Trump, Musk Will “Run Government Like Profitable Business,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Confirms
Trump, Musk Plan To “Run Government Like Profitable Business,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Confirms
“What President Trump and Elon Musk and this entire administration is trying to do is make our bloated bureaucracy here in Washington run like a profitable business,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News. Leavitt followed by saying that “every agency has been tapped with going line by line and ensuring that the American taxpayers money is aligned with the American people’s interests.”
Leavitt: What President Trump and Elon Musk and this entire administration is trying to do is make our bloated bureaucracy in Washington run like a profitable business. pic.twitter.com/0JYlDsLEC1
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 6, 2025
The administration is targeting “fraud, waste and abuse” in the system, Leavitt said, a goal with which Americans are 100% aligned. Yet while fraud and abuse are universally condemned and relatively easy to identify, the notion of what is “waste” lies oftentimes in the eye of the beholder. Take aid for Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Republican Representatives like Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, assesses funds spent helping Ukraine defend itself as wasted, whereas Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina believes Ukraine aid is vital in sustaining the Western-led global order and denying Russian President Vladimir Putin the ability to seize geopolitical targets of his choosing.
The stark divergence of Greene’s and Graham’s opinions, even though they both back Donald Trump and share the same party affiliation, exemplify how hard it is to define what Leavitt calls the “the American people’s interests.” And what is hard to define is hard to “align with.”
When Leavitt added that “Democrats can hoot and holler all they want,” she asserted that the noise won’t affect the administration, which will stay “committed to President Trump’s priorities and being good stewards of the hardworking American people’s tax dollars.”
Running the government “like a profitable business,” as Leavitt said, is a promise that Trump made during his first term also, though without the exponentiating presence of Musk.
In 2016, Trump established the White House Office of American Innovation and placed Jared Kushner in charge, as Jesse Samberg relates in an article called Can Government Be Run Like a Business? for the Yale School of Management.
[NOTE: The government-as-business idea is an evergreen promise having been made by many presidents, most prominent among them Herbert Hoover, the dynamically successful entrepreneur and Stanford University graduate elected as a “businessman president” in 1928.]
Samberg quotes McGill University management professor Henry Mintzberg, writing for the Harvard Business Review, on the problems of thinking that a government and a business should be run the same way.
In Mintzberg’s article — The U.S. Cannot Be Run Like a Business — he writes “Business is essential—in its place. So is government, in its place.” But a private enterprise and a government serve fundamentally different purposes.
“The place of business is in the competitive marketplace, to supply us with goods and services. The place of government, aside from protecting us from threats, is to help keep that marketplace competitive and responsible,” Mintzberg writes. In other words the referee should not also be playing in the game.
Here are some key reasons why a government should not be run like a business:
Profit vs. Public Service – Businesses prioritize profit, while governments exist to serve citizens, including those who may not be “profitable” (e.g., the elderly, disabled, or poor). Essential…
— 𝗕𝗼𝗯 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸𝘀
(@bob_weeks) February 1, 2025
Yet there is no question that the continual progress of business-centric tools that can be applied to government, especially with the swiftly increasing capacity of Artificial Intelligence, should help identify inefficiencies in the systems across government.
Musk and Trump and many before them rightly claim that errors can be found and fixed by applying certain techniques to government that commercial businesses rely on.
But these efficiency tools are just that, tools, and should not have a role in determining the priorities of government. Example: it may well be profitable to “take over” Gaza and reinvent the area as a beachfront resort town, as Trump recently suggested, but profitability — which Leavitt stressed in her statement — cannot be the only or even the top consideration for government action. Just ask a Palestinian. Or an astronaut — planting an American flag on the moon was not a moneymaker for the U.S. government.
As Mintzberg writes about where the calculus and accounting of business diverges from that of government: “Business has a convenient bottom line, called ‘profit,’ which can readily be measured. What is the bottom line for terrorism: The number of countries on a list, or of immigrants deported, or of walls built? How about the number of attacks that don’t happen? Many activities are in the public sector precisely because their intricate results are difficult to measure.”