Posted March 17, 2025 by Alice Wong Guest Blog Posts

The Eugenics Logic Behind Running a Government Like a Startup Under the Trump Administration

Valerie Black

Trump’s favorite broligarch Elon Musk is attempting to run the United States like a startup. But America isn’t a startup. It cannot be “scaled up” because it is already at scale. Its people, citizens and residents alike, cannot be fired. It cannot be acquired. Yet reckless and sweeping acts of “disruption” are indeed moving fast and breaking all kinds of vital resources and systems. All the while, the despotic duo make no secret of their disdain for disabled people: the eradication of remote work; the dismantling of the Department of Education and its IEPs and 504 plans; the decimation of USAID; the slashing of medical research funds; the threat to SSRI medication; the ominous insinuation that Social Security disability benefits are rife with fraud along with proposed cuts to Medicaid funding—all of these both signal and kindle indifference for disabled people’s autonomy and survival. Operating a government like a startup means making cuts and staying “lean” to maximize efficiency and productivity, which is precisely the narrative Musk is offering. But as the slashing continues and expands, what will become of those who Trump and Musk decide are dragging down America’s valuation?

Surreally enough, the current administration appears to have taken intersectionality to heart, albeit in the most perverse way possible: their assault on anti-racism efforts, trans rights, disability accessibility, and feminism—and far more besides—is not merely simultaneous but intertwined. It’s almost darkly encouraging that a presidential executive order explicitly labels accessibility, alongside diversity, equity, and inclusion, as a dirty word—because this coalescence in fact reflects a core principle of Disability Justice: “No body or mind can be left behind.” To some, the ideological scuttling of accessibility might seem like a hastily slapped-on addition to the more conspicuous dismantling of DEI. But it may prove to be this administration’s surest means for maximizing the delivery of financial devastation to vulnerable people. The clue is in the executive order itself: it frames the pushback against DEI and accessibility alike as a matter of eliminating wastefulness. Why stop at taking away educational training, jobs, and research when you can accelerate directly to taking away food, shelter, and medicine?

For disabled folks, being hailed as “wasteful” is the oldest play in the book. It’s the ever-present throughline of ableism: the capacity for someone who isn’t you to determine whether or not the value of your life exceeds the value of the resources that sustain your life. In other words: if the powers that be decide to evaluate your right to exist and determine that you fail to offer a suitable return on value, then you will be branded a burden. We exist within a political-economic system that is hellbent on designating vulnerable people as burdens—as costs just waiting to be cut. To be certain, it’s not just the brazen Nazi salutes and talk of “bad genes” that make this moment echo prior ones in which governments pursued fantasies of “master plan” efficiency, leaving (sending) the “inefficient” to die. But while Trump and Musk are by no means the origin of this outlook, they appear exceptionally eager to exploit it to their maximum advantage—by giving the evergreen logic of human devaluation a fresh startup spin.

Startups are built on expendability. They cannot exist without it. For startup founders, embracing radical expendability is how they prove themselves: the image of a founder coming onto the scene, eager to deploy a radical, break-the-rules transformation of whatever came before, has become a defining trope of startup culture. Crunch, grind, sleep under a desk: startups ennoble the pairing of resource restriction with stretching workers beyond their limits, in turn producing a kind of glamorized template of “rugged masculinity” for the wealthy nerd set. Even the startups themselves are considered eminently expendable. Yet startup captains don’t go down with their ships; they sell, and start again. Because startups more often than not—to an oft-cited tune of 90%—end in failure, the preparedness to dump it all and pivot is necessarily baked into the plan. Significantly, neither startup founders nor venture capitalist investors are interested in improving the overall survival rates of startups as a whole. Instead, this high failure rate is the mechanism by which value is determined. While in most markets, competition refines, in startups it culls. So the fact that our government is emulating a startup means that resource allocation is being evaluated against the underlying logic of “survival of the fittest”—a eugenics logic.

