Dorothy Parker famously said, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” She foresaw Elon Musk. His great wealth and the word of others testify that the world’s richest man is a brilliant businessman in high-technology enterprises. His conduct as the First Buddy of President Trump and head of the spurious “Department of Government Efficiency” demonstrates that he is as great a fool as he is a mogul. For Musk has mindlessly created a threat to national security. The story is an example of his incompetence.
Musk dispatched his youthful techies to the Department of Energy to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, so he claimed. At some point, they encountered the name “National Nuclear Security Administration” on an organization chart or in a department budget. The word “Administration” must have suggested a bloated bureaucracy to these presumptuous youngsters. So, in the name of efficiency, they fired 300 NNSA employees of the nation’s steward of its nuclear arsenal.
I do not know about you, but if I were young again and came across the words “National,” “Nuclear,” and “Safety” in a government office building, I would have come to a screeching halt, asked myself how the hell I got here, and headed for the nearest exit.
At the present moment, the Department of Energy is having trouble rescinding its termination notice because those fired no longer have access to their workstations, and DOE does not have their personal phone numbers. Officials are asking—“Please”: can you believe how humbled they are to have to use this word now?—anyone who knows their numbers to let them know that they are not longer terminated. Preliminary results indicate that some will not return to work and some, though they will return to work, will seek employment elsewhere.
No matter how many of the 300 return, great damage has been done to this unit. There is a loss of highly specialized expertise not easily replaced under any circumstances and less likely to be replaced in a callous work environment and with an insecure employment situation. There are the delays and difficulties in getting security clearances, training new employees, and integrating them into operations—a process taking up to a year and a half. There is the loss of morale. There is the loss of trust in administrators. Meanwhile, NNSA work is impeded and national security, impaired—none of these results lending themselves to efficient operations.
I take this incredible blunder personally. As an independent consultant, I worked on two, high-level, classified, DOD/DOD studies of the management of nuclear weapons programs. One was the “Starbird Study”; the other was a study by a “President’s Blue Ribbon Task Group.” Both required TS and Q clearances, and a special access clearance, CNWDI (Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information). My task was editorial, not checking for serial commas and split infinitives, but ensuring the coordination and cogency of policy, program, and technical content.
After forty years, I have forgotten everything which I knew then. Even if I remembered any of it, I know that all of it would now be outdated. But what I learned about the people who work in this area gives the lie to those who disparage government workers, at least at administrative, managerial, and technical levels. Their knowledge and skills are unmatched. They are good at their work. They are in demand outside government. If they worked in the private sector, their compensation would be much, even multiples, greater than their government compensation. The reasons for their government service are the professional challenge of their work and their belief that what they do makes a significant contribution to national security.
Musk and Trump know nothing about such expertise and commitment to the service of the country. They conceive of government offices as job shops staffed by expendable or replaceable personnel and operating like call centers or automated production lines. So Elon Musk, using the uninformed and the immature to make critical decisions about government services and budgets, is one threat to national security; Donald Trump, using Musk to direct them, is another. Their ignorance and their arrogance in this and other areas of government make both of them threats to the welfare of the country. They are the worst, and the worst are firing the best.
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