A statue for Jeff Bezos? Not with arguments like this

Jeff Bezos, I've been told, is not just a smart guy. When it comes to business, he's a full-on genius.

Acquaintances who have worked in the upper echelons of Amazon have told me the executive chairman's business IQ and instincts really are supernatural. Bezos is a modern-day Henry Ford, one Seattle friend argued - to the point that Seattle should have put up a statue to Bezos by now.

I'm open to the business genius thing. But how is it then that a genius could be so incurious about another major arena of American life, the government?

Bezos is in the news because he sat for a wide-ranging interview this past week on CNBC's Squawk Box." It made headlines mostly because he said, dubiously, that President Trump is now "more mature, more disciplined."

More disciplined at enriching himself and his friends, maybe.

That aside, it's a good interview, with Bezos saying smart things about entrepreneurialism, AI and the space business. It's when he turned to government that I started groaning.

Bezos launched the typical business critique that government is a giant pot of waste. It would be a cinch to slash federal spending without affecting anything.

"Any corporate CFO worth their salt, the Amazon CFO, could find 3% in the federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon," Bezos said. "There is so much waste in government spending."

As an example, Bezos also excoriated the New York public schools, which made news recently for having operating expenses of $44,000 per student. This is quite high for a public school system. (Seattle schools are around $22,000 per student.) And of course it's not news that New York gets mediocre results, with its poorest students, who make up 75% of the district, struggling to pass standardized tests.

"If we ran Amazon the way New York runs their school system, your packages would take six weeks to arrive, we'd have to charge you a $100 delivery fee, and then when the package did finally arrive, it'd have the wrong item in it anyway," Bezos said.

"Right," agreed the TV host.

It's depressing to me that this is the level of analysis we get from one of our geniuses.

Does he not remember DOGE?

It was only a year ago. The national government hired one of the few people in the world who is richer and arguably better at business than Bezos, Elon Musk, for just such a cost-cutting operation.

Musk initially set out to cut $2 trillion - about the size of the current federal deficit. He quickly dialed that back to $1 trillion, then all the way back to $150 billion - which is about 2% of federal spending. But he failed even at that. Musk spent considerably more than a Tuesday afternoon in a chain-saw search for waste, fraud and abuse, and he came up with effectively zero.

Don't take my word for it, here is one of DOGE's deputies, Nathan Cavanaugh, in a court deposition about DOGE's ham-handed attempts to slash humanities grants.

Q: You don't regret that people might have lost important income … to support their lives?

A: No. I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.

Q: Did you reduce the federal deficit?

A: No, we didn't.

Federal spending actually went up in the year DOGE was active, by roughly 1%. It's up an additional 3% so far this year. By some estimates the chaos of DOGE may have cost the government money, due to improper firings, furloughed employees still being paid while not working, contracts and grants getting canceled only to be restored later, and so on.

It's important to understand though why DOGE failed. Bezos doesn't seem to, as he's making the exact same mistake Musk did. Which is that cutting government is not a fiscal exercise, as it might be with a business. It's inherently political.

Example: I too can find 3% to cut in an afternoon. Proposed: Let's slash $150 billion out of the bloated $1.2 trillion U.S. military budget. Boom, easy, mission accomplished.

But what I haven't done with this proposal, and what DOGE didn't do, is build any political support or constituency for it. It doesn't take a genius to imagine what would happen next. Senators will be worried about which military bases might close. Defense contractors will lobby to keep their Pentagon projects. Uh oh, the president has unexpectedly started another Middle East war, and now wants a bigger military. My Tuesday afternoon cut suddenly isn't so simple.

Neither is the school example. Bezos cited New York's outlier schools budget as proof that "we don't have a revenue problem in this country … we have a spending problem."

This empty cliché should be permanently retired from politics.

Consider that Lakeside School, a private Seattle academy where Bezos sent his own kids, spends far more per student than even New York.

That's right, Lakeside has core operating expenses of $52 million, for 890 students, according to its most recent nonprofit tax filing. That comes out to about $58,000 per student.

Is that a spending "problem, too? Presumably not. Lakeside gets better results, but it also chooses its customers. So how are we to judge New York's smaller per-student expenditures?

Bezos, like Musk before him, opts to judge it with contempt. It's a government enterprise, so it should be cut. There is zero grappling with how his own school, Lakeside, has chosen to spend massively more money - on smaller class sizes, for instance - and how choices like that might also benefit the children of New York.

Plus if you asked the people paying the bills - the taxpayers of New York - I bet they would vote against cutting school spending anyway.

This political disconnect happens all the time here in Washington state. Businesspeople say we have a spending problem. In response, some government programs get put to a statewide vote. We just did this with the climate-change carbon-fees program and the long-term care program. What did the voters - the bosses - decide? They chose more government spending, not less.

Were they wrong? Maybe, but it's pointless to keep mindlessly saying we have a spending problem. Either do the political work to build a constituency for a different answer or you're just blowing smoke.

Democracy is not the same as business. It doesn't have a CEO. Please make a note of it.

Seriously, I'm going on about this because both the country and our state desperately need reforms, to balance budgets and make government more efficient. I get that billionaires like Bezos feel unfairly vilified in that.

But it would really help if, in turn, the billionaires took just a minute - a Tuesday afternoon, if you will - to try to grok what government does, who its bosses and customers are, and why it isn't anything like Amazon delivering packages.

Otherwise, it's billionaires in bad faith. You're not going to get a statue for that.

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This story was originally published May 23, 2026 at 6:37 AM.