Remember when Elon Musk launched the Department of Government Efficiency? Yeah, well, this week they laid off 200+ technologists from core civic tech projects. These weren’t paper-pushers—they were engineers building systems for healthcare, passports, and infrastructure.

Look, I’m all for trimming fat. But this? This smells like tearing muscle. I’ve worked in lean teams before, and when you rip out the brains of your operation under the banner of “efficiency,” what you get isn’t speed—it’s rot.

If you’re in the public tech space or contracted with the government, now’s the time to double-check everything. Your funding, your timelines, your dependencies. Because when the folks with the keys to the systems disappear, what’s left behind is chaos disguised as cost savings.