Government efficiency, Musk-style

• As Trump's wave of swing-state victories piled up Tuesday night, Musk posted a crudely doctored photo of himself carrying a white porcelain sink into the Oval Office, captioned "let that sink in."
• It was a reference to a video he posted the evening he took possession of a newly purchased Twitter.

Flashback: A wave of tech talent descended on D.C. and the federal government 15 years ago when Barack Obama took office, eager to put their web savvy and coding skills to work to make government run better.

• During the first Trump administration, Jared Kushner ran the Office of American Innovation, intended to bring private-sector know-how into government, and many tech CEOs sat on advisory councils organized by the Trump White House.

Yes, but: This time around, the valley-to-swamp project is likely to be different.

• Musk's transformation of Twitter into X was a chaotic and costly affair that alienated many users and strained the service's infrastructure.
• Massive layoffs and waves of resignations succeeded in reducing the company's costs, but revenue plunged, too.

Some CEOs and investors praised Musk's approach as a corrective to what they saw as a runaway sense of entitlement on the part of both tech employees and customers who weren't even paying for the service.

• Musk hasn't yet turned around X as a business, but he has succeeded in transforming its social and political makeup.
• What was once a kind of neutral-ground global town square, where both left and right freely mingled, is now a noticeably more partisan environment in which the owner is also the loudest MAGA voice.

State of play: We don't yet know what form Musk's government-efficiency project will take.

• There is bipartisan agreement that government could always use less red tape and more innovation.
• Trump has long been expected to reinstate a measure he introduced near the end of his first term that would make it easy for his administration to fire roughly 50,000 key federal employees formerly protected as nonpartisan civil servants.
• This "Schedule F" approach could enable big cuts to the federal payroll, shaped by MAGA loyalty tests as well as cost efficiencies. To proportionally match what Musk did at Twitter, however, would require firing a million or more government workers.
• There's just a massive difference in scale between a mid-sized tech company and the government of a nation of more than 330 million.

Between the lines: Musk is a billionaire who's already busy running a clutch of ambitious companies of his own.

• It's hard to see him wanting to run an agency himself, or even to invest time getting to know the nuts and bolts of government's innards.
• Also, the more he brings to bear his own experience running Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter/X, the more likely he is to trigger colossal conflict-of-interest mines — and several of his enterprises are already doing government business.

Our thought bubble: Both Trump and Musk see themselves as disrupters, and they want to place a big bet on shaking up the bureaucratic status quo.

• If they win their bet, they expect to make government leaner and smarter. If they lose, they could end up just breaking it.

Reality check: It's one thing to cut so many employees at a private social media company that the platform begins to glitch and crash.

• But if Musk-driven "efficiencies" in D.C. end up interfering with essential government services, they could quickly turn unpopular.

The bottom line: The richest man in the world may not depend on a Social Security check or Medicare, but sooner or later, most Americans do.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to cite 2020 U.S. Census population data (instead of an estimate).