicon Valley startup ethos to Washington. Musk, alongside a short-lived Vivek Ramaswami, promoted aggressive cost-cutting, AI integration, and radical staffing reductions while promoting his efforts on X.
The result? Within months, the department eliminated thousands of federal jobs and scaled back or eliminated several long-standing programs entirely. The goal was agility, but the first few months were sown with discord regardless.
At SpaceX, by contrast, iteration factors into the equation. Rockets blow up under strict conditions, and each failure yields useful data. Musk often overstates the useful takeaways after a launch catastrophe. That attitude works in aerospace, where setbacks feature prominently in research and development.
In government, this principle does not carry over.
Musk is a well-known optimist. He promised self-driving Teslas by 2020 and humans on Mars by 2024. When those dates passed, the public shrugged.
Yet, by the time Musk quietly exited DOGE in May, the department found itself a legal mess, with pending lawsuits, confused oversight bodies, and a establishment perception that its “efficiency” was little more than a PR stunt..
Take the good of DOGE with the bad. It pledged to have purged $170 billion of spending, outlined by the wall of receipts, and prompted a nationwide discussion on the utility and scale of certain agencies and social enterprises. This is a positive outcome long term, especially as Congress encounters more and more issues with balancing the budget.
However, unlike a tech startup, the government isn’t designed to move fast. It’s built on friction: checks, balances, legal review, and public deliberation. Musk’s disdain for this “slowness” was evident. His team at DOGE initially took that exact approach. Entire departments were restructured or dissolved, preempting congressional input or long-term impact assessments. There were no prudential measures, just hollowing out.
The U.S. government appeared to its staff as a legacy system needing a total overhaul, and they presumed that it was a mere retrofit operation.
We should be clear: the government is in desperate need of reform, and the Trump administration acts in our best interest in doing so. Sure, it can be inefficient — point taken. But that doesn’t mean it can be run like a beta test. You can repair a rocket, but you can’t as easily streamline a republic’s working mechanisms. Musk’s instincts are seldom suited to the methodical, often tedious work that governance requires.
ROUTINE SPACEX STARSHIP TEST ENDS IN EXPLOSION IN MASSIVE SETBACK FOR MUSK’S COMPANY
We must remember that a republic isn’t optimized for efficiency. It’s optimized for stability, deliberation, and trust in the long term, much like the free markets that enable Musk’s rocketry. By treating the government like a startup, Musk learned vital differences between launching a machine into orbit and keeping a nation grounded, if not more efficient.
Though enough time and trials may well take humanity to Mars on a SpaceX rocket, we face no such guarantee that our federal institutions will magically fix themselves.