Eugenics is a word that many associate with “extremes.” It’s often treated simultaneously as a grave matter and a relic of the past. But it never left. For disabled people, encountering eugenics can feel like playing whack-a-mole: it keeps resurfacing, over and over (hello, COVID pandemic), predictable in its constancy, even if the precise form it takes shifts with time. Once you begin to clock this routine presence, then the fact that startups adhere to and enshrine a logic of eugenics isn’t especially unusual or surprising: those who frame the world in terms of “survival of the fittest” never see it as just a metaphor. (And no, Musk’s autism disclosure does not exempt him from fomenting eugenics thinking; on the contrary, he exemplifies what autistic activists and scholars have critically termed “aspie supremacist” behavior.) While a proclivity for openly embracing eugenics has been quietly growing among Silicon Valley’s wealthy elite, I’m not just suggesting that startups are being helmed and funded by eugenicists; I’m pointing out that the logic of eugenics is more or less “hard-wired” into startups—meaning that the people who amass wealth through them will already be primed to perceive the world in eugenics terms, and will take this logic—the basis by which they attained (or more realistically: amplified) their power and wealth—as self-evident truth.

This matters because when we use startups as a blueprint for remaking society, we aren’t just borrowing their rhetoric of iconoclastic innovation. We’re adopting a model that treats failure as a cleansing mechanism, that frames survival as proof of superiority, and that rewards those who claim to have “solved” complex problems—whether or not they actually have. It’s a system that demands radical oversimplification, and that insists on neat, scalable answers to problems that are anything but. And in the process, it inculcates the belief that ruthless elimination is not only necessary but virtuous.

If the idea that humanity must be saved from itself—by an elite few, who in turn reserve “salvation” for some, not all—was foundational to eugenics, then it’s an idea that’s now reached its zenith in the tech world. In the 1930s and 40s, the LA Times ran a weekly eugenics column—or per historian Alexandra Minna Stern, “shilled for racist eugenics”—that warned how the “unfit,” if allowed to reproduce, would “wreck civilization” itself. Like eugenicists before them, startup founders frequently position their work as an unquestioned instrument of social progress, or even a viable means of utopia-building. Not long ago, Musk declared, “If Tesla fails, the human race is doomed.” It’s mockable—textbook main character energy—but it also reflects a culture that not only tolerates such grandiosity from tech elites but actively encourages it. Indeed, the belief that possessing the power to enact widespread changes on behalf of others automatically confers the qualification to do so is deeply embedded in the way founders, funders, and even the public at large have come to regard the societal role of startups. Like eugenics before it, the “startupification” of society affords a kind of “para-governance” position.

There’s an intriguing hypocrisy at the root of this, and it’s where the eugenics logic that animates the startup world is most discernible. Arguably, the core hypocrisy of eugenics boils down to: wanting what’s best for everyone for some of us. In other words, elites dictate the terms of supposed societal betterment on the basis that all will share in it, yet the entire point of eugenics is that many will, by design, not share in this common future. This contradiction might be familiar to those who recognize America’s paradoxical relationship with class—where we disdain such divides even as we idolize the very elites who perpetuate them. Yet the tech elite not only expect the world to fall in line and not question their benevolence or right to influence the world as they see fit—they also need for us to regard them as meritocratic victors. They simultaneously stake their power in the belief that they are at once “predestined” to lead—discernible in the increasingly common references to “high IQ” among tech elites, a perennial eugenic trope—and necessarily self-made. This dynamic is so prevalent that it might not at first seem like a contradiction—but consider the tinge of a working class stolen valor that accompanies bragging about “the grind,” and how this sits at odds with the entitlement of “high IQ.” If tech elites seem to resent having to justify why one “proven” skill set should extrapolate to expertise and of a wholly different domain, then perhaps it’s because they no longer want to bother with having to buy into their own unconvincing self-made ethos. The social transformations that tech elite seek to deliver have become, once again, “what’s best for everyone for some of us.”

This tension points back to the ways in which “merit” itself is dubiously awarded in the startup realm. The appraisal of valuation, for instance, is exceedingly fuzzy, yet commands an almost unquestioned power belying that fuzziness—something that the scandal of Theranos publicly pulled back the curtain on. Silicon Valley also has a long tradition of disavowing the key role that government funding played in underwriting startup success from the start (and still).

