If the Chief Business of the American People is Business, the Chief Business of the American Government is to Govern
“The chief business of the American people is business,” President Calvin Coolidge declared in 1925. Whether or not that phrase is applicable today, it is evident that the new Trump administration believes that the U.S. government should be business-like. How else to understand the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a planned presidential advisory commission to be led by billionaire businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy? How else to understand President-elect Trump’s nominating a significant number of Wall Street chief executives to major government positions? Instead of a government “of the people, for the people, by the people,” the new Trump government is all about the business of business.
What ever happened to the common good? What has happened to the general welfare? For behind Trump’s touting efficiency is a shift away from common values and purposes to a bottom-line mentality. Trump the New York real estate mogul has brought his “what’s in it for me” mentality to the highest levels of American government.
It is in this sense that Elon Musk has become the man of the hour. This is the entrepreneur who reduced Twitter’s work force from 8,000 to 1,500 in one sweeping blow. In his new position, Musk has promised to cut $2 trillion or 30 percent from the annual U.S. budget. And Trump seems enthralled with Musk’s history of firings, imagining himself taking his television Apprentice’s iconic “You’re fired” to the Oval Office.
What are the implications of those potential government layoffs?
Just as the term “worker” has been delegitimized, now it’s civil servants who are under attack. In the United States, civil servants have been protected from nepotism and indiscriminate firing for almost 150 years. There are federal laws, starting with the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service ReformAct, specifically designed to make entering federal employment competitive and beyond favoritism. Since 1883, there have been various modifications to the Act, but it is obvious that any system based on merit and union protection is under threat from Trump 2.0.
Already, in October 2020, Trump 1.0 issued Executive Order 13957 to eliminate competition for certain government jobs and narrow protection for those workers. The Order gave power to the president to appoint government employees outside normal civil servant procedures because “To effectively carry out the broad array of activities assigned to the executive branch under law, the President and his appointees must rely on men and women in the Federal service employed in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character,” the Order justified in overriding previous guarantees. And consequentially, “Faithful execution of the law requires that the President have appropriate management oversight regarding this select cadre of professionals.”
The Order eliminated another check on civil servants’ rights; it proposed that besides the president, “agencies should have a greater degree of appointment flexibility with respect to these employees than is afforded by the existing competitive service process.” The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) filed a lawsuit against the Order bemoaning that “This case is a textbook example of the president acting contrary to Congress’s express and limited delegation of authority to the president.” They pointed out that “The president’s sweeping order fails to make a meaningful showing that shifting large numbers of federal employees into a new excepted service category so that they can be fired more quickly and without cause is necessary or supported by good administration principles.”
President Biden revoked the Order on January 22, 2020, just after taking office, but it will certainly come back under Trump 2.0.
There is no denying that the private sector should be efficient. On the other hand, the public sector’s contribution to the general welfare cannot be measured in efficiency. Unlike simple mathematical calculations of bottom-line success, the public sector’s evaluation appears during the next election cycle when citizens decide if they are satisfied with how the government has performed.
Trump’s electoral successes have accelerated the neoliberal privatization of the public good. How is that superrich individuals are being mandated to make the government more efficient without considering very nature of what government should be doing? What are Musk and Ramaswamy going to do to improve the general welfare of American citizens?
How many people will be fired? Will the two have the Trumpian pleasure of going on television to say, “You’re fired,” to hundreds of thousands of civil servants. Their proximity to the Oval Office is a re-enforcement of a hegemonic masculinity that has no direct link to a common good.
The art of the deal is a business approach that does not necessarily transfer to diplomatic negotiations. Concluding treaties is not the same as overseeing a merger and acquisition or starting a stock’s initial public offering. Concluding treaties and negotiating mergers and acquisitions require negotiations, but their ultimate goal is not the same. Allowing Musk to meet with foreign leaders makes a travesty of how a government should conduct its foreign affairs. Diplomacy is based on consensus, win-win, not on some negotiation to improve corporate earnings or stock prices.
As an example, the running of the United States Defense Department up and through the Vietnam War by the former Ford executive Robert McNamara and his Harvard Business School and Rand Corporation Whiz Kids is a case study of how technocratic private sector management style transferred to the public sector contributed to disastrous human consequences and lack of trust in the American government. Musk/ Ramaswamy threats to initiate a massive reduction in the federal workforce is a bizarre update of McNamara’s use of the body count of the dead Vietnamese to calculate how the United States was winning the War. McNamara’s body counting was inhuman and unsuccessful; Musk/Ramaswamy’s firing of civil servants to improve government efficiency will fail to improve the country’s general welfare.
The chief business of the American people may be business, but governing for the public good is not the same as running a business for profit. The United States government is not an enterprise. It is responsible for the general welfare of its citizens. The chief business of the American government is to govern.
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