It’s clear that Elon Musk hopes to run his Twitter playbook on the U.S. government. That is: launch an aggressive plan to reduce headcount, not just to reduce costs but also to shed unproductive employees who will cling to old ways of doing things. Once the legacy employees are gone, you rebuild the organization around the hard core who survived the purges.

This worked surprisingly well at what’s now X. If you’d asked me beforehand whether Musk could keep his platform running with only 20% of its workforce, I would have scoffed. (Indeed, I did scoff.) But somehow, he pulled it off: The site kept chugging along even as the company lost a reported 80% of its employees. Oh, sure, the platform saw an exodus of users and advertisers, but that seems to have been largely driven by changes Musk made to the company’s moderation policies, not by human resources issues.

If it worked once, why not try it on the legendarily inflexible and unresponsive federal bureaucracy? On Tuesday, federal employees got an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” inviting them to resign in exchange for getting to work from home — probably on administrative leave — until Sept. 30. It was very similar to an email Twitter employees got shortly after Musk took over, down to the same subject line.

But while the Twitter email saw employees resign in “droves,” the current round is unlikely to have the same effect. The Trump administration is about to discover why reforming the government is so different from — and so much harder than — reforming the private sector.

It’s not that the system doesn’t need reform. The federal government is sclerotic and inefficient, and its hiring processes idiotic, selecting candidates who have mastered the government’s arcane human resources procedures, rather than those who have mastered the job they’re applying for.

There’s an argument that the only way to reform the system is to blow it up, and the only person who can do that is a human wrecking ball like Musk. Don’t take my word for it: Listen to Jennifer Pahlka, who helped found the United States Digital Service under President Barack Obama and now pushes for reforms to cut the red tape holding back government projects. In a recent edition of her newsletter, Eating Policy, she suggests that getting past the voices insisting that no change is possible might require someone like Musk who is willing to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

“I wish it were different,” she writes, “but perhaps the job of breaking the wall has ended up with someone who is suited to doing it.”

Any such breakthrough is apt to go faster if there are fewer of the old crew standing in the way. Workplaces select people who like things the way they are. (After all, people who hate it are more likely to leave.) Federal workplaces, in particular, select people who are risk-averse and willing to trade higher pay and autonomy for a job that offers excellent benefits and a low likelihood of getting fired.

But of course, that’s the reason this is unlikely to work. These are not mercurial young tech workers, ready to flounce off to the next start-up if management isn’t to their liking. These workers are older — on average, in their late 40s — with an average tenure of 11.8 years, three times longer than that of a typical private-sector employee. And their jobs often have no equivalent in the private sector. I will be surprised if many of them resign.

But if they do, I will be even more surprised if this works out to the Trump administration’s benefit.

Even if you think there’s a lot of deadweight in the federal civil service, many of its members are necessary workers doing necessary things. There’s no guarantee that the necessary ones will stay — indeed, these kinds of buyouts often see star performers leave while the laggards cling to jobs they can’t easily replace.

Even Republicans want Mom to get her Social Security check, and Dad to get his Medicare-funded hip replacement, and Sis to collect her veterans benefits. They want national parks and courts to stay open. If there is the slightest hiccup in these services, they will freak out. Any damage from too-hasty departures will be hard to repair, because federal hiring takes a lot longer than it does in the private sector.

Moreover, unlike X users, American voters often have constitutional or statutory rights to various services, from a speedy trial to their tax refund. Those rights are enforced by the courts and by Congress — or if you prefer, America’s 535-member board of directors.

Which is why we’ve gotten such modest results from prior rounds of reform, many of which were led by people who correctly observed that things worked much better in the private sector, but who never figured out a way to fix the political and legal incentives that kept the government versions dysfunctional. Maybe this time will be different. But when it comes to government reform, that’s never the smart bet.