Analysis: The DC plane crash highlights the flaws of Trump's ‘government as a business' playbook

CNN

31-01-2025

It's one of the more obviously flawed ideas embraced by both President Donald Trump and his right-hand man Elon Musk: that government should be run like a business.
Synergies! Streamlining! Above all, efficiency — that is the operative word that will help transform the federal government from a hulking, bloated bureaucracy into a nimble machine, like swapping a 1995 Compaq desktop PC for a 2025 MacBook Pro.
Of course, Trump and Musk are applying a business playbook to a thing that is decidedly not a business. Governments don't work for profit, and the services they provide aren't supposed to wow shareholders or go viral on TikTok. Good government should fade into the background, unnoticed, so that Americans don't have to think twice about whether it's safe to get on a commercial flight or drink water from their tap.
That's not to say government agencies are perfectly calibrated. But not all redundancies can be written off as needless red tape. A leading commission on aviation safety, for one, was widely seen as an asset in bringing the sprawling US industry into alignment. Trump disbanded it last week.
Less than two weeks in, and it's clear Trump is running the White House with the same dictatorial energy he brought to his companies — almost all of which have been privately held, with no outside board or public shareholders to cater to. It's a style that also seems to suit Musk, who oversees half a dozen private companies and one public entity, Tesla (where he has stacked his board with loyalists and where he has regularly butted heads with shareholders).
In the name of efficiency, the president and Musk are putting on a familiar show of cleaning house — a tactic so clearly modeled after Musk's past endeavors, they didn't even bother to change the subject line.
On Day One, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, who had publicly clashed with Musk over issues related to SpaceX, stepped down. The post remained vacant for nine days. It was only after 67 people were killed in a midair collision over the Potomac River in Washington that Trump announced the appointment of Chris Rocheleau, an FAA veteran who most recently ran an aviation business lobby, to lead the agency.
On his second day in office, Trump fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and Coast Guard, cutting both their terms short.
On Day Three, all members of a crucial aviation safety committee received a memo, per the AP, saying that the Department of Homeland Security was terminating the group as part of its 'commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.' (The advisory, by the way, was ordered by Congress more than 30 years ago in response to the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, and brought together key groups in the aviation industry to advise the TSA on the most effective safety protocols.)
Day Seven, trillions in federal funding were frozen indefinitely. Day Eight, the US government did a carbon copy of Musk's Twitter playbook when it emailed 2 million federal workers with an offer to resign — once again sparking confusion and panic.
Among those 2 million workers were some 11,500 air-traffic controllers who have been stretched thin for years, often working overtime and battling burnout. Last year, the FAA said it was still short 3,000 controllers, despite a surge in hiring.
Ten days in, and the sturdy bureaucracy — the folks tasked with keeping planes in the air, ensuring water is drinkable, providing housing to veterans, any number of other essential services — is in chaos.
And while the cause of the plane crash, just a few miles from the White House near Reagan National Airport, is not yet known, it is testing the new administration's response to a crisis at its own doorstep.
Unsurprisingly, Trump defaulted to a well-worn page of the playbook, heaping blame on his predecessors and suggesting that diversity initiatives eroded aviation standards — a statement that is just not true and, as usual, he offered no evidence. Neither did Vice President JD Vance, or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, or Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who all parroted the boss.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are trying to do their jobs while weighing the offer to simply reply to an email with 'resign' and walk away. The offer purports to allow workers to leave with eight months of pay and benefits, though many questioned whether the offer was genuine or even legal.
That anguish appears to be part of the plan.
Russ Vought, Trump's acting head of the Office of Management and Budget, has stated plainly in private speeches revealed by ProPublica last year that 'we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.'
'When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down… We want to put them in trauma.'