- Steve Wozniak said DOGE’s mass firings are a bad business tactic.
- Wozniak said DOGE should approach cost-cutting “more surgically, with a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer.”
- Thousands of federal workers have been fired in recent weeks as DOGE has ramped up cost-cutting efforts.
Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of Apple, isn’t a fan of how DOGE is tackling cost-cutting in the federal government.
Wozniak said that while he supports looking for inefficiencies, he does not think Elon Musk and DOGE’s efforts to slash the federal workforce are the right approach.
“Mass firings — not good for a business to run that way,” he said in a conversation with CNBC on Wednesday. The Apple co-founder advised the group to be more strategic, saying that DOGE should act “more surgically, with a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer.”
Federal agencies have fired thousands of employees in recent weeks and offered conflicting guidance on the terminations.
The Apple cofounder isn’t outwardly political — he told CNBC that he decided not to vote when he was 18 — but did sign his name to a list of business leaders supporting former Vice President Kamala Harris during the election.
Voting record aside, Wozniak said he’s “on the wrong side of Elon” after criticizing Tesla in the past. The White House has repeatedly said that Musk isn’t officially running DOGE, though Trump said in a speech on Tuesday night that the group “is headed by Elon Musk,” and many see him as the functional leader.
Trump’s comment was flagged as part of an existing lawsuit against DOGE shortly after the speech ended.
Wozniak isn’t the only business personality who has criticized DOGE —billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has written about the group on Bluesky, a social media site that rivals Musk’s X. Cuban said that DOGE will “inevitably” create a mess in one post and called its efforts “not so brilliant” in another. Some management experts have had choice words for DOGE’s early tactics, previously telling BI that the group has been “clumsy” and “wrongheaded” so far.
Representatives for the White House, DOGE, and Wozniak did not respond to BI’s request for comment.
