Behind the Curtain: Startup America
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President Trump points to Chief Justice John Roberts after taking the oath of office in the Capitol Rotunda today. Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times via AP
Think of the U.S. government as a once-dominant, lean, high-flying company that grew too big, too bloated, too bureaucratic, too unimaginative.
- It's Kodak or Circuit City — a dominant player caught napping amid an obvious technological transformation.
Why it matters: This snooze-and-lose reality is partly driving the governing and economic pace, tone and policies of President Trump's White House, officials tell us.
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.
- This isn't Trump's instinctual motivation, aides say. He wants a strong stock market, slower inflation, low joblessness, the holy trinity of economic indicators.
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.
- You have Silicon Valley's best and brightest battling for bigger roles in reshaping government. Almost every CEO wants a slice of the action.
The optimistic scenario for the Trump presidency: It'll 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.
Reality check: Some of this is motivated by politics, some by genuine enthusiasm to serve, and some by naked self-interest. 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, so complex, so 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 rather how a tech CEO would shake things up if their company was deep in debt and slow in execution.
- 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 $1 trillion every 100 days. Another way to look at it: America spends more on defense than the next 10 biggest nations — and yet we spend more on debt than defense! So cutting government, now or later, is unavoidable.
- Bet big. You can't cut your way out of this crisis. The only palatable solution: explosive growth. Not 2% or 3%. Twice that. Marc Andreessen has argued publicly 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. GDP growth of 1% would amount to about $290 billion.
- Break stuff. Musk bluntly warned before the election that big cuts and change in government inevitably cause "temporary pain." Politicians typically hate inflicting any pain on voters — hence, your deficits! But any business leader who shuts down products or lays off people knows it's the price of growth.
- Ignore the whiners. What holds back CEOs and political leaders is the same thing: fear, fear of bad headlines or big revolts. But Trump's pain threshold is higher than anyone we've seen in public office. So you could see him enduring it if convinced it will juice his numbers. Musk is a living reminder that a lot of bad press does not equate to failure. Often, it's the opposite.
The other side: 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."
