We knew that Donald Trump and Elon Musk were mendacious buffoons. It comes as no surprise that the brave new world of Trump 2.0, where government was to be slashed to a trim and fit size and trillions of dollars, trillions I tell you, were to be saved — and even refunded to taxpayers — was a fantasy and a farce. But if you start to look at the actual figures of what either Trump or Musk promised and what has actually been delivered, it will shock you. It’s much worse than you think.
The biggest twist in this sordid drama is why the pair originally fell out: disagreement over a reconciliation bill that is going to increase both the national debt and the deficit. But that breaking point would not have been reached if Musk had accomplished what he set out to do in Washington.
The seeds of this meltdown were planted in the wake of the 2024 election, when Trump pledged to crack down on government spending upon a return to the White House and appointed Musk, perhaps the most successful entrepreneur in history, to whip the bloated US government into shape.
Musk stormed into Washington with the bravado of a man who spent his career running major companies with absolute authority. He set the bar for success high, pledging repeatedly to slash at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. He suggested, somewhat quixotically, that doing so would be easy. It was not. By January, before Trump was even inaugurated, Musk had cut his own target down to $1 trillion. Now, having left the White House in failure, Musk says his efforts were stymied by a federal bureaucracy impervious to reform. In the end, the Department for Government Efficiency claims it managed to root out a mere $160 billion.
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” Musk said last week in a fit of self-pity.
Perhaps Musk did not know that the government is hard to cut because he never bothered to ask anyone. If he had put that question to any staffer who worked in any past administration – many of whom tried and failed to trim down the size of government – he would have been informed that doing so is a herculean task. It’s made near-impossible by special interests, political realities, and the fact that military spending and entitlements are the only two real expenditures where cuts could be made meaningfully – but not without fatal electoral political consequences for the president who oversees them.
If we are to take the $160 billion figure at face value (DoGE’s record of mendacity suggests we shouldn’t), the way Musk went about the job likely cost taxpayers nearly as much. A nonpartisan research group estimated that the efforts will cost $135 billion thanks to the recklessly haphazard way it fired federal workers, hampering productivity and often requiring those workers to be re-hired. The estimate does not account for the blizzard of lawsuits spawned by this vandalism of the US government.
Cynic that I am, I’m going to conclude that with all the costly litigation, and taking into account that a lot of little things that we don’t even know about yet which were caused by DOGE’s move fast and break things philosophy, DOGE will eventually be found to have saved us nothing and actually cost us money. Mark my words. At some point, some economist will hook up with some political historian (I vote for Robert Reich and Heather Cox Richardson) and calculate what the damages to the country actually have been.
For instance, I don’t think we can blame DOGE for the two $60 million planes that fell of the same aircraft carrier within a few weeks of one another, but you can certainly credit that to some laxity on the part of the Secretary of Defense, and so that loss is part of the Trump/Musk imbroglio.
Expect more than one best selling book to be written about the duplicity and mendacity of the DOGE era, be it ever so short lived. (And bearing in mind that we don’t know what’s left of DOGE, still messing with our government, as we speak.)
This kind of fantasy thinking brings to mind the goldrush years of the 19th century, where a few people amassing riches by pulling precious minerals from the ground had everybody and their brother heading west. And the net effect was that far more people went broke than got rich, which is the usual way of speculative things, goldrush or dot coms.
But it was an intriguing fantasy while it lasted, wasn’t it, the world’s greatest entrepreneur “fixing” the federal government overnight and shrinking the size of it like a ’50’s B-movie shrunk people? I hope you didn’t earmark those refund checks for anything, I don’t think they’re going to appear.
Bill Gates says he killed a lot of children also while he was wrecking the departments. So we can add murderer to his vandalism crimes.
What’s the cost for the loss of international standing, damage to once strong alliances? Not to forget the domestic economic and social carnage.