Musk brought Silicon Valley mindset to Trump's Washington

Washington has never seen anything like the rule-breaking, power-taking, government-torching, protocol-scorching force of delighted havoc and gleeful mayhem that is Elon Musk. Margaret O’Mara has. The University of Washington historian charted the spectacular rise and all-swallowing influence of the tech industry and its titans in her excellent, highly readable 2019 work, “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.” Musk, who grew rich by age 30 through his start-up work, is a relatively small character in the book, for reasons of narrative and focus. Instead, O’Mara centreed her history on the founders and back stories of the major platform companies: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

But there’s an attitude, a worldview and a fundamental set of principles that guide the tech industry and its progeny, like a secular catechism. O’Mara sees those beliefs very much in evidence at Musk’s fancifully named Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and his wrecking-ball efforts to raze huge swaths of the federal government in a single, unfettered swoop. Several elements are present and accounted for.

The “techno optimism,” as O’Mara described it, with its unshakable faith that technology is inherently good and will improve things — “even if there might be some collateral damage along the way.” The drive to move quickly and scale rapidly, if recklessly. The importance of personal relationships, such as the transactional bromance between President Donald Trump and Musk, who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to put his ally back in the Oval Office.

The two are masters of “the modern attention economy” — getting people to sit up and take notice — “and have a kind of shamelessness,” O’Mara said, “that is to their advantage, business-wise and politically right now.”

O’Mara worked in government and politics before teaching and undertaking her big-sweep cataloging of American history. (Other books include one looking at four presidential races that shaped the 20th century.)

Raised in Little Rock, O’Mara went from college to volunteering for Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. After he won, she took a position in the White House, working from the West Wing on economic and social policy.

Though O’Mara served for a time on the staff of Vice President Al Gore, an early techie adapter and one of Silicon Valley’s strongest political allies, she didn’t work on tech policy. “I was in the room next to the room where that was happening,” she joked on a Zoom call from her home office on Washington state’s Mercer Island. Her dog, an enthusiastic Labradoodle named Zuka, offered brief commentary off-camera.

O’Mara’s graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania led her to Silicon Valley, as her dissertation explored the domestic economic effects of the Cold War. “Once you start looking at that question,” she said, “it gets you to a whole host of things, including the electronics industry and micro-electronics and transistors. So I kind of came to tech through politics.”

O’Mara’s book explains how the federal government built Silicon Valley, a fact many of its entrepreneurs and legends — basking in the reflection of their self-glorification — choose to ignore, or fail to understand. “That’s actually part of the secret,” O’Mara said. “The indirect nature of the spending, the fact that it’s flowing through universities and private companies in a way that is kind of stealthy and hidden.” Of course, there was a profusion of great minds in California’s fertile Santa Clara Valley, innovators and visionaries blessed with a superhuman capacity to peer around corners and deep into the future. All that brainpower would have been for naught, however, save for the beneficence of Uncle Sam. As a customer. A subsidizer of research. A producer of human capital, through generous education funding. As an angel investor.

“We think of low taxes and deregulation as absence of government,” O’Mara said. “But actually those are government decisions that were made favorable — very deliberately so — (to) this industry.”

Call it ignorance or arrogance, there’s a deeply embedded notion in Silicon Valley and many of its denizens that because government is not market-driven “it is, by definition, stodgy and inefficient and wasteful and corrupt,” O’Mara said. They think that people working in government “aren’t very smart. The smart people all go to work in business.”

That mentality goes a long way toward explaining the meat-ax approach Musk has applied, with Trump’s encouragement, to whole agencies and federal programs. Doubtless, there is waste, fraud and abuse that could be thoughtfully and deliberately carved out. Government is, after all, a human endeavor.