The Department of Government Efficiency’s path of destruction through the federal government leaves little doubt that Elon Musk and his hand-selected staff have no idea what the federal agencies are intended to do for the citizens of the United States.

A leaked audio recording from the acting commissioner of Social Security Leland Dudek confirms as much. In it, he says to a room of staffers and contractors that the “DOGE kids” are unfamiliar with Social Security, and that he is working to educate them. “They’re learning, let people learn, they’re going to make mistakes,” Dudek warned in the recording.

Most Americans are likely unaware that their trillions of dollars of Social Security tax contributions and benefits and deeply private personal data is mere educational fodder for what amounts to a group of unvetted, non-competitively hired interns. Indeed, Musk’s needless destruction exposes the lie at the heart of DOGE’s mandate, which is that it will make the government more efficient.

For too long, Americans have equated inefficient with wasteful, casually assuming that the federal government is susceptible to both. In fact, the government’s sphere is defined by where efficiency fails to produce the outcomes that Americans want. Musk won’t change that, and in his own way he may help usher in a new era of big government.

The most efficient allocation of goods and services is through an open market. When a market fails, it’s not that the process of allocation has failed but rather the result of the allocation is a failure. This is where the government’s mandate begins, to allocate those goods and services whose market allocation fails our needs, economy or principles in some way. The private market maximizes a company’s profit; the government maximizes the public’s welfare.

A government allocation, by design, won’t be market efficient and shouldn’t be market efficient. The private market for health insurance, for example, has decided that, on average, elderly individuals have a much higher instance of dying when they get sick, and insuring the elderly is a prohibitively expensive undertaking, so they won’t do it. They’re right that putting resources toward dying 85-year-olds is not efficient but denying them help is cruel and unfair. This is why we have Medicare.

It's popular to just exclaim that the federal government is inefficient, when there are many examples — Medicare along with hundreds of other programs — where Americans don’t want market efficiency.

It’s similarly obvious in places where the federal government has yet to intervene but desperately should. The private market has efficiently allocated the precious service of child care but in such a way that provides early education to the children of only the richest parents. The private market for homeowners, flood and fire insurance has decided it’s inefficient to serve tens of millions of homeowners in California and Texas.

To be wasteful is to be lazy and profligate, to be efficient is to be cold and artless. So many Americans are learning the difference, which means the real question surrounding DOGE is how quickly its actions will be erased. Or even whether the backlash will lead to calls for action larger than just reversing what DOGE has wrought, creating possibly the greatest appetite in U.S. history for the expansion of federal government.

That’s a good thing, and it’s overdue.

The federal government has long been held in a vise of politicians’ making. It has been assailed as wasteful and punished with budgets that are frozen, cut or simply too low to deliver services well. Yet any slip in performance is held up as proof of ineptitude and the need for further cuts. Consider that the number of federal employees has been flat for 40 years even as government spending has increased, a textbook definition of being asked to do more with less.

The problem with the entire DOGE endeavor is that it takes scapegoat logic to its final conclusion and works forward from cuts. Cut indiscriminately, fire indiscriminately, end programs, end services and end investment with little discernment or critical thinking. It assumes that the problem is the government itself, rather than the difficulty of allocating goods and services without the benefit or cruelty of market efficiency.

This slash-and-burn march through public services will leave no American unaffected, and they are already unhappy about it. A CNN/SSRS poll found that 53% of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion of Musk, 62% believe he lacks the right experience to make meaningful changes, and 61% feel he does not have the right judgment to effectively do the job.

The proper way to make government more efficient requires more capability and works backward from services. Identify the services that the government provides and design the most efficient non-market delivery that balances welfare and effectiveness with reduced waste. But politicians are terrified of this process, because it could result in the need for more staff or more resources.

Social Security is a great example. It operates with a shrinking administrative budget — a poster child of efficiency, no doubt — but at the cost of greatly delayed services. The challenge is that the overwhelming preference of retirees is to handle paperwork, applications and complaints in person. They do not, or cannot, upload a copy of their driver’s license or marriage certificate to a website; they’d rather drive to a field office and show it to a person. Which makes mass closures of field offices the opposite of efficiently delivered public services.

We know what efficient means in the private market, but we’ve lacked leadership and courage to show what it means in the public sector. Musk is surely not that, but his destruction makes the need for it greater than ever before. And with repulsion of Musk likely to grow, it’s an opening.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist and independent policy consultant.

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