For all that the founders and followers of eugenics believed they’d figured out how to steer human society to maximum achievement, their framework proved to be factually baseless, and relied on a vastly oversimplified conception of how genes work. Trump and Musk’s steering of America in turn indicates a similarly inadequate grasp of real-world complexity. Curiously, during a White House press briefing in which he attempted to justify dismantling federal resources, Musk referred to “feedback loops”—a cybernetic concept. Cybernetics, from a Greek word meaning “governor” or “steersman,” and commonly glossed as the study of communication and control, is a mid-century framework for understanding systems through feedback and regulation, and it shaped much of the thinking that led to AI as we know it today. But if there’s such a thing as Muskian cybernetics, then it’s bad cybernetics: astonishingly reductive and fundamentally at odds with cybernetics’ hallmark commitment to capturing, without eliding, complexity. Cybernetics emphasizes the need to carefully model reality before attempting to shape it. Musk, by contrast, seeks control without understanding.

Such folly aptly mirrors James C. Scott’s account of German scientific foresters in his classic work Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Though Scott doesn’t once use the word “cybernetics” in this text, he documents instances of disastrous attempts to control systems without first comprehending them. The opening chapter portrays, with fairytale-like irony, a quest to maximize timber production by planting trees in tight, rigid rows, only to result in killing off the trees. In seeking to impose strict order, they failed to comprehend the very conditions of diversity that make forests thrive. The lesson isn’t that ambitious, systemic undertakings are doomed to fail, but rather, that schemes built on willful ignorance are. Like those foresters, today’s techno-elites pursue control while denying and discounting the complexity of the systems they seek to control. Such hubris isn’t merely misguided—it actively endangers our shared future.

Elon Musk seemingly prides himself on thinking about the future of human existence. Imagine having the scope and daringness to think on this scale—only to be undone by an arrogance so profound that it allows you to believe you’ve come to fully understand which qualities must be pruned and which nurtured in order for humanity to endure and flourish. Yet again, it’s lining up trees, the forest itself be damned. It’s not necessary to foresee everything in order to be capable of leaving space for that which you cannot know or anticipate. Why is this lesson so unlearnable to those who are ostensibly most concerned with the future?

Musk and his minions are attempting to enact solutions—budget cuts and productivity expansion—without adequately considering if these indeed “solve” the problems it most behooves humanity to solve. (And if it weren’t Musk pushing this agenda, then sooner or later, another tech billionaire would be. As journalist Kara Swisher aptly described a younger Musk: “Silicon Valley has a million people like him.”) Such “solutions” actively circumscribe our future, and tether that future to assumptions that have not been adequately tested. The assumption that looms largest? That all of us and our needs—like so many items to be stuffed into a suitcase (or spaceship), simply won’t fit. And that to become future-fit, we must now make swift choices on what—who— to jettison. But attempting to retrofit humanity for a narrowly imagined future is simply eugenics, rebranded. It’s powered by a few people’s certainty that care itself is an inherently scarce resource that not everyone can—and therefore, should—receive. But recalling that eugenics is not only morally repugnant and cruel, but has also proven, time and again, to be oversimplistic and unfounded, then it’s worth asking: are our tech overlords, confident in their own fit survivorship, in fact failing to identify the right problem—and in the process, chaining us all to a solution that is both asinine and catastrophic?

When disabled scholar, activist, and artist Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about dreaming disability justice, they show that “dreaming” isn’t a powerless or apolitical act. Indeed, who better than those who intrinsically understand the harms of exclusion—and who know productivity is a game the house always wins—to compensate for our world’s ongoing failure of collective imagination by positing a world where survival of the fittest is understood as a narrow, childish, and ultimately baseless fantasy of what success looks like? Those Musk would sooner cut out of humanity’s future could even be the most valuable resource of all when it comes to ensuring a good future, because we tend to know how to ask better questions. Starting with: what would it take to create a world where care is so abundant that the notion of its scarcity becomes inconceivable?

About

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Valerie Black is an anthropologist (PhD UC Berkeley) and disability studies scholar whose work examines the social and ethical dimensions of human-AI relationships, including AI mental health care in both the US and Japan. As a postdoctoral scholar at UCSF’s Decision Lab, she serves as a Disability Justice-centered ethnographer and technology ethicist. Her research critically assesses the ways in which failure to center “nothing about us without us” across the development and use of novel technologies produces new forms of ableism.

The Eugenics Logic Behind Running a Government Like a Startup Under the Trump Administration