The Education of Elon Musk

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

One of the great weaknesses of the Donald Trump presidency is its failure to learn or heed history. (If you are or know a member of the administration, consider spending some time in our archive!)

“His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was ­really limited,” former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson complained of the president in 2021. “It’s­ really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.”

This limited historical knowledge can produce ironic results. When Trump allies brag that the president has brought “the best and the brightest” to the White House, the phrase is apt, but not in the way they mean: That expression entered common parlance when David Halberstam used it as the title of his classic book about how an earlier wave of academically gifted but inexperienced staffers came from private industry to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, just like Elon Musk’s crew at the U.S. DOGE Service, and blundered into catastrophe.

The Atlantic’s archive contains another cautionary tale, from a generation later, for the Trump administration. “The Education of David Stockman” is a story of cost-cutting zeal and ideological certainty crashing up against the harsh reality of how politics and government work. (I was reminded of this parallel by a Substack newsletter from the publisher and journalist Peter Osnos, a former Atlantic contributor.) Musk is not the first person to believe that if you’re smart and ruthless enough, you can bend the U.S. budget to your whim.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the presidency and sought to bring in a new age of fiscal austerity while also increasing the Pentagon’s budget. Supply-side economics, which essentially argued that tax cuts would pay for themselves by inducing economic growth, was just coming into vogue, and fiscally conservative dogma about tax cuts requiring budget cuts was out. The man in charge of reconciling all of Reagan’s promises was David Stockman, a former Michigan representative, whom Reagan named to lead the Office of Management and Budget. The question the new administration faced was: “How is it possible to raise defense spending, cut income taxes, and balance the budget—all at the same time?” Part of Stockman’s education was the revelation that it was not.

Stockman agreed to a series of embargoed interviews with William Greider, then an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post and later a prominent progressive economics commentator; he died in 2019. Over the course of eight months, in 1981, the men met regularly for breakfast at the Hay-Adams hotel, across from the White House, under an agreement that their conversations about the administration’s new policies would be made public later—“after the season’s battles were over.”

Like Musk today, Stockman was able to use the strong support of the president to move quickly and overwhelm members of the Cabinet or Congress who might have objected. “Stockman’s agency did in a few weeks what normally consumes months; the process was made easier because the normal opposition forces had no time to marshal either their arguments or their constituents and because the President was fully in tune with Stockman,” Greider wrote.

But Stockman couldn’t overcome math. Once you account for defense spending (which Reagan wanted to increase), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ and federal retirees’ benefits, and interest payments on the national debt, he could mess around with only 17 percent of all federal spending in order to balance the budget. “One might denounce particular programs as wasteful, as unnecessary and ineffective, even crazy”—that sounds a lot like Musk lately—“but David Stockman knew that he could not escape these basic dimensions of federal spending,” Greider wrote. Today, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, excluding the same programs leaves roughly 21 percent of the budget to play with, but the basic challenges are the same. When Musk promised to find at least $1 trillion in cuts to the roughly $7 trillion federal budget, he was either lying or ill-informed.

Stockman also had to contend with the economic effects of his proposals. When staffers fed Reagan’s plan for slashing taxes and hiking defense spending into a computer model, the results were dire. If the numbers were made public, Greider wrote, “the financial markets that Stockman sought to reassure would instead be panicked. Interest rates, already high, would go higher; the expectation of long-term inflation would be confirmed.” Sounds familiar.

As the year went on, Stockman seemed to become thoroughly disillusioned. “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” he told Greider. “You’ve got so many different budgets out and so many different baselines and such complexity now in the interactive parts of the budget between policy action and the economic environment and all the internal mysteries of the budget, and there are a lot of them. People are getting from A to B and it’s not clear how they are getting there.” His candor got him in trouble. He was, in his own words, “taken to the woodshed” by Reagan after the story’s publication.

Today, Musk insists that he and his team are smarter than everyone else in the government, yet they keep making mistakes caused by their hubris or their lack of understanding, to say nothing of their penchant for spreading lies and misinformation. “One of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention,” Musk said at a recent Cabinet meeting. Although Musk claimed that the program has been restored, The Washington Post has reported otherwise. Musk also keeps trying to take credit for cuts DOGE isn’t making—in one case, a contract that expired 20 years ago. Stockman did the same: The Reagan administration sought credit for cuts made by Jimmy Carter.

The big difference is that Stockman, though an ideologue, actually cared about the government functioning well. Musk and his presidential patron have not demonstrated the same impulse. Today, the global economy seems on the verge of major changes: Free trade is losing favor, Pax Americana is fading, and what comes next is unclear. Stockman saw peril in moments such as this. “Whenever there are great strains or changes in the economic system, it tends to generate crackpot theories,” Stockman told Greider. The warning has aged well.