Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

Elon Musk has decided he needs to spend a little more time with Tesla since the first quarter earnings for the firm were down 71 percent.

Before that he announced that he had trimmed the projected savings of the Department of Government Efficiency down to about $150 billion. Considering his original target was $2 trillion that is quite a change, probably not one he is happy about.

Musk’s problem, in my humble opinion, is that his idea that he could bring in a crew that could identify all kinds of problems from the top end of a computer system really didn’t work very well. Oh, the computer kids were smart enough on the computers, they just didn’t understand how various government agencies worked, or what they did, or why some of the things they did were more important than others, or done in a certain way on purpose.

My brother, Keith, is a computer guy. He started in school in the 70s and stuck with it through his recent retirement. Over that period of time he wrote some of his own software and sold it to business and federal government agencies and then later went to work for a number of major firms that dealt with computer software.

In a recent blog he wrote that when he started he could write “tight” code. Back then memory was very expensive so tight code was necessary.

“One skill I didn’t have at the time was the ability to look at code others had written and understand the reason it was written,” he wrote. “It’s one thing to be given a problem and solve it via code and quite another to be given some code and figure out what problem it is solving. The latter requires something that’s called today “Domain Knowledge” which is a fancy term for knowing the business problem.”

“The DOGE youngsters are quite likely some of the best technologists in the country but it’s obvious they lack domain knowledge,” he wrote.

Musk was probably not helped with his project by the cabinet and department heads brought in by the administration of President Donald J. Trump. These people were selected on the basis of their loyalty to the president as opposed to knowledge of the departments they were hired to lead.

Many didn’t understand the mission of their organization, how it worked, and what its legal mandates were. So they started without knowing what the most important aspects of their department were, what parts might be out of date and could be dropped, what parts could be made more efficient with better technology or much of the detail stuff a manager needs to make informed decisions.

We were told that the whole idea of DOGE would be efficiency. But firing people via email because they were probationary or some department had a strange name they didn’t understand was anything but efficient. Included in the probationary category are people who had been recently promoted to new positions who needed a certain time in that position to be made more permanent. These would be people who supervisors thought were doing well and should advance, exactly the kind of people you want to keep, not boot out the door, if efficiency is the goal.

The president would have been much better off to hire people more knowledgeable in departments as cabinet heads and task them with making that department more efficient, including elimination of programs that were no longer necessary or could be combined with those of a different department.

It should be fairly clear to all of us that we need to reduce government spending at the Federal level or we need to increase taxes or a combination of the two. We are borrowing ourselves into oblivion.

But the real issue is that the major problem, our national debt, still exists with no plan to slow or stop increasing it. It is a sin to leave this mess for our children and grandchildren.