This is what happens when you try to run the government the way Elon Musk runs Twitter

Last year’s election came with a Greek chorus: rampant speculation about what a second Trump term might actually look like. Would it be a leaky ship once again? Would a team of loyalists turn it into the well-oiled machine Trump boasted of at the time, but whose true lubrication was debatable? Or would it be more like the dystopia that Trump’s harshest critics warned about?

If the first 10 days are any indication, what Trump’s second administration most closely resembles is . . . Twitter just after Elon Musk took it over.

Ever since Trump first announced the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) last November, it was clear the Tesla impresario would play a role in Trump’s second term. Musk contributed over $250 million to Trump’s campaign and boosted the candidate in other ways.

Now he would have a seat at the table.

Or that’s how it looked on paper, anyway. In practice, Musk appears to now occupy several seats. His influence has been unmistakable in the rocky early days of the new administration, and many of its familiar messes.

We the tweeple

A grinning Musk famously barged into the Twitter offices in October 2022 carrying a kitchen sink—a punny nod to the meme “let that sink in.” Days later, he laid off roughly half the staff.

Although Trump’s return to the White House was thankfully devoid of any visual puns, it has a similarly disruptive focus on efficiency. At least 240 employees of the federal government have reportedly already been fired, reassigned, or designated to be laid off so far.

And just as Musk offered Twitter workers in 2022, Trump’s administration on Tuesday presented two million government employees with what seemed to be a buyout option: eight months’ pay now, if they resign by next week. (Details of the murky ultimatum and its legality seem up for interpretation.)

As if the two propositions weren’t similar enough, the language in the new memo echoes that of the one Musk once sent to Team Twitter. According to the New York Times, the email carrying the respective memos even bore the same subject line: “Fork in the Road.”

Back in 2022, Musk shook up the lives of the Twitter workers who didn’t accept his buyout. He demanded a companywide return to office, ending pandemic-era remote work practices; made those remaining employees commit to an “extremely hardcore” work ethic, which translated to “long hours at high intensity”; and implemented a broad series of cost-cutting measures around everything from infrastructure to real estate and content moderation.

Each of these aspects of Musk’s Twitter takeover has a counterpart in the new administration. One of Trump’s 26 day-one executive orders was a return to office mandate; many roles have new performance benchmarks; some employees have been made to justify their current projects in ambush meetings; and the cost-cutting-at-all-costs ethos has manifested in widespread funding freezes and budget cuts of dubious legality.

As if all these initiatives didn’t smack of Musk already, helping to enforce them are a collection of loyal acolytes from Musk’s various businesses, similar to the crew he assembled years ago to hollow out Twitter.

But why is that effort something the world’s sole superpower would ever want to emulate?

Why what happened to Twitter matters

Twitter’s transformation into X is not the typical aspirational business story. Musk bought the microblogging platform for $44 billion in 2022; as of last September, its estimated value was $9.4 billion. Ad revenue has reportedly plummeted amid eased content moderation and Musk’s erratic behavior, while subscription revenue for premium tiers of X has not brought in nearly enough to make up the shortfall. In a recent email to X staff, Musk reportedly described the company’s financial situation bluntly: “We’re barely breaking even.”

Given the company’s tumultuous recent history, that gloomy assessment seems charitable.

Beyond the financial decline, Twitter sustained even more grievous damage to its reputation over the past several years. While Musk claimed that part of his motivation for buying Twitter was to correct an alleged “bias against conservatives,” by any metric, he overcorrected. During last year’s election, X had become an atmosphere where the right-wing echo chamber thrives, and where legacy media accounts are throttled.

While X remains something of a hub for news junkies, it no longer attracts the same heady mixture of athletes, artists, journalists, comedians, and scientists as it did during Twitter’s 2010s heyday.

The United States of X

The same chaos and confusion that engulfed Twitter in November 2022 has spread throughout the federal government since Trump’s inauguration. Beyond the flood of sweeping executive orders, the bedlam peaked earlier this week when a memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget paused all federal grants and loans—without clarifying the extent of who might be affected.

Although the memo was eventually rescinded 36 hours later, amid an onslaught of lawsuits, the freeze is still ongoing. According to language in the memo, the freeze is meant to root out programs that have anything to do with the broadly defined concepts of “DEI” or “gender identity.” However, just about everything beyond a shortlist that includes Medicaid and food stamps is potentially on the chopping block.

Anyone whose well-being or livelihood depends on government funding now knows what it’s like to work in an office where heavy layoffs are imminent. Except more than jobs are at stake.

There are plenty of reasons why the U.S. government should not be run like a company. The objective of a business—profits, profits, profits—is fundamentally at odds with the government objective of serving the public interest and keeping people safe. The same cost-cutting measures that seem to please investors, for instance, can lead to crises like the 2014 water contamination in Flint, Michigan—a result of the city trying to save money by switching sources for its drinking water.

Citizens are more than just a user base. A company like Twitter might troubleshoot how lean it can run without degrading its offering so much that users flee in mass, but the U.S. government has a slimmer margin of error. When its offering is degraded, the results can get far more catastrophic than soft quarterly profits. And sometimes it’s unclear exactly what or who is keeping degradation at bay until after they’re gone.

When Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he fired and laid off so many workers the company actually couldn’t afford to lose, the HR team had to create an “accidental termination” category to re-onboard them all. How many layoffs and firings will he initiate in the new administration before learning the hard way which government employees were important after all?

Perhaps there’s one bright spot in the ongoing efforts to pare down the government. Some of the former Twitter employees who took the buyout offer in 2022 ended up suing Musk for the severance he never paid. This time around, politicians like Senator Tim Kaine and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are warning anyone tempted not to take the bait.

Some of them hardly seem to need the encouragement, however. Employees have been posting on Reddit about how this whole episode has only made them more fired up to stick around and see to the business of keeping the government functioning.