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AN OPEN LETTER TO ELON MUSK  
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Stephen Engelberg
December 11, 2024
ProPublica
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_ I have little doubt that ProPublica will write stories in the
coming years that will enrage people you know. Some of our work may
even focus on you or your companies. With immense power comes immense
scrutiny. But here are some ideas you should like. _

"Elon Musk - Caricature", by DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0)

 

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
This story was originally published in our Dispatches
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Elon,

I know your relationship with ProPublica got off to a rocky start when
we contacted you about a story we were writing about your federal
taxes
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You replied with a lone punctuation mark — “?” — and
subsequently called the story that mentioned you “a bunch of
misleading stuff.”

We can agree to disagree on that story and a lot of other things. But
we thought it might be useful to reach out again in light of your
role, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, as co-head of the Department of
Government Efficiency.

Simply put: If you’re trying to identify wasteful practices and
spending by federal agencies, you’ll find a wealth of actionable
issues that our reporting has surfaced over the past 16 years. You and
Vivek noted in your recent Wall Street Journal op-ed
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your plans for DOGE that “the federal government’s procurement
process is also badly broken.”

Our reporting over the years provides some powerful illustrations of
that point. ProPublica’s work on the Navy’s cost overruns
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design flaws in its ships is second to none. We recently disclosed
how Microsoft boxed its competitors out
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providing cybersecurity software to the biggest government agencies,
including the Pentagon. (Microsoft defended its conduct, saying in a
statement that its “sole goal during this period was to support an
urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture
of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by
sophisticated nation-state threat actors.”)

Perhaps the most immediate relevance of our journalism to your work
arises from your reported interest
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creating a phone app that most Americans could use to file their
taxes.

No national news organization has been more focused on this subject
than ProPublica. We have thoroughly documented
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States is one of the only industrialized countries in the world that
does not provide free filing to its citizens: Companies like Intuit
that make billions of dollars selling tax preparation software have
persuaded Congress to block free filing and keep their businesses
alive.

I’d encourage you to take a look at the story “Inside
TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes
for Free.”
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You’re a busy person, so I’ll provide a TL;DR version: The tax
prep industry has blocked free filing by organizing a bipartisan
coalition on Capitol Hill that is anchored by House Republicans but
includes Democrats like Zoe Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley.

The industry also attracted support from longtime Republican figures
like Grover Norquist, who has branded proponents of free filing as
“big spenders in Washington, D.C.” who are trying to “socialize
all tax preparation in America.”

As you know (or will soon learn if you pursue this agenda), despite
decades of resistance, the IRS recently launched a pilot program for
free filing
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It works pretty well, but it’ll likely remain small scale unless
something changes in the current Washington status quo.

 

That’s where you and Vivek have a historic opportunity.

What has always struck me about Washington is its ability to resist
fundamental change. People arrive with big plans for reforms and often
end up becoming part of the problem.

I began my career as a Washington reporter in 1983, two years after
President Ronald Reagan took office promising to upend how business
was done in the capital. Reagan was serious about coming up with some
concrete ideas for saving money and reducing waste. He created a
presidential commission of business executives and urged its members
to work like “tireless bloodhounds.”

“Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out
inefficiency,” the president said.

Two years later, the commission delivered 47 volumes of reforms that
it said could save $424 billion in government spending over three
years. Most of the proposals required congressional action, a daunting
task when the Senate was controlled by Republicans and the House by
Democrats. In the end, only 27% of the recommendations were enacted.
By the time Reagan’s term was over, government spending was up and
the deficit had grown.

I believe Republican control of the presidency and both houses of
Congress gives you and Vivek a better shot at taking on issues like
free tax filing that have long been dismissed as lost causes.
There’s a broad coalition of Americans who voted for Donald Trump,
many of whom feel the government cares little about their problems.
Politicians of both parties understand that their futures may depend
on taking real, measurable steps to address those concerns.

Eliminating the annual ritual of paying money to a third party in
order to tell the government what it already knows about your personal
finances could be both popular and more efficient.

There has been a lot of skepticism about whether it’s possible to
achieve your goal of cutting trillions of dollars from the federal
budget. It appears to me that you could only rack up that level of
savings by slashing everything from Medicare to military spending. I
think the president’s political advisers will take the ax out of
your hands before you hit the first trillion.

That’s not to say there isn’t an array of government programs that
could be better run. We see our job as holding power to account, and
the waste of the people’s money is one focal point of our reporting.
That’s why we’ve written repeatedly about waste
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Medicare and Medicaid, the government’s two biggest health care
programs. (We’ve also covered the way cuts to those programs harm
people
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I have little doubt that we will write stories in the coming years
that will enrage people you know. Some of our work may even focus on
you or your companies. With immense power comes immense scrutiny. (As
we did several years ago, we will always reach out to you for your
response before we publish anything about you.)

Still, I would be disappointed if we did not also publish a piece or
two that prompted you to storm into Vivek’s office and say: “Damn,
this is outrageous. We could fix this.”

Best,

Steve Engelberg

_Stephen Engelberg is ProPublica’s editor-in-chief and served as
founding managing editor from 2008–2012._

_ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces
investigative journalism with moral force. We dig deep into important
issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public
trust — and we stick with those issues as long as it takes to hold
power to account._

_With a team of more than 150 editorial staffers, ProPublica covers a
range of topics including government and politics, business, criminal
justice, the environment, education, health care, immigration, and
technology. We focus on stories with the potential to spur real-world
impact [[link removed]]. Among other positive
changes, our reporting has contributed to the passage of new laws;
reversals of harmful policies and practices; and accountability for
leaders at local, state and national levels._

_Investigative journalism requires a great deal of time and resources,
and many newsrooms can no longer afford to take on this kind of
deep-dive reporting. As a nonprofit, ProPublica’s work is powered
primarily through donations. The vast bulk of the money we spend goes
directly into world-class, award-winning journalism
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the truth, no matter how long it takes or how much it costs, and we
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forward the important work of exposing corruption, informing the
public about complex issues, and using the power of investigative
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* Elon Musk
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