Who Are Trump’s Musk-eteers?

My VIPs for this week are the Musk-eteers, the talented young people who are helping Elon Musk search for government waste. Musk and his fellow engineers are going through records at government agencies to discover where taxpayer money goes – and Democrats and the legacy media are melting down. They are no longer calling for Trump’s death and have gone after Musk.

The legacy media is really upset the Trump administration is hiring too many young people to help with the task of downsizing the federal government. Jarrett Stepman discussed the strategy of the legacy media in his article published at The Daily Signal. 

Left-wing media types are doing their best to cook up negative stories about the young DOGE whiz kids so that they will get fired or get mired in controversy so they can’t work effectively. Isn’t it interesting that they are trying to dig up old social media posts from DOGE employees who have just arrived on the job, yet have done virtually nothing to uncover the wasteful spending and outright corruption that’s taken place at USAID and the State Department for decades?

Fortunately, the new Trump administration isn’t accepting left-wing gatekeeping these days.

That’s refreshing.

But the general point that the Left is apparently trying to make here really needs to be pointed out for the absurdity that it is.

There is no problem at all with Musk employing young staffers with highly impressive abilities to help reform and streamline the out-of-control federal bureaucratic Leviathan.

This narrative about DOGE employees being too young is incredibly rich coming from the Left.

Stepman reminded his readers about the young people who have been honored by Democrats and the Left-leaning media: Greta Thunberg was made the “voice of the green movement” as a young teenager. David Hogg, now a 24-year-old gun control activist, began his political activities as a teenager. In fact, he was recently elected to be the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Stepman ridiculed the Left because they complain that Trump is using young people for their technical talents, while they put teenagers in charge of their activities.

Why should we look to those young people for wisdom, but reject the youthful energy and brilliance of a handful of DOGE employees who are bringing their technical expertise to the bloated, ideologically compromised dinosaur that is our federal bureaucracy?

The dynamic in the Trump administration seems to be a mix of older people making the big picture decisions, aided by young people who, with their youth and skills, are carrying it out….

Trump and Musk aren’t looking for wisdom from the young tech bros. They are looking for energy and the kind of skills that were extraordinarily useful in getting Twitter, now X, to work efficiently with a minimal staff.

Stepman pointed out that the Trump administration is not the first to employ young people. George Washington was the first president to work with young men, such as his “gifted aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton” was only 21 years old.  The famous General Marquis de Lafayette was only 20 years old when he joined Washington.

A great number of successful endeavors in history have been carried by very young men led by able older leaders. World War II was won by 20-year-olds. And it’s not just in war that this dynamic works. In business and government, using the energy and talent of youth and combining it with the experience of older, able leaders has typically been a winning combo.

That seems like common sense to me, but these days I guess it has to be spelled out….

But my feeling is that the American people are going to be quite pleased with the changes coming to our federal government and don’t care about the age of the people making those changes. Certainly, a little youth and energy sure beats the four miserable years of toothless Caesarism under President Sleepy Joe Biden.

The pattern that Trump and Musk are following with hiring young engineers is a familiar one to me. For more than 200 years, the Lord Jesus Christ has trusted young men to carry His gospel to the world. Today, eighteen-year-old young men and nineteen-year-old young women are called as missionaries by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to carry the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world.