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The smartest guys in the room
I'm a f**ing billionaire who's never had anything to do with foreign aid or agriculture or lots of other things, and never worked in, much less ran, a government agency of any kind, but I know better how to run a foreign aid agency, an agriculture department, or any government agency than people who have actually done it for decades. In fact, it's such child's play that my college-aged interns can do a better job of it than people who have done it for decades.
It's really quite simple, something called "zero-based budgeting". You start by setting the budget for everything to zero, and then the people who really care about what the agency does can try to justify every penny they want it to spend. Sure, they already spent months making those arguments to Congress, when Congress passed their appropriations into law, but Congress is corrupt and rule-bound; it takes somebody like me, not biased by rules and regulations and domain knowledge, to decide what really deserves funding. It'll take more months to make those arguments to me, and then I'll decide unilaterally whether to accept them, depending on how I feel that day. It's not like anybody's life or livelihood depends on these programs, right?
And while we're waiting for me to make my decisions about which programs survive and which don't, I'm busily deleting data files and shredding documents, to make it as difficult as possible for the opposing team to get their pwecious agency running again.
The plan is to destroy as much of the Federal government as possible, so quickly that by the time the courts or Congress or other such fuddy-duddies can try to stop me, it'll be a fait accompli. And since I'm in a hurry, I don't have time to make distinctions like "which programs are actually valuable?"; if it turns out we really do need them, we'll build them from scratch. That can't be hard, for somebody as smart as me.
UPDATE: TechDirt makes a similar point. Musk charged into Twitter, destroyed most of it without understanding what it did, then found he needed some of the things he had just destroyed, and started rebuilding them in a rush with less context and forethought. Now he's charged into the US government, destroyed various agencies without understanding what they did (specifically USAID), then found that he needed some of the things he had just destroyed, and started rebuilding them in a rush with less context and forethought.
It's really quite simple, something called "zero-based budgeting". You start by setting the budget for everything to zero, and then the people who really care about what the agency does can try to justify every penny they want it to spend. Sure, they already spent months making those arguments to Congress, when Congress passed their appropriations into law, but Congress is corrupt and rule-bound; it takes somebody like me, not biased by rules and regulations and domain knowledge, to decide what really deserves funding. It'll take more months to make those arguments to me, and then I'll decide unilaterally whether to accept them, depending on how I feel that day. It's not like anybody's life or livelihood depends on these programs, right?
And while we're waiting for me to make my decisions about which programs survive and which don't, I'm busily deleting data files and shredding documents, to make it as difficult as possible for the opposing team to get their pwecious agency running again.
The plan is to destroy as much of the Federal government as possible, so quickly that by the time the courts or Congress or other such fuddy-duddies can try to stop me, it'll be a fait accompli. And since I'm in a hurry, I don't have time to make distinctions like "which programs are actually valuable?"; if it turns out we really do need them, we'll build them from scratch. That can't be hard, for somebody as smart as me.
UPDATE: TechDirt makes a similar point. Musk charged into Twitter, destroyed most of it without understanding what it did, then found he needed some of the things he had just destroyed, and started rebuilding them in a rush with less context and forethought. Now he's charged into the US government, destroyed various agencies without understanding what they did (specifically USAID), then found that he needed some of the things he had just destroyed, and started rebuilding them in a rush with less context and forethought.
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And by the time those losers in Congress or wherever can mount a challenge, I'm sure the king will have corrected all those judicial errors so there will be sane judges to hear those cases. I can lend him some interns if he needs.