- Even in the best of cases, if this is your approach, you need a plan for how to add back the stuff that you learn is critical. DOGE haven't demonstrated that minimal level of competence. Firing National Nuclear Security Administration staff and cutting them off from their work emails meant that when those staff were quickly discovered to be critical, it wasn't possible to quickly bring them back. This is amateurish.
- But further, this principle works with designing rockets because you expect to build multiple rockets during the development process, and failing on one rocket doesn't destroy your ability to iterate. You don't do this with a rocket if you're in the rocket. If we crash the US economy or start a war, we impair our ability to just pick up the pieces and carry on as before.
- And this works with something like rockets b/c no one is actively trying to blow up your rocket, or take advantage of its weaknesses. The US has adversaries, and the current administration is destabilizing agencies in a pretty public way which those adversaries may take advantage of. A crappy way to discover that the NNSA is critical would be if, e.g. some reduction in global monitoring meant that we didn't notice some movement of fissile material to countries we aren't friends with, etc.
Maybe the tactics that work at Tesla and SpaceX aren't universally applicable and governing requires at least a somewhat different approach?
It's even worse than you point out. DOGE/Musk/whoever is really in charge didn't learn the NNSA staff was critical because the firings cause some immediate impact. Someone who actually knows what they're talking about likely told them about the problems it would cause and the firing squad actually listened. Had they relied on waiting for side effects to understand the impact, it would be far, far too late when you're talking about something like nuclear weapons.
In other words, not only is the strategy wildly likely to result in you learning things are critical years past the point of no return when talking about functions like nuclear weapons, it was completely pointless in this particular case. They didn't learn anything they couldn't have learned beforehand, but did manage to piss off a ton of people with critical skills who are likely looking for the exit now if they even came back at all.
- Even in the best of cases, if this is your approach, you need a plan for how to add back the stuff that you learn is critical. DOGE haven't demonstrated that minimal level of competence. Firing National Nuclear Security Administration staff and cutting them off from their work emails meant that when those staff were quickly discovered to be critical, it wasn't possible to quickly bring them back. This is amateurish.
- But further, this principle works with designing rockets because you expect to build multiple rockets during the development process, and failing on one rocket doesn't destroy your ability to iterate. You don't do this with a rocket if you're in the rocket. If we crash the US economy or start a war, we impair our ability to just pick up the pieces and carry on as before.
- And this works with something like rockets b/c no one is actively trying to blow up your rocket, or take advantage of its weaknesses. The US has adversaries, and the current administration is destabilizing agencies in a pretty public way which those adversaries may take advantage of. A crappy way to discover that the NNSA is critical would be if, e.g. some reduction in global monitoring meant that we didn't notice some movement of fissile material to countries we aren't friends with, etc.
Maybe the tactics that work at Tesla and SpaceX aren't universally applicable and governing requires at least a somewhat different approach?