Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been politically flirting with one another for some time, and now it seems they're finally ready to become an item... again, politically speaking. Musk has offered to join Trump's administration in the past in order to lead a task force to clean up the bloat that's making government so expensive and inefficient.
Now, it would appear Trump is interested and teased the idea that he'd, indeed, hire Musk if he's not too busy.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: "At the suggestion of @elonmusk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement, I will create a Government Efficiency Commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government — and making recommendations… pic.twitter.com/ETZcsf7qbR
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 5, 2024
This is an exciting prospect, but what could Musk bring to the table, and how would he make things a bit less cumbersome and costly? Let's explore that.
For one, Musk is a master at streamlining his businesses. Twitter is probably his most famous example. Once he bought the joint, he fired over 80 percent of the staff there, ridding the place of the excessive and unnecessary employees, many of whom were more useless than a screen door on a submarine. I'm sure many of my readers are salivating at the idea of what Musk can do to D.C., a place that has probably gone unchecked for ages. The amount of money we as taxpayers could save could easily range into the billions with Musk setting efficiency and redundancy standards.
Musk could help this along by implementing AI automation, streamlining administrative tasks, and requiring fewer resources, including cumbersome, out-of-date programs and fewer people on the payroll. As this is likely to happen in the near future anyway, it's better that Elon Musk be the guy to do it instead of some other tech billionaire who will likely be turned to who doesn't have our best interests in mind.
This could also open up brand-new avenues of transparency.
Digital information entered by the government can be organized via blockchains or organized data entry points organized by time stamps that are immutable once entered, creating a timeline of information that you can easily track. To visualize this, think of paragraphs in an article that describe the goings-on in government that, once entered, cannot be edited. Each paragraph is preceded by the next entry, giving you a direct timeline of events, decisions, and numbers.
This means that spending, votes, contracts, budgets, and more could be entered into blockchains, giving you a timeline of decisions and changes that you can access day to day, or even hour to hour. This could simplify government transparency in huge ways. These data points could be visualized into graphs by AI programs, giving you a real-time look into where spending is going, what is working, what isn't, and more.
This would change the way people see government, which is currently a confusing mess that is hardly trackable even by people who work in it, and one of the reasons so many corrupt politicians get away with being shady.
This is, of course, something that won't happen overnight, and you can bet there will be an unforgivable number of politicians who will resist any attempt at better transparency. However, if Trump successfully pulls this campaign off and hires Musk, this process of organizing and reducing bloat could be a feather in the cap of Vance, who will most likely run after Trump's four years are up.
And these are only a few of the solutions I could think up. No doubt, Musk has many more ideas rattling around in his brain.
But this first requires that Trump be elected. Vote accordingly.