Elon Musk arrived in Washington in January as President Donald Trump’s billionaire benefactor, promising Mr. Trump – and America – that he would transform a bloated and costly federal government into a lean, modernized machine, like his SpaceX Raptor rockets.
Five months later, he’s leaving as Mr. Trump’s disgruntled star-crossed frenemy, spitting venom at the president and spendthrift Republicans in Congress, with few real budget cuts to show for the chaos he sowed during his short stint in the nation’s capital.
Despite Mr. Musk’s career track record of accomplishing seemingly impossible feats – revolutionizing the electric car market in America, reinventing Twitter with a fraction of its previous staff, and sending rockets into space – reforming Washington wound up being a task too complex for the world’s richest man.
Why We Wrote This
Elon Musk brought a chainsaw, audacity, and close ties with Donald Trump to his actions as DOGE mastermind. But the effort failed to slash federal deficits.
Even before a spectacular blowup Thursday with the president he helped elect, Mr. Musk had become bogged down in political, legal, and bureaucratic battles. In recent weeks, he had shifted to focus more on his businesses, including Tesla electric vehicles, whose sales have suffered this year, particularly in Europe’s EV-friendly markets, as his efforts to downsize the federal government grew increasingly controversial.
And while Mr. Trump has said that his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, will continue, that effort now faces growing skepticism, including from Republicans, over its purported savings from cutting programs and employees. Democrats argue that DOGE has done irreparable damage to government services and broken laws on privacy, data protection, employment, and more, while doing almost nothing to reduce the debt.
In the end, analysts say, Mr. Musk came to Washington vowing to bring an ethos of innovation to the federal government but is leaving with few successes to show for it. Despite the optimism he projected at the start, his brief tenure made clear that the federal government can’t be run like a tech startup in Silicon Valley, and an outsider couldn’t lead it as the CEO. That job, of course, is reserved for the president.
“We are talking about one of the greatest minds not just of our generation, but of our history. He has brought the future here. But it’s maybe easier to go to Mars than solve problems in Washington, D.C.,” says Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and a former communications director in Mr. Trump’s State Department. “As successful as he has been in the private sector, you could argue he’s been as much of a failure in the public sector.”
A whirlwind ride at DOGE
In the early months of Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Musk was everywhere: the Oval Office, Cabinet meetings, Air Force One, Mar-a-Lago. For Mr. Musk’s work at DOGE, Mr. Trump had given the billionaire, whom he called a “super genius,” full access to his administration and to himself. The two men seemed to share a sweeping vision of dramatic change, and Mr. Musk’s manic, take-no-prisoners approach to bureaucratic reform dovetailed with the blitzkrieg of Mr. Trump’s first 100 days. Both men posted thoughts and trumpeted successes, sometimes in the wee hours of the night, to their millions of followers on their social media platforms, X and Truth Social.
The breakup began cordially enough. On May 30 Mr. Musk, wearing a black T-shirt that said “The Dogefather,” accepted an oversized golden key in the Oval Office from Mr. Trump, who praised the businessman as “one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced.” Even though Mr. Musk was leaving Washington as a temporary 130-day job ended , Mr. Trump said he would continue to be involved with DOGE, “his baby.”
But in recent days, their rival platforms became hosts to an ugly war of words between two of the world’s most powerful men, as any lingering feelings of goodwill dissolved.
Mr. Musk went after the president’s tariffs, claiming they will cause a recession later this year. And in post after post, he criticized the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Mr. Trump is ushering through his Republican-led Congress, saying it will bankrupt the country and “undermines” the work of DOGE.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” Mr. Musk wrote on X Thursday. “Such ingratitude.”
Mr. Trump, for his part, said that Mr. Musk “just went CRAZY!” when he learned that the tax-and-spending bill would eliminate the electric vehicle tax credit, which benefits Mr. Musk’s company Tesla.
“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” posted Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk has insisted he’s not lobbying for his own interests but to avert a future fiscal crisis. The spending bill “more than defeats all the cost savings achieved by the @DOGE team at great personal cost and risk,” he wrote Wednesday.
Elusive targets for cutting waste
Those “cost savings” are, at best, a fraction of what Mr. Musk promised when he first came to Washington, claiming fraud alone represented 10% of all federal disbursements – an assertion he was unable to prove. Mr. Musk had also vowed to shed 10% of the federal government’s workforce of 2.3 million federal workers. More than 75,000 employees took the buyouts offered by DOGE, and according to the Treasury Department’s May jobs report released Friday, the federal government has cut 59,000 jobs since January. But some employees have been reinstated, as agencies claw back workers for essential duties; other workers have been reinstated following court orders.
Despite an initial goal of cutting $2 trillion from the government’s $7 trillion budget, DOGE, by its own accounting, has so far cut just 8% of that through staff reductions and the canceling of contracts, grants, and real estate leases. Moreover, numerous news outlets have found errors in DOGE’s “wall of receipts.” The New York Times, for example, found several contracts were double or triple-counted.
