The “CEO Presidency” Scam: How Republicans Turned Government Into a Profit Center for Billionaires
The slogan that promised efficiency was really a blueprint to dismantle public government and hand its power—and money—to the billionaire class…
The bombs are falling on Iran this week, Kash Patel has fired the FBI experts on Iranian sleeper cells in America, and people are speculating that Trump’s trying to provoke an Iranian attack on the US to justify blowing up November’s elections. Somewhere in the wreckage of what used to be America’s functioning national security apparatus, the ghost of Ronald Reagan is grinning.
I’ve been doing my progressive program on SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and radio stations nationwide for over two decades, and every time a Republican runs for office promising to “run government like a business” — Reagan‘s favorite meme — I tell my listeners exactly what’s coming next:
— Tax cuts for the morbidly rich,
— Gutted regulations that had been designed to protect average people,
— Privatized (profitized) public services that will make billions for corporations and eat our tax dollars,
— incompetent management of government agencies and our economy,
— And, soon, a slow-motion disaster that the rest of us end up paying for.
We’re living through that disaster right now, and it’s accelerating.
And figuring out why ain’t rocket science; it’s one of the GOP’s oldest scams that relies on public ignorance. Here’s what, since Reagan gutted aid to public education (20% cuts in his first year), they don’t teach in Civics classes anymore: businesses and governments have fundamentally different purposes and are run in fundamentally different ways.
A business exists to maximize profit for its shareholders. A government exists to provide services, protect rights, and ensure, to quote the Constitution, the “general welfare” of its people. You can’t do both at the same time: they’re not even on the same spectrum.
When you try to run a government the way, for example, Jack Welch ran GE, you don’t get “efficiency.” You get cruelty dressed up as cost-cutting programs for average people and massive subsides and tax breaks for giant corporations and their morbidly rich CEOs.
Reagan started this particular con back in 1981, arguing that government was “the problem” and that corporate-style management was the solution. What he was really up to was laying the ideological groundwork for two goals: stripping the government of its capacity to serve ordinary people, and handing that capacity over to private companies that would then charge all of us twice as much for half the service.
We see this most visibly in how we’re all ripped off by for-profit health insurance companies, while every other democracy on Earth has a national healthcare system that costs half of what ours does, but the examples are legion.
As usual from Reagan, it was brilliant political marketing and terrible governance, and the Republican Party has been running that same scam ever since.
The most spectacular early example of the “CEO presidency” disaster came with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, whom the conservative press was practically orgasmic about in 2001. Two businessmen! A president who’d run an oil company! A vice president who’d run Halliburton! Finally, Washington would be managed by real executives who understood how the world worked.
What they conveniently forgot to mention was that Bush’s business background was a trail of failed ventures propped up by his father’s connections, and Cheney’s record at Halliburton was, to put it charitably, a catastrophe.
Cheney made the disastrous decision to acquire Dresser Industries in 1998 for $7.7 billion, a company nobody else wanted, at a price at least 16 percent above its actual value. What he either didn’t notice or didn’t care about was that Dresser came loaded with over 66,000 asbestos liability claims that eventually totaled roughly $5.5 billion and drove Halliburton right up to the edge of bankruptcy. (Nonetheless, he was rewarded with a bonus for the deal; that’s CEO leadership for you.)
Then came Bush and Cheney lying us into the Iraq War, and suddenly Halliburton’s problems were solved. Cheney’s former company received a $7 billion no-bid contract for which, quite literally, only Halliburton was invited to bid on. The coordination of that contract with Cheney’s office was later confirmed by an internal Pentagon email.
Cheney claimed he had no knowledge of those contracts, even as he continued receiving deferred compensation from Halliburton and held hundreds of thousands of unexercised stock options in the company.
The Iraq War, sold to us on a foundation of lies about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, left more than 4,400 American soldiers dead, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, and added trillions to our national debt. It also made Halliburton very, very profitable. That’s no coincidence; it’s a Republican CEO presidency in action.
Now we’re doing it again, only bigger, faster, and with considerably more billionaires who all appear eager to get their fingers into the Treasury’s till.
Trump assembled the wealthiest cabinet in American history, with at least a dozen billionaires holding roles in his administration, collectively worth nearly $400 billion. These are people who, along with their spouses, poured tens of millions of dollars into his campaigns, then were rewarded with the keys to the agencies they’d spent years lobbying or suing.
Trump’s so corrupt he’s even managed to screw up Reagan’s old saw about “running government like a business.” Instead, his regime is now running our government for the benefit of the specific businesses owned by the people Trump’s put into place.
The Department of Government Efficiency was the purest expression of this philosophy. Elon Musk, whose companies have billions in government contracts and was under at least 30 government investigations for corruption, fraud, or waste, was handed essentially unlimited access to the federal government’s data systems and given a mandate to “cut waste.”
