Now that Musk has left government to spend more time posting unhinged White supremacist babble on X, his review of DOGE is in, and it is … well, unflattering: ‘We were a little bit successful.’
Lights out for Elon Musk’s DOGE
DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, promised huge savings. With eight months left on its charter, it has now been dissolved.
Do you all remember Elon Musk and DOGE, the “Department of Government Efficiency”? Do you remember President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers going gaga over the billionaire rocket exploder and saying he was going to eliminate all waste and save the federal government?
Well, now that Musk has left the government to spend more time posting unhinged White supremacist babble on X, his review of DOGE is in, and it is … well, it’s unflattering: “We were a little bit successful.”
Speaking with the enthusiasm of an introvert on horse tranquilizers, Musk said on “The Katie Miller Podcast” that his much-ballyhooed cost-cutting adventure was “somewhat successful” and that if he had a chance to do it all over again, he would definitely not do it at all.
Even Elon Musk thinks DOGE was a bust and wishes it had never happened
Miller, the wife of vampiric Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, pressed Musk on whether, given a chance to go back in time, he would again choose to launch DOGE. Sighing and stammering, Musk muttered: “I don’t think so. … Instead of doing DOGE, I would’ve basically worked on my companies, essentially.”
A ringing endorsement!
A proper headline for all this would be: “Uniquely unqualified billionaire who promised to cut $2 trillion in government spending then failed miserably now admits he sucks, and maybe the chainsaw bit was a bit much.”
Musk and the chainsaw, an image of faux toughness and uselessness
You all remember the chainsaw, right? Musk wielded one at a Conservative Political Action Conference, delighting the weirdos in attendance and declaring: “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.”
Turns out it was just a chainsaw in the hands of a dork who shouldn’t be trusted with a chainsaw.
DOGE’s accomplishments align with Musk’s “meh” review of his own work. After promising $2 trillion in savings, Musk quickly trimmed it down to a $1 trillion promise. In the end, DOGE claimed to have cut $214 billion in government spending, but by then, nobody trusted the numbers coming from the department, as it was clear Musk and Co. played fast and loose with their figures.
At no point could anyone trust numbers from Musk or DOGE
Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor, recently told Newsweek, “Unfortunately, the numbers coming out of this effort have proved to be completely unreliable. So I have no reason to believe this ($214 billion) estimate.”
Along with suspect savings, Musk and DOGE wreaked havoc on government functions and prompted a slew of lawsuits. According to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande, DOGE’s defunding of the U.S. Agency for International Development “resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition.”
A tracker created by Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols estimates that nearly 675,000 people around the world, two-thirds of them children, have died of malnutrition, pneumonia, HIV and other diseases since DOGE cut foreign aid.
Or as Musk put it, “We were a little bit successful.”
Republicans cheered on what Musk now sees as a middling effort
Now that Musk has at least partially seen the light on his calamity, clearly wishing he could close his eyes and forget the whole mess, we have to wonder about the Republicans who gleefully cheered him on while he was making the world a measurably worse place.
In February, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was chair of the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency and boasted: “In this subcommittee, we will fight the war on waste shoulder to shoulder with President Trump, Elon Musk, and the DOGE team.”
In March, Republicans applauded Musk when Trump called him out during an address to Congress.
‘It’s really revolutionary’ was, in retrospect, really, really wrong
Following a meeting with House Republicans in March, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson raved: “This extraordinary work that Elon Musk is doing with DOGE, that he’s explaining to our House Republicans tonight, is transformative. It’s really revolutionary in the way that we’ll do budgeting, we’ll limit the size and scope of the federal government, and we’ll be much more accountable to taxpayers in this country, and that’s long overdue.”
In April, GOP Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas told Fox Business: “The great work that DOGE has done is now coming forth, and this comes as a result of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I’m so proud of their guts and decision-making to stay after this.”
Yeah, that “guts and decision-making” didn’t really pan out so well. In fact, it cost lives, cast federal workers and their families into chaos, halted vital research and accomplished – at best, according to Musk – “a little.”
Musk now spends his time talking about White supremacy on X
Musk is now trying to salvage the Tesla brand, his DOGE tenure demolished, though he’s not very good at that, either. He’s spending time on X – the social media platform he bought and turned into a Nazi playground – posting things like: “If current trends continue, Whites will go from being a small minority of world population today to virtually extinct!”
In other words, like DOGE itself, Musk is accomplishing nothing while making things worse.
And given Republican leaders’ shameless and fleeting embrace of the billionaire, “accomplishing nothing while making things worse” could well be a slogan for the whole damn party.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk