This is what change tastes like
Change tastes weird. I’ve had that phrase in my head since the election. It feels like the rules of the game are being re-written as we idly watch.
Regardless of what we expected, the incoming administration seems bent on going further. Some Trump political nominees have so little relevant experience that their bios start with where they went to college. And Silicon Valley elites like Musk, Andreessen, and Sachs are basing themselves at Mar-a-Lago to take an active role in deciding (not just influencing) American policy and the selection of political leaders. The word “technocrat” is a getting a whole new meaning.
It may seem like every norm is being broken—and many are. But that's the essence of change: the deliberate disruption of established norms. You can be simultaneously appalled at the Silicon Valley junta and appreciate that this is a moment for humility.
Because Democrats are long overdue for a re-consideration of norms. Anyone who works in government can tell you the system isn’t working. Why do we just accept that there must be good reasons for it and assume it will always be the case?
Norm: The most qualified leaders are experienced public servants who can skillfully navigate the intricacies of bureaucracy
Norm: Bureaucracy will remain inefficient because there is little incentive or accountability to drive meaningful reform
Norm: A rigid bureaucracy that endures across administrations is essential for consistent governance and long-term policy implementation
Democrats tend to view the destruction of (their) norms as the decay of democracy. Harvard University political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblat published How Democracies Die during Trump’s first administration, which epitomized how modern liberals correlate respectful behavior with the success of democracy:
Two basic norms have preserved America’s checks and balances in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.
~ Levitsky & Ziblat, How Democracies Die (2018)
Democracy isn’t natural, the theory goes, and all that is holding it together is good people who choose to do the right thing and not to exploit loopholes. But the truth is norms come and go with the times. And Democrats haven’t adjusted their priors much in the last 15 years. I write this as a life-long Democrat.
Instead, with the potential return of Trump to the presidency, Democrats doubled down. They vigorously defended the status quo and dismissed him as a threat to democracy. He’s full of contradictions, they said. He’ll destroy basic civility. Well, what did that achieve?
Let this show be the utterly ineffective hypocrisy finders.
I can tell you from experience, it does nothing.
- Jon Stewart, “The Daily Show”. Nov 18, 2024
The issue with change is that it’s hard to see where it will lead. Emotion and fatigue often cloud our ability to appreciate a better end state. The only thing that’s clear right now is we are in a moment of change.
America’s norm-breakers
In our democratic system, we operate on a few basic assumptions that need revisiting. One is that we live under the rule of an elected committee, and progress is impossible without the majority buy-in of committee members. This inherently means sweeping change is nearly impossible, as it would inevitably impinge on the interests of too many committee members.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program is an iconic example of this stalemate. Its supply chain of over 1500 vendors is deliberately spread over 48 states in order to limit any political will for its Congressional overseers to change, or even publicly critique the program. Nearly every Senator has constituents with jobs that depend on the status quo of that program. In a dark irony, the JSF program is expected to cost over $2 trillion over its lifetime while its logo still describes it as “Affordable”. The Air Force and Navy are actually having to reduce how often they fly the jets because the cost of maintenance—around $6M per aircraft, annually—is pushing the limits of their budgets.
The logical next step when looking at stalemates like this is that we come to believe only crisis will force our divided committee to gather the political will to enact real change. This principle is deeply embedded in today’s national psyche. So much so that I’d argue it’s one of America’s greatest cultural failures. We refuse to take sweeping, overdue action until it’s no longer optional. At that point, consensus becomes almost instantaneous—because we’re no longer negotiating civic action; we’re just responding to a civic emergency.
Stuck in a system that expects status quo, the case for stronger executive power is understandably more attractive. When the committee can’t agree on anything, you’re left with two options: wait until a crisis forces consensus or install a norm-breaker who can bypass a dysfunctional committee. While democracy is built on negotiation and compromise, let’s not confuse those for dysfunction.
The rule of norm-breaking is that no one likes you breaking their norms. Change is easy to campaign for and hard to implement. It’s true in government, and it’s true in most corporations. Volatility tends to be bad for business. Long-term assumptions make economic outcomes more predictable, and by extension, the ability for corporations to confidently undertake multi-year projects like building new factories or transitioning their supply chains. The public wants predictable returns on their index funds.
So if not from within government or from major corporate leaders, where would the American norm-breaker come from?
Silicon Valley is all about breaking norms. Its high-growth, venture-backed software companies thrive in environments where speed is everything and breaking with convention isn’t a bug, but a core feature. Tech entrepreneurs identified a massive arbitrage opportunity in the slow pace at which traditional industries (think healthcare, automotive, energy, national security) have adopted software and AI. “Many of the winners,” Marc Andreessen wrote in 2011, “are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures.”
Andreessen’s point about software “eating the world” wasn’t obvious at the time. It required a willingness to imagine a better end state—to believe the world could work differently, even if it wasn’t immediately clear how. Venture capital, and the founder circles it invests in, are the epitome of that “dream bigger” culture. A company of one or two people can grow to displace Fortune 500 behemoths, and private capital can fund the upfront costs of that growth. Today, Amazon and Apple are 2 of Fortune 500’s top 3.
And this extends beyond software. Look at this chart of what SpaceX is doing to the cost of rocket launches.
Not only is the cost of sending payloads into space expected to exponentially decline, but SpaceX is doing it with 10x less capital. In 2011, NASA verified SpaceX’s estimate that it cost only $300M to develop the Falcon 9 rocket, and then estimated that it itself would have needed $4B to do the same, “based on NASA environment/culture.”
This is the change happening before our eyes. It’s not just software eating the world—it’s software culture eating organizations. And most are idly watching, because only a tiny part of the US is actually working in these game-changing companies. But it will spread.
You can imagine what the general view of NASA might be at SpaceX. Given all of that, maybe it’s not surprising that Silicon Valley’s next target for disruption would be Capitol Hill.
Let’s wish this administration well
Change seems near impossible if you live within the system. That’s why bringing in people from outside of the system - lots of them - just may work.
It really does take the secretary himself, backed by the president, waking up every single day, prioritizing one to three issues in order to bend the Pentagon bureaucracy to his will.
~ Mike Gallagher, former Rep (WI-8) turned Palantir’s Head of Defense (Axios)
The disparity between public and private sector efficiency has grown too great to ignore, and trust in public institutions is rightly almost nonexistent. The status quo, the norms of bureaucracy, simply have to change. Software culture will eat at the most wasteful areas of the federal government like the Department of Defense, but it’s hard to predict how.
Only time will tell if we are witnessing the beginning of the reforms that will finally streamline a bloated bureaucracy, or if it’s empty rhetoric. A lot of hot air has been expended by conservatives who envision business leaders breaking down the door of Washington and taking a sword to wasteful spending. I suspect a lot of this will depend on how much of a leash the incoming president and his political circle give to these technocrats.
But for those nervous about this administration (as I still am in many ways), I suggest we wish them well. Now that the election is behind us, I think we owe them a moment to transform the Republican critique of government inefficiency into an ambitious strategy. Let’s see what they can do.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may end up looking like the Space Force when it was launched - funny at the time, obvious in retrospect. It’s being co-chaired by one of Silicon Valley’s iconic founders. Its staff is being picked by one of Silicon Valley’s iconic venture capitalists. And their over-arching ambition is spot-on.
Taking a sword to inefficiency is worth cheering on both sides of the aisle. In turn, we should hold DOGE accountable for, in Elon’s words, outcomes. Ambition is a great first step, but real change will require relentless follow-through. Remember, no one likes the norm breakers, at least until they see a reachable end state with upside for them.
And if it fails? At least we’ll have a better blueprint for the next norm-breaker to try.