He promised to save $2 trillion, then revised that down to $1 trillion, and then ended up running up a bill for at least $21.7 billion in his own wasteful spending while federal expenditures increased from $6.95 trillion to over $7 trillion during 2025.
Every agency that was investigating Musk’s businesses was gutted, shut down, or redirected away from him; he walked away Scott free. And now one of the people he’d inserted in our government reportedly stole the entire Social Security database and has taken it to a private corporation. This is a level of corruption and scandal that makes Teapot Dome and Agnew’s bribes look like a joke.
DOGE was forced to rehire thousands of the workers it fired, crashed the Social Security Administration’s servers by updating software without testing it, and exposed the private data of hundreds of millions of Americans by stealing sensitive Social Security information and putting it on an unsecured server. Musk himself eventually admitted he wouldn’t do it again. Even the White House Chief of Staff described him privately as a “complete solo actor” whose actions weren’t always “rational.”
And now, this week, as American bombs fall on Iran and the Middle East edges toward a wider conflagration, CNN is reporting that the very DOGE cuts that were supposed to make government “lean” — in this case with regard to our security and international relations — have damaged our ability to respond.
The State Department has lost so many career experts that its remaining staff are behaving like a bunch of wimps terrified of pushing back against Trump and his appointees. Even Secretary of State Rubio is afraid to wear his own shoes and, as former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor documents, is instead wearing a pair Trump ordered him to, the same way Stalin, Mao, and Saddam required their underlings to follow their fashion trends.
FBI counterintelligence agents who track Iranian threats were fired not because of performance problems but because they’d been involved in the investigation into Trump’s criminal mishandling of classified documents.
Or was that because Trump actually wants Iran to attack the US so he can get the kind of “9/11 boost” in the polls like Bush did? Nobody knows because — like the way a business is run — the boss is essentially an unaccountable king and there’s no transparency.
Cybersecurity personnel at the Department of Homeland Security have also been gutted. We’re in a war, and CEOs Musk and Trump deliberately kneecapped the people who’re supposed to keep us safe from these dangers, because “efficiency.”
If their greed and incompetence wasn’t so dangerous, it’d be funny.
The fundamental problem here isn’t that these billionaires and CEOs are personally greedy, vain, or incompetent, although many of them clearly are. The problem for our government suffering under this GOP delusion about “running government like a business” is structural.
A CEO’s job is to maximize the revenue return for shareholders — profit — even if that means cutting corners, externalizing costs onto the public, or treating workers like crap. Those instincts are catastrophic when applied to a government whose “customers” are all 330 million of us and whose product is the common good.
You can’t fire your citizens when they’re not profitable. You can’t outsource national security to the lowest bidder. And you can’t treat a nation’s core and essential infrastructure like a line item to be slashed when quarterly earnings disappoint. Although Trump and his lickspittles are trying their hardest anyway.
J.D. Vance is, in many ways, the distilled essence of this failure. He’s a man whose entire political career was constructed by a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires, who saw in him a vessel for their particular brand of techno-libertarian, anti-democracy, and anti-government ideology.
He has no meaningful experience governing anything. He went from Yale Law to venture capital to senator to vice president on the strength of billionaire patronage and a memoir about Appalachian poverty (he actually grew up in an middle-class suburb) that he used as a stepping stone to represent the very economic interests that created the poverty that he falsely claimed.
Democrats have long understood that public service is different from corporate management. The people who built Social Security, Medicare, the Clean Air Act, the minimum wage, public schools, and the interstate highway system weren’t trying to turn a profit: they were trying to build a country. That’s a completely different job, with completely different skills, and we should start saying so loudly and clearly.
The next time you hear a Republican at any level, from your local school board to the United States Senate, promise to “run government like a business,” understand what they’re really saying: they intend to serve the interests of whoever funds their campaign, strip your government of its ability to serve you, and call the resulting chaos “efficiency.”
It seems like every new generation gets its own version of the GOP’s favorite scam: it’s the same con Reagan ran in 1981, the same con Bush and Cheney ran in 2001, and now it’s the same con Trump and his billionaire cabinet are running today.
The proof is in the ruins of our country. In the transfer of over $50 trillion from working class people to the top 1% since Reagan started the scam. It’s visible in the middle class going from two-thirds of us in 1980 to around 43% of us today, and it taking 2 paychecks today to have the same lifestyle a single one could provide before Reagan took an axe to our government and the unions it protected.
Share this insight with your neighbors, family members, and your social media followers. Teach them the difference between a business and a government. Explain what public service actually means.
And the next time a candidate shows up promising to bring their CEO experience to Washington, run in the other direction because disaster is inevitable.
Pass it along.
Louise’s Daily Song: “The CEO Presidency Scam”