No, Elon Musk, Government Should Not Be Run Like a Business

Andrew Leyden/ZUMA

For years, I’ve heard the familiar refrain: “America should be run like a business.”

First, it came from the young Republicans at my small, conservative, undergraduate institution, advocating for Mitt Romney in 2012. More recently, it has become a justification for Elon Musk’s indiscriminate cuts to government spending alongside his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In a recent interview on Fox News, Musk claimed that a commercial company would have filed for bankruptcy by now if they were to operate the way that the federal government operates. 

So I reached out to Michael Mechanic, a senior editor at Mother Jones, to ask if the government should be run more like a business. His answer was simple: That’s “bonkers.” 

Not only does the government provide services and resources that don’t easily map to the business world’s profit/loss framework, the government is designed to be a corrective force to the excesses of business. And their missions are fundamentally different.

“The government does all sorts of things that you can’t put a number on the outcome,” says Mechanic.

Watch part of our conversation here: