As Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States begins in earnest, he and his team are coming in hot. The once-and-future President was quick to issue a bevy of Executive Orders and begin molding government policies as he saw fit, demonstrating his and his collaborators’ eagerness to set new precedents and retake control of the US government.
According to many official sources, much of this gung-ho mentality has come from the belief that Trump and his billionaire buddies such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg harbor—that the US government is a once-dominant, lean, high-flying company that grew too big, too bloated, too bureaucratic, too unimaginative. This view of the US as a dominant player caught napping amid a foundation-shifting transformative period has also allegedly directly influenced many of Trump’s policies and actions relating to the country’s international affairs, such as his stance on renaming the Gulf of Mexico and retaking the Panama Canal.
A theory that binds Trump with leading innovators, especially Elon Musk, is that you can bring tech and business talent and techniques together to take a wrecking ball to broken ideas and/or processes or entire agencies. Aides say this isn’t Trump’s instinctual motivation. He wants a strong stock market, slower inflation, and low unemployment—the holy trinity of economic indicators.
Tech CEOs in Government
But Musk, Marc Andreessen, and a growing chorus of entrepreneurs and tech CEOs are fusing their “founder mode” mentality with Trump’s desire for fast growth. Silicon Valley’s best and brightest are now actively battling for bigger roles in reshaping government. Ever since Musk demonstrated just how easy it was to purchase premium access and active input into Trump’s team, almost every CEO wants a slice of the action.
The optimistic scenario for the Trump presidency is that these shock-and-awe tactics might jar lawmakers and the public into realizing how a slow, bloated, bureaucratic government handcuffs and hurts America in the vital race for AI, new energy sources, space, and overall growth. Of course, some of this is motivated by politics, some by genuine enthusiasm to serve, and some by naked self-interest. The government will help pick the winners and losers in chips, AI, energy, crypto, satellites, and space. So, it would be CEO malpractice not to try to shape the outcome. A seat at the table could be worth billions.
Whatever the motivation, the genuine thesis is directionally correct: America’s government is so vast, complex, and indebted that it makes fast, smart growth exponentially more complicated.
Whether you’re a skeptic or fan, consider not what a policy wonk would do but how a tech CEO would shake things up if their company was deep in debt and slow to execute.
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently dined with Trump, loves to tell how his company rediscovered its mojo with a Year of Efficiency (2023) where he declared: “Leaner is better.” Meta cut workforce, managerial layers, and decision-making obstacles—then went all-in on AI. The results were magical, he says.
Cut Costs
The U.S. debt is too staggering to comprehend. It’s $36 trillion and grows by $1 trillion every 100 days. Another way to look at it is that America spends more on defense than the next 10 biggest nations—and yet America spends more on debt than defense! Thus, cutting government, now or later, is unavoidable.
Bet Big
You can’t cut your way out of this crisis. Instead, the only palatable solution is explosive growth—not 2% or 3%, but twice that. Marc Andreessen has publicly argued that this rate of growth is possible if you stack government attention and staff correctly. The big bets would be on AI, space, new domestic energy sources, crypto, and U.S. businesses doing this work at home. A GDP growth of 1% would amount to about $290 billion.
Conversely, Robert Rubin, who was a co-senior partner at Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, wrote Friday in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that outsiders arriving in Washington need to “recognize how much they don’t know about government and how different it can be from business.” Rubin writes from experience that “government can’t and shouldn’t be run like a business.”
“The best way to make a successful transition to the public sector is to do so with humility,” Rubin concludes. “The alternative, in many cases, is to have humility thrust upon you.”