Even if DOGE’s claim of $180 billion in cuts is accurate, this sum (less than half of Mr. Musk’s own net worth) would hardly register on the national balance sheet. That’s especially true in light of Mr. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which will add $2.4 trillion to the debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
DOGE’s cuts may seem like “a lot of money,” says Thomas Kahn, a Democrat who served as director of the House Budget Committee from 1997 and 2016. “But it’s barely a blink of an eyelash in terms of the size of the deficit.”
Any meaningful budgetary savings, experts say, could never be found by just addressing discretionary spending. By not touching the main sources of federal spending – entitlements and defense – any DOGE cuts were always going to be marginal relative to the topline number. Ultimately, to substantially reduce the nation’s debt, politicians in Washington will have to cut entitlements like Social Security and Medicare or raise taxes – moves that would come with so much political risk that elected officials are loath to do it.
The charitable view of DOGE’s failings is that they reflected a lack of understanding and perhaps a naivetée on the part of Mr. Musk. To Linda Bilmes, a professor of budgetary and public finance at Harvard University, it was an act of hubris for Mr. Musk to believe he could eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse from the federal government, where legions of others had previously failed to do so. Inspectors general and the U.S. Government Accountability Office have been at this for decades, and Mr. Musk could have been more successful had he adopted cost-cutting ideas from within the government, she says, instead of demonizing the workforce as a whole.
A more cynical view suggests that DOGE was always an exercise in politics, not governance. Will Ragland with the left-leaning Center for American Progress, who created an interactive map of DOGE’s cuts by congressional district, saw the outlines for DOGE’s mass firings in the controversial Project 2025. Getting rid of veteran bureaucrats to make way for more ideologically aligned employees was one goal within the controversial conservative blueprint circulated last year.
Still, even Mr. Ragland was surprised by DOGE’s ad hoc tactics. Initially, “I figured there must be some kind of systematic approach – something more careful coming from the richest man in the world who has run so many successful corporations,” says Mr. Ragland. But when Mr. Musk took the stage at a conservative political conference with a chainsaw, and said working in DOGE was like closing your eyes and shooting a gun in any direction, Mr. Ragland said he stopped giving Mr. Musk the benefit of the doubt.
“He was just going after an arbitrary number of cuts,” says Mr. Ragland. “Anyone with any experience was telling him this is crazy.”
Dr. Bilmes says trying to get a true calculation of DOGE’s impact is a “fool’s errand.” Even if the “wall of receipts” was accurately tallied, the true savings cannot be known because some of those cuts will likely wind up costing the government money in the long term, she says. Firing Internal Revenue Service agents, for example, may result in lost tax dollars coming in. Likewise, there are unknown costs that could come from losing the “soft power” of the now-hollowed-out United States Agency for International Development or the scientific research at the National Institutes of Health.
There’s also the cost of all the lawsuits in which the government is now entangled over DOGE’s actions.
“You really need to step back from this and think in terms of cost-benefit,” says Dr. Bilmes. “Because of the way it was done, there are costs associated with the chaos that DOGE caused.”
Political and personal fallout
That chaos may also leave its mark on Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk has threatened on X to fund primary opponents against Republicans who vote for the president’s big bill in the coming midterm elections. In a poll on X, he asked if it was time to create a new political party in America. He indicated support for the notion that Mr. Trump should be impeached and replaced by his vice president.
Mr. Trump has threatened to cancel SpaceX’s billions of dollars’ worth of government contracts. Steve Bannon, a Trump ally and White House strategist during Mr. Trump’s first term, has called for investigations into Mr. Musk’s immigration status, his reported drug use, and his companies. Amid the social media sparring, Telsa’s stock dropped 14%, erasing $152 billion from the company’s market value and erasing $34 billion of Mr. Musk’s net worth.
Also wiped away is perhaps a missed opportunity. Mr. Musk and his team had a window to make needed fixes to technical issues within the government, which is riddled with old IT systems that have difficulty speaking between departments or agencies. One DOGE success, to this point, is the Office of Personnel Management’s rollout of a fully digital retirement application system. (OPM employees fired by DOGE, however, have said this new system had already been in progress.)
One former Trump campaign official tells the Monitor that Mr. Musk’s tirade against Mr. Trump and his bill might actually push some fence-sitting Republicans to support the legislation, lest they be seen as on the side of Mr. Musk rather than the president.
As Mr. Trump’s legislation moves through Congress, Mr. Musk leaves town with Tesla’s brand damaged, without his preferred NASA administrator, no billion-dollar contract from the Federal Aviation Administration for his company Starlink to overhaul air traffic communications, and America’s CEO “not interested” in taking his calls anymore.
“If you look at it from Musk’s perspective,” says the former Trump official, “he probably wonders, ‘What the heck did I get out of all of this?’”
