Elon Musk has said that the aggressive federal job-cutting program he led at the start of Donald Trump’s second term, known as the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), was only “partially successful” and he would not lead the project again.
Musk said he would not want to repeat the job, speaking on the podcast hosted by Katie Miller, a rising-profile right-wing personality who was an adviser to Doge and married to Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff on immigration.
Asked if Doge had achieved what he hoped, Musk said: “We were a little successful. We were kind of successful.”
Doge created chaos and unrest in the government machine in Washington, D.C., and by May more than 200,000 federal employees had been laid off and approximately 75,000 had received “severance pay” as a result of purges by Musk’s external team, made up of often young fanatics.
The group said it had saved billions of dollars in public spending, but it was impossible for experts to verify these claims.
That body was credited with saving far less public money than Musk and Trump boasted it would save.
Musk eventually backed out of Doge and the team later appeared to have quietly shut down.
Musk, CEO of electric vehicle company Tesla, who also controls social media platform X and runs space company SpaceX, told Miller that he “would have been better off running his own companies” than Doge. /Telegraph/