Fukuyama's Open Letter to Musk: Improving Government Efficiency—Cutting Civil Servants Isn't a Panacea
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Fukuyama's Open Letter to Musk: Improving Government Efficiency—Cutting Civil Servants Isn't a Panacea
Firing government officials is not necessarily a way to improve efficiency.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Francis Fukuyama
Compiled by Bitpush News
Author Bio: Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at FSI. He is the author of *The End of History and the Last Man*, *The Origins of Political Order*, and *Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy*.
Francis Fukuyama
Prelude:
On November 12 local time, President-elect Donald Trump announced that American entrepreneur Elon Musk and Indian-American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy would jointly lead a proposed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) after his inauguration, with Musk taking full oversight of government spending. According to NBC News, despite its name, DOGE is not an official U.S. government agency, and it remains unclear how the organization will operate.
Trump stated on social media that DOGE would “pave the way to dismantle bureaucratic agencies, cut redundant regulations and wasteful spending, and restructure federal institutions.”
Below is the main text:
Dear Elon Musk,
Congratulations on your candidate Donald Trump’s decisive victory—a result to which you contributed greatly. I understand you’ve been appointed as the new administration’s efficiency czar, a role that will be critically important because the federal bureaucracy indeed needs reform. However, I have some advice about what to keep in mind while taking on this position.
I trust you realize that working within government is fundamentally different from operating in the private sector. The key difference is that government employees are heavily constrained by rules. For example, you cannot start firing people on day one as you did at Twitter. Federal employees are protected by a complex set of civil service rules established by Congress. Trump plans to rescind these protections by reinstating an executive order from his first term, creating a new “Schedule F” category that would allow the president to dismiss any employee at will. But such a move will face strong legal challenges, and overcoming the legal barriers could take months.
In any case, dismissing government officials isn’t necessarily the path to greater efficiency.
There's a common perception that the federal bureaucracy is bloated and overstaffed. This is simply not true.
The number of full-time federal employees today is roughly the same as in 1969—about 2.3 million. Despite the fact that government now spends more than five times as much money, staffing levels haven’t increased. In fact, one could argue that the government is understaffed, given decades of pressure to reduce headcount. For instance, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), responsible for overseeing $1.4 trillion in expenditures—roughly one-fifth of the entire federal budget—has only 6,400 full-time staff. These employees must detect Medicare fraud, evaluate and certify tens of thousands of healthcare providers, and ensure timely payments to tens of millions of Americans. Cutting these personnel would likely increase, rather than reduce, fraud and waste in the Medicare system. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, tasked with resettling millions of refugees entering the United States, has just 150 employees. Meanwhile, increasing IRS staffing is projected to generate an additional $561 billion in revenue for the government over the next decade.
To compensate for chronic understaffing, the government relies heavily on contract workers—including through companies like yours, SpaceX. While it's easier to terminate contractors than regular federal employees, who will perform their work if they're dismissed? In reality, bringing these functions back in-house might save costs, since federal salaries are generally lower, but doing so would require hiring more people—and could risk declining service quality.
Deregulation is indeed part of any plan to improve government efficiency. There are clear targets, especially in construction—something you’re well aware of based on your experience building factories in the U.S.
We have too many permitting requirements that slow down or even block infrastructure projects entirely. For example, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) mandates environmental impact statements that can run into thousands of pages and take years to complete. Moreover, federal and state laws allow private lawsuits to enforce environmental regulations, making compliance both costly and time-consuming. That’s why it takes nearly a decade to approve offshore wind farms, and why it can take years to build transmission lines capable of delivering electricity from Texas to California. Any measures that streamline this process would therefore be widely welcomed. This would be one of the most visible early wins for the new administration, with positive ripple effects across areas ranging from affordable housing to climate adaptation. (But you should recognize that much of the excessive regulation occurs at the state level, which you cannot directly control—which is, of course, why you moved Tesla from California to Texas.)
However, improving government efficiency requires another kind of deregulation as well.
People often accuse bureaucracies of over-regulating the private sector, but bureaucracies themselves are also over-regulated. Americans have never fully trusted government, leading to decades of accumulated rules that bureaucrats must follow. The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) is a prime example—a massive rulebook spanning hundreds of pages that governs everything from purchasing F-35 fighter jets to office furniture. Hiring new staff is extremely difficult; my own students often wait months just to get an interview for a federal vacancy. Additionally, there are numerous diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements that don’t always reward actual talent, and I believe the Trump administration will be eager to eliminate many of these.
Many conservatives argue that government bureaucrats wield too much discretion, using it to advance liberal agendas beyond democratic control. While this does happen in some cases, the reality is often the opposite: bureaucrats spend far too much time complying with hundreds of congressional mandates rather than exercising independent judgment to make decisions that benefit citizens. They need to be freed from these constraints and evaluated based on outcomes achieved—not merely on their ability to avoid risks. This is how Silicon Valley and the private sector operate.
Clearly, you cannot delegate more authority to officials if you believe they lack the training and skills to use power wisely. And here lies another challenge: young people are unwilling to join federal agencies.
The average age of government workers is 47; only 7% of the workforce is under 30, while 14% are over 60. In the age of artificial intelligence, there is an urgent need for younger workers to fill these roles. Yet young talent avoids federal service. Onerous hiring procedures make job searches slow and frustrating, and working for the government carries little social prestige.
Under these conditions, you cannot achieve efficiency through mass layoffs. Government work must become attractive to young, tech-savvy individuals. They need flexibility to move in and out of public service without being bound by civil service pay grades designed 70 years ago, when most government workers were clerks and typists.
So here’s the crux: you can never manage government exactly like a company, but there is much you can do to improve efficiency. The key is to avoid simplistic, heavy-handed approaches like mass firings or shutting down entire agencies.
Remember, Rick Perry—appointed by Donald Trump—once wanted to abolish the Department of Energy, unaware that one of its most vital functions is managing the national laboratory system, which oversees nuclear weapons and energy research. You’ll also confront the reality that Congress has a say in how government operates. Even with Republican control, members represent diverse districts across the country and may resist efforts to overturn regulations they previously approved.
We need to reduce government regulation of many parts of the private sector—but we also need to deregulate government itself, empowering those who work within it to actually do their jobs. If Donald Trump wants to help the American people, he must recognize that government is an effective and necessary instrument for achieving national goals—not an enemy to be dismantled.
Sincerely,
Francis Fukuyama
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