It’s clear enough that Elon Musk likes to move at breakneck speed. He likes to build things to his specifications with total control and little outside influence. He also has a track record for creating or furthering hugely profitable businesses from PayPal to The Boring Company, Tesla and SpaceX as well as X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. In addition to running his multi-billion international enterprises, the 53-year-old South African-born billionaire with dual Canadian and U.S. citizenship has more recently taken on the high-profile challenge of running the Department of Government Efficiency.

But do the business skills and unprecedented global successes of the world’s richest individual translate well into government service? Time will tell, but it appears, at least at present, that Musk has significant and important lessons to learn about how the U.S. government operates.

It’s fair to say that DOGE has faced significant controversy within its first month of operation. Whatever sum Musk claims to have saved U.S. taxpayers — a claimed $55 billion over President Donald Trump’s first month in office has been hotly disputed and may amount to far less — the methods employed have angered nearly all Democrats in Congress and many Republicans, too.

The latest example, Musk’s email demand that 2 million federal workers summarize a week’s worth of accomplishments or be fired, has not only sown anger but confusion with supervisors giving their workers contradictory advice on whether or not to even respond to the request. Even President Trump has seemed stumped at times suggesting Monday during a meeting in the Oval Office with French President Emmanuel Macron that perhaps workers who don’t answer could be “sort of semi-fired.”

What Musk evidently doesn’t understand is that governments are not private companies. The objectives of the government are unique.

The government does not prioritize maximizing profits for the benefit of shareholders. The government is responsible for maximizing the strength, stability, security and prosperity of a nation. Lives and livelihoods are at stake — and for America, indeed, even the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance of its decisions.

Perhaps by Wall Street standards, our government is by design inefficient. Consider the three branches. Extensive labor performed by one branch (the executive, for example) can be nullified by another (the judicial). Or consider the millions of taxpayer dollars expended on the creation, drafting, advocacy and enactment of legislation. A court that subsequently voids that law as unconstitutional could be said have caused millions in government waste. But, was the “waste” of our constitutional checks and balances worth it? It doesn’t take a historian or scholar to recognize the value of this arrangement.

Would it not be more efficient to establish a single branch of government that develops and possesses ultimate authority over all governmental decisions? It would indeed be, but, as history informs us, it would not be better. That is the road to dictatorship, ruthlessly efficient, perhaps, but surely not the American way.

In Maryland, we see perhaps more clearly than people living elsewhere the value of federal employment, the workers who process Social Security claims (in Woodlawn), who fund vital research (at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda), who help guard us against foreign terrorists (at the National Security Agency in Fort Meade).

Many are our friends and neighbors, fellow Americans who use their hard-earned dollars to contribute to the economy, by the way.

These individuals have devoted their lives to providing essential services to benefit all of us.

Their choice to enter public service means something, and the labors they perform add up a lot more than the dollars they’re paid, even if sometimes their workplaces aren’t run as efficiently as we’d like them to be.

When you fire a public employee, it is simply not like firing a private sector employee for whom a job is just a job. It’s different.

Musk must swiftly understand that government operates differently from businesses — and that the checks and balances the framers placed in the Constitution aren’t mere advisories. Perhaps Musk can do a lot of good with his expertise and it’s clear that Trump has placed a great deal of trust in him, but he needs to learn the system before he breaks it badly.