“It’s unclear how the whole experiment will go with a whole section of the Silicon Valley elite deciding that enough is enough essentially,” said Cummings. “The view always was in Silicon Valley that being thousands of miles away from DC was actually a great blessing because they could say ‘We can just do our own stuff and they’ll leave us alone’”.

Cummings went on to outline the ways that Silicon Valley elites might change government departments. “Option one is you go into the Air Force and fire the majority of people and restructure it completely, which is very hard to do in government,” he said. “But the other option is you just say ‘we’re going to do it differently’ and all the money the US Air Force was going to get for drones is no longer going to the US Air Force,” he argued.

Instead, the former Downing Street advisor argued that a separate legal entity should be created with its own powers and laws, which would be known as “Drone Force”. Cummings proposed making it exempt from “all the normal procurement rules” so it could “build like Silicon Valley does — i.e. super fast and optimised for speed and engineering — not optimised for Congress, all of the insane DEI stuff which they put in.”

Cummings then referred to Joe Biden’s Chips Act as an example of government waste. He said that a fraction of the money actually went on manufacturing chips and much of it went to what he called “DEI communism”. The political strategist also said that an external efficiency agency like DOGE would not “affect very much”. Something needs to be done internally, he said.

The Brexit architect concluded by warning that the system was “pathological” and designed to resist such a restructuring. But, if a new elite from Silicon Valley moved to DC and took it over with a president who “reinforces” it, then “extraordinary things are possible”.

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Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

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