It may have felt like a whole lot longer, but we’re less than 100 days into billionaire Elon Musk’s grand experiment of trying to shave trillions of dollars from the United States government’s budget.
And judging by the absolute chaos that has unfurled, his Department of Government Efficiency experiment has been nothing short of a disaster.
Besides finding little in terms of actual “waste and fraud” and massively cutting his ambitions down from $2 trillion to a mere $150 billion earlier this month, Musk’s actions have had little to show except endless drama and suffering.
Millions of people are in danger of being cut off from Social Security, the Internal Revenue Service is struggling to keep it together at the height of tax season, and international aid organizations are warning that extreme hunger and starvation will be on the rise thanks to massive cuts to US foreign aid.
And while Musk promised during a recent Tesla earnings call that he would be spending less time overseeing these budget cuts, White House officials, including Cabinet members, are getting increasingly fed up with the billionaire’s meddling.
As Axios reported this week, Musk was involved in a shouting match — in earshot of president Donald Trump — with treasury secretary Scott Bessent. The argument was reportedly about Musk trying to influence Bessent’s decision over who to pick to lead the IRS.
Vocal disagreements have become so commonplace that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently had to defend them as a “normal part of any healthy policy process,” a bewildering statement that defies common sense.
“And ultimately everyone knows they serve at the pleasure of President Trump,” she added.
Musk’s actions in Washington, DC, have proven disastrous for his popularity — just as he predicted himself last fall — with the majority of Americans now holding an unfavorable view of him.
His relationship with Trump, which flourished last year during and immediately after the election, has been tested again and again. Case in point, Trump had to remind his Cabinet last month that they were the ones in charge, not Musk.
The president’s disastrous trade war has also driven a wedge between the two, with Musk breaking rank this month, raging against tariffs threatening his businesses’ bottom line.
Even whether DOGE is saving the government any money at all remains dubious. Last month, the Treasury Department and IRS officials predicted a decrease of more than ten percent in tax receipts, which would amount to more than $500 billion in lost revenue, as the Washington Post reported at the time.
“DOGE is not a serious exercise,” Manhattan Institute fellow Jessica Riedl told Reuters, estimating that DOGE had only saved $5 billion to date and predicting that Musk’s efforts could ultimately cost the government more than it saves.
Mass layoffs have also repeatedly involved DOGE making mistakes, forcing agencies to immediately rehire fired staffers.
Instead of meaningfully addressing waste and unnecessary red tape, the Trump administration has attempted to justify the freezing of countless grants as a way to root out so-called “woke” ideology, a bogeyman used to defend a shift to a purportedly more meritocratic society.
Judging by his “progress” so far, Musk’s stint at the White House has been a failure of epic proportions. Which leaves the question: what was it all for? Could the cruelty itself be the point, as The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer argued in a 2018 essay about Trump’s first presidency?
Given Musk’s long-held reputation for being a “horrible boss” and his well-established disdain for the public sector and its workers, it often feels that way.
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