Why Elon Musk’s Twitter Strategy Won’t Work in Government: A Reality Check on Public Sector Downsizing

Disclaimer: This is not a political post – my articles do not support either side of the aisle, they only assess the effectiveness of project and transformation initiatives. No politics in the comments, please!

When Elon Musk cut 80% of Twitter’s staff, many expected the platform to collapse. It didn’t.

Now, he’s trying to bring the same approach to the U.S. federal workforce.

But government isn’t Twitter — and this is where the comparison breaks.

Twitter Versus Government Transformation

I think by now we’ve all seen the headlines about what Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is attempting to do. Everyone expected there to be public sector downsizing, but I think most people – myself among them – expected there to be some programs flagged for review, with cuts coming slowly but surely.

That hasn’t happened. The literal chainsaw he brought on a public stage served the metaphor as well as anything, since he’s slashed through government departments and programs faster than probably any other spending review in history.

He’s using the same approach that he did when he bought Twitter two years, which was to eliminate a full 80% of his employees, while trying to carry on with business as usual.

Major service disruptions aside, we can suppose that he would call his own work at Twitter – er, “X” – a success.

But the public service?

I don’t see the same sort of “success” with public sector downsizing happening at all.

Same, Just Less

One of the built-in advantages Elon Musk had in slashing all of those Twitters jobs was knowing that the overwhelming majority of the employees had transferrable skills.

Sure, some of them might have been in software development, some of them managed the servers, and some were in design. And of course there would have been corporate folks in marketing, etc., as well.

But almost everyone in the building had a near enough proximity to the core business that he could merely point at someone, direct them to a new job, and say, “Figure this out.”

It was chaotic and at a breakneck speed, but mostly everyone involved had transferrable skills that could be adapted on the fly.

Everyone in the building could pitch in if needed.

If only that were the case with his current set of government transformation targets.

Public Sector Downsizing Is On A Whole Other Scale

Before we even get into the inherent complexity, let’s just take a pause to look at the size that’s under focus here.

In the understatement of the year: the United States federal government is big. Really big. 3,000,000+ employees kind of big.

So big that if Elon Musk and DOGE were able to hit the same lay-off targets as he did with Twitter (approx. 80%), that would mean about 2.4 million people losing their jobs.

And what would be left – about 600,000 – would still be roughly 75 times larger than the entire workforce he purchased at Twitter.

So straight away, the scale is almost unimaginable, from a perspective of comparison. If someone can successfully lead a team of 10 people, there’s nothing built-in that says they can immediately jump to being a CEO of a 750-person organization. (It’s possible that they could, of course, but it becomes a completely different conversation.)

So let’s remember that size factor when we talk about speed later.

Just a few differences

Now, back to that “skills transferability” part.

The public service also has software engineers, just like Twitter did.

They also have marine biologists.

And economists.

And nurses.

And actuarials.

And police officers.

And translators.

And… well, just about every occupation under the sun.

Why does that matter?

Because there are so many different mandates with so many different occupations and specializations that it makes his Twitter downsizing look like a side hustle.

Where government transformation gets complicated

There is no one single mandate for the United States federal government. Sure, you could fold all of them into the massive umbrella of “serving the public,” but that can get sliced into a thousand different directions.

To appreciate how complex some departments and agencies can be, we need only revisit how challenging it was to align the activities under the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11.

They all obviously specialize in security-related functions – which sounds transferrable until we break down what that actually means:

• Overseas, on-the-ground intelligence gathering
• Cybersecurity
• Physical border protection
• Cargo inspection
• Drug trafficking
• Coordination with different police jurisdictions

And a whole host more.

Every single one of those mandates is a broad specialization, with lots of further refined specializations within.

And those are just within the “public security” umbrella.

Complexity x scale

The Department of Agriculture provides grants to farmers, aims to end hunger, supports commercial livestock, and even includes the United States Forest Service (among many others).

The Department of Transportation regulates airplane construction, airplane traffic, commercial trains, marine traffic – and builds highways. (Again: and a ton of other things.)

Run down virtually every arm of the federal public service, and you’ll get bogged down in the same question: what is their one, single activity that can be easily shrunken in the same way that Twitter was?

The point here is not that each department and agency is too complex for government transformation.

It’s that before you can swing an axe, you have to first be able to see your target – and discern it from the background.

What’s the goal?

The “slash and burn” approach to transformation can be an enticing one. Without cumbersome planning and postulating, we can see “progress” almost immediately:

We wanted to cut jobs, and now we have cut jobs.

We wanted to reduce spending, and now we have reduced spending.

It’s quick, it’s straightforward, and the results can be announced almost as quickly as they’re dreamed up.

And if reducing the budget is the only intended outcome, then I guess it’s easy enough to hit the mark?

But is that really the only outcome anyone wants? I would certainly argue that all taxpayers want to see their government spend as little as needed, but to what end?

Back to twitter

When Elon Musk made the massive cuts at Twitter, it was never with the goal to make Twitter’s service worse.

At no point did he ever say to users, “You will have the opportunity to post less,” or “You’ll often want to log in but the servers will be down.”

His desired outcome was that Twitter provide the same service – or even expanded service, eventually – at a much, much lower people cost.

His “mandate” (if you can call a private sector company’s business goals a mandate) was a simple one, and the talent could be shuffled around the building to make it happen.

In other words, at no point did he alter the fundamental purpose of the company, and he always had a single target to focus on.

And that brings us back to the current situation.

Keeping the lights on

Without first understanding a public service organization’s mandate, it is impossible to make indiscriminate cuts and maintain the same level of service.

It’s all well and good to promote a “more with less” approach, but beyond a few motivational speeches, there has to be a plan to ensure that the “more” doesn’t become “less.”

How are services going to be maintained? How will fewer employees do what previously took two or three of the same? How will trained administrators take on specialized roles, such as nuclear scientists?

Recognizing that the federal government isn’t made up of interchangeable parts is the first step.

Understanding how those parts work together is where real, lasting change begins.

Understand before you cut

This is not a case against downsizing, nor against government transformation. As mentioned right in the disclaimer right at the top, I’m not opening up a debate on the decisions to cut.

Political leadership has a right to make decisions – a lot of the voting public will agree with the decisions, and a lot of the voting public will disagree.

That’s just part of what makes democracy messy.

And what makes democracy messy is also what makes the public service far more complex than a social media platform.

One has a thousand arms with thousands of job descriptions on each, and one has a single business purpose that employs everyone under the same faculty.

Both can be downsized.

Both can be transformed.

I only hope the real differences can be recognized before the transformation is over.

If you’ve worked inside public sector reform, I’d love to hear your take. What gets missed? Let me know in the comments – but no politics, please!