It’s Not Even Good Coding Practice
Musk’s assault on the US government isn’t just reckless abuse of power, it’s also reckless software development practice.
By Ryan McGreal.
482 words. Approximately a 1 to 3 minute read.
Posted February 08, 2025 in Blog.
I think the story Elon Musk is telling himself and his fanboys about what he’s doing is that he’s cutting the cruft out of the codebase of the US government to make it more streamlined and effective.
As he says, he thinks regulations should be “default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
I understand this impulse. I’ve done something similar myself at times with a piece of functionality when no one has any idea who uses it. Turn it off and wait to see if anyone squawks.
There are almost certainly some aspects of the US government that fall into this category. And I guess one way to find out what is really needed is to delete all of it and wait to see what happens.
But as any experienced, responsible developer knows, just because you don’t understand the point of a piece of code, that doesn’t mean it’s pointless.
This is especially salient in the set of federal government policies, where a great many of the programs and regulations were written in blood after a disaster.
The responsible way to refactor a big, messy, complicated codebase that has evolved by accretion over a long period of time is to:
(1) Carefully review and document your requirements so you understand what the code must do.
(2) Write a comprehensive test suite that checks all the items of functionality you identified.
(3) Move your code into a version control system so you can keep track of (and if necessary roll back) your changes.
(4) Set up a development environment that mimics the production environment where you can test changes before deploying them into production.
(5) Run your test suite on your code in dev after every change to make sure you didn’t break anything.
(6) Deploy your changes to production once they’ve been tested and pass every test.
Needless to say, the DOGE script kiddies breaking into departments, hijacking their code and reportedly pushing hot fixes into live production systems aren’t doing any of that.
When you wholesale shut down a government program because you are ideologically inclined not see the point of it, suddenly you may find that airplanes are falling out of the sky, veterans can’t get healthcare, farm produce rots in a warehouse while children starve.
Suddenly there’s a new global pandemic of Ebola and a new global pandemic of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. AIDS drugs stop working. The historic mission to cure cancer grinds to a halt.
It’s reckless and unprofessional. It’s negligent and lawless. It’s unconstitutional and unconscionable. It’s hypocritical projection from a gang of thugs who falsely accused their political opponents of acting unilaterally without legal authority.
It is a shameless, sociopathic power grab. It is cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
And on top of all of that, it’s not even good software development practice, which is supposed to be the thing they’re good at.