Despite promises of “draining the swamp,” Donald Trump is shaping up to be the most anti-science, anti-technology and anti-private sector president in memory. But it’s not too late for him to right the ship and make good on the promise for bold outside voices.
In the new administration, Elon Musk should be head of NASA. After all, he is basically running the private-sector equivalent. He just won a $112 million NASA contract for SpaceX to launch an ocean surveying satellite that will launch in 2021 and monitor the earth’s oceans and rivers from above.
NASA needs a bold, optimistic vision for how we fit into the universe. Musk, the billionaire founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors, already has that vision, and his grand plan to colonize Mars is exactly what America needs right now. Given his track record, I wouldn’t bet against him. He also seems to love Twitter as much as our incoming president.
The director of national intelligence historically has been a person from the defense and military communities, but it’s increasingly a tech-heavy policy job. Issues such as whether to create backdoors to encryption, how to prevent foreign cyberattacks and how to handle bulk telephone surveillance seem to suggest that the man who created the world’s biggest search engine — Sergey Brin — is uniquely qualified.
And how delicious would it be for the Kremlin to know that their lost son, Soviet-born Brin, co-founder of Google and the president of Google’s parent company, would be overseeing efforts to spy on them. He’s already one of the most powerful people in the world, and has a keen understanding to the world’s flow of information, including having brought a censored version of Google to China.
Brin’s intellectual soulmate, Larry Page, with whom he founded Google, could be given a role in the executive branch as well. Page is a notoriously demanding leader, who famously coined the “10X” philosophy, meaning that Google employees are expected to create products that are at least 10 times better than the competition.
These two are already the 12th and 17th richest men in the world, respectively. They aren’t working to make more money, but rather to have an impact, with both focusing on projects at Google X. That’s the secret innovation arm of Google charged with what the company calls “moonshots.” Our government could use a moonshot right now.
But all signs point to political insiders for roles in intelligence. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is under consideration as director of national intelligence. Giuliani was slow to institute the city’s emergency command center in three years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and when he finally did, he placed it in the World Trade Center. Not the most strategic thinker. Not likely to enjoy managing folks who are smarter than him, either.
Trump seems to like appointing dissidents, if his picks for the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency are any indication.
So if we’re going to appoint dissidents, why not Jeff Bezos? Bezos is the diabolical genius responsible for gutting Main Street due to the price undercutting of his e-commerce giant Amazon. He’s also the perfect person to restore dignity to the U.S. Postal Service and guide it into modernization. The mail is going out of business, and that’s partly because of Bezos. He clearly knows consumers.
But Bezos would never take the job, which is why you’d also have to make him the secretary of commerce as well. It makes sense to put the postal service under the auspices of commerce, because what’s more fundamental to the exchange of goods and services than the mail? Plus, the board of governors that oversees the postal service is down from 11 to 3 members. Nobody wants that job.
As a dual postmaster general and commerce secretary, Bezos would help develop policy on issues related to the internet economy and would be able to craft a new postal service that compliments and drives the economy.
Scientists, technologists and startup founders are great choices for government. You won’t find anyone less dogmatic than someone who relies on evidence and empirical data for a living. That in and of itself would shake things up and drain the swamp.
©2016 the Boston Herald Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
