Point Four of Elon's Fork is the Scary One
Have you read Elon’s “Fork in the Road” email? This is the one where he starts doing to the United States government what he did to Twitter.
Honestly, I’m kind of in the camp that Twitter as a software product is as good or better now than it was before, with an order of magnitude less staff. Certainly the chicken-little about its impending catastrophic failure was wrong. Elon does seem (to this casual observer) to have made it much more efficient, and I have no reason to doubt he can do the same with the federal government. Maybe that’s not so bad.
However, only three of the four points in Fork in the Road—”Return to Office,” “Performance culture,” and “More streamlined and flexible workforce”—are about efficiency. The fourth point, entitled “Enhanced standards of conduct,” is the one that seems to indicate the most dramatic, far-reaching change (emphasis mine):
The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work. Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward. Employees who engage in unlawful behavior or other misconduct will be prioritized for appropriate investigation and discipline, including termination.
If the referent of loyalty were the Constitution, that would be one thing. To this casual observer, the referent is Trump. If future historians come to see Trump as one who shifted America away from the rule of law, point four of “Fork in the Road” may be a key text.
Elon’s choice of the word “fork” is quite interesting. A fork in the context of an Open Source software project is a split in the software project community (emphasis mine):
In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but also a split in the developer community; as such, it is a form of schism.
I don’t expect Trump to have known this meaning of the word. Perhaps Elon explained it to him.
Empires don’t last forever. Neither do republics.