Musk is treating the US government the way that he treated Twitter, but they are very different:

1. Twitter employed high tech workers - people who are professionally mobile. And most of them early career.

2. Musk demands people to spend all their waking hours working their job. A lot of people will, to be able to spend five years working for a Musk company - it's good for your resume. But a government agency? That is just unrealistic - most people do NOT want to spend all their waking hours working, and should not have to.

3. If you fire people from Twitter, they are gone, with respect to Twitter. But if you fire government employees, they are not gone - they are still part of the US economy: you just traded employees for unemployed. It's not a win.

4. Causing chaos at Twitter doesn't cause real harm. But cutting off aid to African countries causes real harm - access to drugs, food, and other things that people were told would be there, and then overnight are not there. And scientists took jobs, and moved their families, and suddenly gone. A colleague of mine had a $49M contract for a health program in Africa - overnight it is gone. All the clinicians are suddenly stranded.

The way that all this is being done is horrific. It's one thing to revamp an agency, or even fold it into another; it is another to smash things with a wrecking ball.

The WAY that this is being done is inhuman, sadistic, sociopathic, and massively dysfunctional.