Elon Musk's historic role showed that even a chainsaw can't cut federal bloat

Elon Musk’s departure from the Trump administration last week was satirized on the humor website Babylon Bee, which reported the tech billionaire and SpaceX CEO “will now spend his time tackling the much easier job of sending human beings to Mars.”

Funny, but as Mr. Musk learned, not too far from the truth.

President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency head dedicated thousands of hours to reducing federal spending by ridding the government of waste, fraud and abuse.

Mr. Musk left the job having made just a fraction of the cuts he hoped to make when he famously wielded a chainsaw in February on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“Elon is really not leaving, he’s going to be back and forth,” Mr. Trump said Friday, appearing in the Oval Office with Mr. Musk on his final day on the job. “It’s his baby, and I think he’s going to be doing a lot of things.”

Mr. Trump called Mr. Musk’s 134 days as head of DOGE “without comparison in modern history,” but the result showed how the growth in federal spending is entrenched and nearly impossible to curb.

After predicting he could reduce federal spending by $2 trillion, Mr. Musk said DOGE is closing in on $200 billion in cuts after more than four months of work.

That’s only 10% of Mr. Musk’s original goal, and the actual cuts may be much, much smaller, according to various analysts who have crunched the DOGE numbers.

During his four months on the job, Mr. Musk was vilified for cutting favored programs and accused of laying off essential government employees, even though only a tiny fraction of the federal workforce was let go, and most of them did not show up at the office.

Much of the canceled funding was duplicative, potentially fraudulent or supporting questionable initiatives outside the U.S.

While he burrowed through the federal budget, Mr. Musk, CEO of Tesla, watched his dealerships and cars burned and vandalized by left-wing activists while the company stock nosedived.

The turmoil demonstrated how Washington’s spending habits are hard-wired and nearly impossible to break, even by a guy like Mr. Musk, said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican fiscal hawk and former House lawmaker​ with an eye on the 2028 presidential race.

“DOGE and Elon were on a collision course with the swamp,” Mr. DeSantis said last week. “I don’t think there is any question that DOGE fought the swamp and so far, the swamp won.”

On Friday, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk put a more positive spin on DOGE’s work, saying such savings had never been seen before and promising more cuts in the future.

The president said DOGE will continue after Mr. Musk leaves, and Mr. Musk said he’d keep serving as an advisor if asked.

Mr. Musk insisted DOGE will meet his spending cut goal, which was halved from $2 trillion to $1 trillion in January.

“We do expect over time to eventually achieve those trillion dollars in cuts,” he said.

Mr. Musk acknowledged the immense difficulty of the task. It involved parsing through the federal budget line by line, while every cut, and even those DOGE wasn’t responsible for, was ripped apart by opponents who fueled sharp and sometimes violent public backlash.

“We became the DOGE boogeyman,” Mr. Musk said.

By all accounts, Mr. Musk’s role was historic.

Mr. Trump appointed him to a newly created role with a single mission: Dig through federal departments and agencies to root out wasteful and unnecessary spending to drastically reduce the government’s exploding and unsustainable ​s​pending.

Mr. Musk quickly went to work ferreting out and eliminating high-cost, questionable projects, among them millions of dollars in funding for such initiatives as ice-skating drag queen performances, studies on HIV prevention in transgender women, green energy businesses in Vietnam and gender-transition health care and LGBTQ advocacy in Guatemala — not to mention a $12 million pickleball complex in Las Vegas funded by the Bureau of Land Management.

His DOGE team, made up of young software engineers and fellow CEOs, uncovered eye-popping expenditures, including $59 million in spending by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide high-end hotel rooms for illegal immigrants in New York City.

DOGE also revealed and began reforming an ancient federal retirement system housed in an old limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania.

The DOGE team’s scrubbing of the Social Security database turned up 20 million people aged 100 and older, and DOGE deactivated more than half a million government credit cards spread over 32 agencies.

Analysts ripped into some of the DOGE team cuts, downplaying the savings as inflated or flat-out incorrect.

A reported savings of $8 billion from cancelling a DEI initiative at Immigration and Customs Enforcement amounted to only $8 million.

A DOGE claim, touted by Mr. Trump, that it had stopped the U.S. from funding a $50 million program to provide condoms to the terrorist group Hamas turned out to be inaccurate. The money was part of USAID grants provided to a medical group to render aid and trauma services in war-torn Gaza, although the State Department said the grants, now slashed, included “money for contraception.”

Mr. Musk’s program cuts and layoffs have also faced a torrent of lawsuits. Several have been blocked or reversed by federal judges.

E.J. Antoni, an economist for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said, DOGE rooted out a lot of wasteful spending, but much of it can only be eliminated by Congress. Some of the cuts will be codified in a $9.4 billion rescission package headed to Congress.

While tiny in comparison to the projected $7 trillion federal 2026 budget, those cuts will be followed by additional revision packages, Mr. Trump pledged.

“It’s a drop in the bucket, but you’ve got to start somewhere,” Mr. Antoni said. “As they continue to build steam and uncover more and more of this waste, I have no doubt we will see those cost savings steadily increase over time.”

Polls showed mixed support for DOGE from the public, while Democrats on Capitol Hill said the cuts were sabotaging critical programs, including, without evidence, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

“Elon pulled the strings of the Trump administration to ransack our government; attack, demean, and illegally mass fire dedicated public servants; create a new surveillance state to spy on the American public; degrade the quality of essential lifelines people count on; and line his own pockets with taxpayer dollars,” Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said in a statement.

Mr. Musk on Friday described the difficulty involved in cutting federal spending even as the deficit and debt have climbed to $1.8 trillion and $36 trillion, respectively.

“It’s the largely uncaring nature of bureaucracy. When someone within the government tries to stop money from being spent, there’s usually someone that complains,” he said. “And then their managers will say it’s not worth the trouble and just pay it anyway. That happens over and over again.”

Mr. Trump gave a gold key to Mr. Musk on his way out the door and praised him for enduring the brickbats hurled at him from the Washington establishment.

“He didn’t need any of this,” Mr. Trump said.