Efficiency Will Kill Our Future

Efficiency won’t save our future. It will starve it. Innovation needs room to wander.

In the rush to make government “efficient,” we are dismantling the very conditions that make American innovation possible. Budget hawks call it “streamlining,” but in practice it often means cutting the programs whose benefits aren’t immediate or easily measurable — and basic research almost always falls into that category.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger, in The Question Concerning Technology, warned about a dangerous mindset he called enframing (Gestell): seeing the world only as a stockpile of resources to be optimized and exploited for maximum output. It is a worldview obsessed with order, control, and productivity — and it blinds us to possibilities that can’t be measured in quarterly reports. Today, this mindset has found a political home in the ideology known as the Dark Enlightenment, which openly argues that all institutions, including governments, should run like profit-maximizing corporations.

But here’s the problem: true innovation — the kind that changes industries and transforms lives — doesn’t come from quarterly thinking. It comes from curiosity-driven exploration, from research that looks “wasteful” until it changes the world. The National Science Foundation’s modest grant to two Stanford grad students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, seeded the algorithm that became Google. DARPA’s decades-long networking experiments gave birth to the Internet. The Human Genome Project looked slow and expensive in the 1990s; today it underpins precision medicine and the biotech economy.

Even space exploration, often derided as a costly spectacle, has given us weather satellites, GPS, and countless material science breakthroughs. NASA’s Apollo program didn’t just land astronauts on the Moon — it created cordless power tools, improved water purification, and advanced microelectronics. At CERN, a particle physics lab funded by European governments, scientists created the World Wide Web to share data. As the President of Princeton University recently noted, none of these projects would have survived under a corporate “return-on-investment” model. They were too uncertain, too expensive in the short term, and too hard to justify on a balance sheet.

This is the point: government research funding thrives precisely because it resists efficiency logic. It creates the slack — the breathing room — where unpredictable breakthroughs happen. Markets are fantastic at refining proven ideas and bringing them to scale, but they are structurally incapable of sustaining decades of work before the first dollar of profit appears. The Dark Enlightenment’s dream of “governments as corporations” would kill that ecosystem entirely.

We should be clear-eyed about what’s at stake. This isn’t just a budgetary debate — it’s a civilizational one. If we allow efficiency to become the sole measure of value, we will blind ourselves to the work that matters most for the long term. We will save pennies today while forfeiting the moon landings, the Internets, and the medical revolutions of tomorrow.

The Dark Enlightenment is not just a fringe internet curiosity. Its leading thinker, Curtis Yarvin, has found an audience with Vice President JD Vance who has echoed aspects of his critique of democratic “inefficiency.” And the thesis of Musk’s DOGE has its roots in Yarvin’s ideas, which are intolerant of the open-ended, experimental, and occasionally “wasteful” processes from which genuine breakthroughs arise. If we allow this worldview to guide our policies, we will have a government that manages decline efficiently instead of building the future boldly.

Heidegger’s warning still stands: a society that sees only through the lens of efficiency loses the ability to see possibility at all. And when that happens, the future stops being something we build — it becomes something that happens to us.