Run It Like a Business

A coup can be performed in many ways. Musk & Co. has chosen this one, the one he and his fellows have yearned for and know best. Run government like a business. Strip it for parts. Suck the value out of it. If there’s a husk to leave, leave it.

-Anne Lutz Fernandez, “Musk & Co.'s Performance of Brutality”

If the people cannot vote, and have their will be decided by their elected representatives, in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.

-Elon Musk, Oval Office Address

My first year of teaching was 2006. A lot has happened since then.

What I do remember about that year is a vague refrain from school administrators that clashed with my idealistic, student-focused teacher education: school should strive to be more like a business, and dealing with parents should be more like customer service.

Looking back, I interpret this as a desperate, misguided attempt to, as Timothy Snyder calls it, comply in advance, to talk a lot about customer service out of a fuzzy hope that we could avoid the relentless push of powerful special interests that wanted to privatize and ultimately defund or destroy American education.

Maybe if we acted sort of like a business, they seemed to think, we wouldn’t be replaced by an actual business.

This idea, and its tension with the foundational vision of public schools as a public good and as an essential part of an open, egalitarian society, was more or less a constant throughout my sixteen years working in South Carolina public schools. It rode a kind of ideological stock market up and down with other popular slogans— “teach with the end in mind” (often a way of teaching to The Test without admitting it), “students need GRIT,” and various answers to the sometimes bad-faith question, “Why can’t kids read?”.

But it always felt to me more motivated by fear of an encroaching private, sometimes religious, often for-profit, often tacitly segregated system.

And the argument often made by proponents of this “alternative” system (which was basically a re-branding of the “independent” segregation academies created in response to the Brown v Board of Education decision) was that education would be better and more efficient if run “like a business”.

Rarely did we stop to ask what better meant, other than kids doing “better” on standardized tests that had been popularized largely as a part of the narrative that public schools were failing (A Nation at Risk). Rarely did we ask what efficiency meant, or if it was good.

Rarely did we consider the potential costs of trying to convert human students to economic outputs.

This seems to me to be an error in thinking created not by schools themselves, but out of a larger American obsession with the idea that “business” was inherently rational, inherently “efficient,” inherently somehow democratic. (This is often presented in explicit or implicit contrast to the rarely-defined threat of “Communism” that seemed to indicate, actually, Stalinism, and by extension anyone left of the right wing).

With each election, many Americans seemed to become more enamored with the idea that “a businessman” would make an ideal leader. That a “businessman” could fix the economy, could make tough decisions, could Make America Efficient Again. And, as with schools, the idea of “efficiency” in this context is confusing. As economics professor John T. Harvey once wrote,

[T]o ask that the government be run like a business is tantamount to asking that the government turn a profit. The problem in a nutshell, is that not everything that is profitable is of social value and not everything of social value is profitable.

So what does “running it like a business” look like?

As Trump and Musk enact the fondest dreams of Project 2025, they are gutting federal agencies and programs which may be “inefficient” from a business perspective— but of course, they aren’t businesses.

Most people probably agree, for example, that the while the federal Department of Education may have problems and certainly doesn’t generate direct profit, having protections in place so that all students can attend school is good for society. Musk, an unelected “temporary government employee” leading a team made up largely of young tech workers and interns (including an openly racist coder who was “mistakenly” given the ability to edit the Treasury Department’s payment system), has already cut almost $1 billion from the Department of Education, which Trump and Project 2025 have called for abolishing.

Is this running the government “like a business”? In a sense, it certainly is. This is much the way Musk has run his own businesses— slashing and burning and making many of his employees miserable at companies like Tesla and Twitter (now “X”) with debatable results.

In an address about DOGE in the Oval Office (via C-SPAN), Musk warned, seemingly without intentional irony, of the danger of unelected “bureaucrats” making funding decisions in the federal government without being answerable to “the people”.

Trump has seemed to intentionally outdo himself this time around with controversial cabinet picks. For example, Pete Hesgeth survived a contentious confirmation process to become President Trump’s Defense Secretary. He has already put in place rules throwing Department of Defense schools into chaos and requiring them to remove everything from posters of Harriet Tubman to artwork involving rainbow flags.

As Peter Greene pointed out recently, an effective business might want to replicate what Department of Defense schools were doing— since they were some of the most successful schools in the country based on the metrics business types like— but instead the Trump administration is pushing “school choice” and anti-DEI.

Does Trump Want To Dismantle The Best US Schools?

As Derek Black writes in his recently-released book Dangerous Learning (which was finished before the November election),

Pete Hesgeth, a Fox News commentator with no background in education, captured the fervor with his bestselling 2022 book Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation. He and his coauthor, David Goodwin, offer “a revolutionary road map to saving our children from leftist indoctrination” that threatens “the very survival of the American Republic”. Public education, according to the authors, was “an invention of the Progressives,” better thought of as “a plot” that now teaches children to hate America.

Is this running the country “like a business”? Sure, in that businesses sometimes discriminate against customers based on their political orientations. Sure, in the sense that businesses sometimes elect people with questionable credentials or with reputations which threaten to harm the entire enterprise. (This, for example, is arguably why Musk’s shareholders and investors are suing him, including for harming Tesla’s reputation and leadership with his alleged illicit drug use.)

Twice, America’s electoral system chose a grifter blessed with inherited wealth, who was rescued from financial ruin by a “reality” TV show where he got to pretend to fire people— and the argument many of his supporters made was that he would run the government like a business.

And you already know how that turned out the first time around.

This time, the grifter has brought with him an even more effective grifter, blessed with inherited wealth, who is famous, in part, because he actually fired a lot of people. And together, they’ve set about firing a lot of people in federal government.

Like many businesses, they have appointed cronies and yes people without qualifications to head powerful organizations and to take on important work. For example, Musk’s unofficial pseudo-agency DOGE has a slapped-together .gov website, evidently created by one of his unelected and un-appointed tech associates which seems to have been easily hacked last week.

So, in this sense, America is now being run “like a business,” and if there’s any silver lining to that, it’s that maybe (and it’s a big maybe) we’ll finally realize the implications of reducing everything in public life to corporate business-style relationships, to reduce people (students or federal employees, for example) to outputs, to reduce human flesh-and-blood connections to business networks.

Of course, if America were a business, and if American citizens were “customers,” we could opt out of supporting that business, and choose not to pay for its services. The trade-off for being taxed, and for being required to follow laws, rules, and regulations (at least, if you’re not rich or powerful enough to get a pass from many or all of these) is that you can expect government protections and services in return.

It’s doubtful Musk and Trump feel this way about either government or business. Musk, after all, is currently suing former Twitter advertisers for taking their money elsewhere, arguably as a rational response to his own actions that made the brand toxic for many people.

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