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In a recent interview, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made an offhand comment that connected a number of dots for me. Ramaswamy spoke with Ezra Klein about the possibility that tens of thousands of government employees could lose their jobs if Donald Trump were re-elected. According to him, this would be a healthy development. That could be done, he said, by reinstating Trump’s Schedule F executive order — which stripped some government employees of job protections, making them easier to fire — and creating a government efficiency commission led by Elon Musk. Ramaswamy said Trump should lay off 75 percent of federal government employees “on day one.” At issue, he argued, is whether some of those people would ultimately be rehired. “That’s certainly not the character of what Elon did on Twitter, and I don’t think it’s going to be the character of what the most important part of that project actually looks like, which is abolishing and thinning out the bureaucracy. ”

Ramaswamy’s invocation of Twitter is significant. In 2022, after acquiring the social network, Musk infamously purged Twitter’s ranks, firing 80 percent of its employees in the first six months, then making a series of management decisions that ultimately plunged the company into further financial disarray. Hearing Ramaswamy speak and the respect in his voice as he cited the centibillionaire’s tenure, it became clear that he sees a blueprint for the Trump administration. Should Musk be appointed federal firing czar, it probably won’t be because of his electric cars or rockets or internet-broadcasting satellites: it will be because he has achieved the dream of draining the swamp, albeit on a smaller scale. Musk’s purchase of Twitter isn’t just a Republican success story; it is the template for the federal MAGA government. Even Musk’s mother said this in a recent interview with Fox News: “He’s just going to get rid of people who aren’t working, or don’t have jobs, or aren’t doing their jobs properly, just like he did on Twitter… He can also do it for the government do.”

Musk’s argument for clearing Twitter was that the company was so overstaffed that it was running out of money and had only “four months to live.” Musk cut so close to the bone that there were genuine concerns among the employees I spoke to at the time that the site might crash during major news events, or fall into a state of disrepair. “I fully believe that if Musk does what he says he will do, it will be an absolute shitshow,” a trust and security engineer at another tech company told me in 2022. Musk did fire most trust and security staff, as well as those responsible for governance and “human rights,” and the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team. The purge of these people in particular delighted some right-wing commentators, who saw Musk’s firing as a long-overdue eradication of the woke bureaucracy within the company. “Nothing of value was lost,” a MAGA account tweeted upon news of the layoffs.

Read: I Watched Elon Musk Kill Twitter Culture From Within

Twitter has not destroyed itself, as my sources feared (although parts of it have, perhaps most memorably when Musk tried to organize Spaces events with Trump and with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, only to get out of trouble come). Aside from small-scale disruptions, the site has mainly functioned during elections, World Cups, Super Bowls and world-historical news events. But Musk’s cuts have not spared the platform from deep financial problems. His chaotic management strategy for Twitter was to rename the site ‘all-app’. The end result was disastrous for the company’s bottom line. Shortly after the takeover, advertising revenues dropped by 40 percent, and the bleeding hasn’t stopped. According to estimates, X lost about 52 percent of its U.S. advertising revenue last year. A recent Fidelity report suggested that the company may have lost almost 80 percent of its value since Musk bought it (for arguably much more than it was worth). If this continues, some have speculated that Musk may have to sell some of his Tesla shares to keep the company afloat. Musk’s backers also have huge loans on their balance sheets The Wall Street Journal has called “the worst bank buyout since the financial crisis.”

Trump and Ramaswamy don’t seem to care about this. What matters is that Musk has turned X into a political weapon in the service of the MAGA movement. X has, as I wrote last week, become a formidable vector for amplifying far-right narratives and talking points; it poisons the information environment with unverified rumors and conspiracy theories about election fraud. It doesn’t matter to the far-right faithful that his platform has occasionally labeled pro-Kamala Harris accounts as spam, temporarily banned journalists, restricted accounts that have tweeted the word cisgenderand complied with requests from foreign governments to censor speeches. Republican lawmakers also don’t seem to care that Musk is using his platform to get Trump elected, even after spending the better part of a decade outraged that tech platforms were allegedly biased against conservatives. Their silence about Musk’s obvious biases, coupled with their admiration for his activism, suggests that what they really appreciate is the way Musk has taken a popular communications platform and turned it into something they can control and use against their political enemies can deploy.

This idea is not dissimilar to the vision expressed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the conservative policy proposal to reform the federal government in a second Trump administration. Project 2025 is a dense, often radical, and unpopular set of policy proposals that, as my colleague David A. Graham notes, “would dissolve the Department of Education and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cut Medicare and Medicaid, ban pornography, federal legislation would establish abortion restrictions, repeal some child labor protections and allow the president to fire tens of thousands of career federal workers and replace them with political appointees.” Put another way, if Trump were elected and decided to make Project 2025 a reality, his administration would take over an existing piece of bureaucratic infrastructure, strip it of many of those who can control its power, and then exercise that power for ideological purposes and against their political enemies.

The parallels between this element of Project 2025 and Musk’s Twitter are great. They should also be alarming. The federal government is not a software company and should not be run as such. There may be bloat in our departments and agencies, but officials are working on everyday technical problems that are critical to a functioning country — like conducting censuses, tracking storms and preparing for pandemics. Simply cutting these people off with abandon (and replacing others with political appointees) could have dire consequences, such as stifling disaster response and increasing the potential for corruption.

Also consider the financial dynamics. Last week, Musk said in a virtual town hall that the Trump administration’s second-term agenda — which includes tax cuts, federal budget cuts and tariffs on imports — “will necessarily involve some temporary hardship,” but would ultimately result in prosperity. “We need to reduce spending to continue living within our means,” Musk added. The sentence is similar to his justification for the Twitter layoffs, which he called at the time “painful” and necessary so Twitter could balance its budget. But Musk bought the platform without any idea how to turn it into a profitable business. His main interest seems to prioritize posting nonsense and trolling rather than finding advertisers or realizing his ideas of turning X into a WeChat-style commercial app. Musk has never shown any interest in understanding the mechanics of a social network or the complexities of content moderation or even the minutiae of the First Amendment. His incuriosity about what he was ultimately in charge of is exceeded only by his desire to use it as a personal playground and political weapon.

Before Musk officially took over Twitter, the tech oligarch at least feigned interest in running the company for the purpose of actual governance. “For Twitter to earn the public’s trust, it must be politically neutral, which essentially means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” he tweeted in 2022. However, Trump has made no effort to address the vengeful goals of to conceal his next government. and how he plans, in the words of the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, to “merge the office of presidency with himself” and “reconstruct it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies.” In other words, he plans to use the Elon Musk Twitter playbook for the entire country.