Elon Musk arrived in Washington in January as a billionaire donor to President Donald Trump, and Mr. Trump and America promised that he would do Transforming an enlarged and expensive federal government In a machine, such as Spacex Raptor missiles.
Five months later, he will leave while Mr. Trump was the Najji District, spitting the poison in the president and the Republicans in Congress, with a few real budget cuts in the chaos he planted in a short period in the country’s capital.
Despite Mr. Musk’s professional record of completing the apparently impossible exploits – a revolution in the electric car market in America, Twitter with a small part of his former employees, and sending missiles to space – it ended as a very complicated task for the richest man in the world.
Why did we write this
Elon Musk brought the saw, boldness, and close relationships with Donald Trump to his actions like Douge MasterMind. But the effort failed to reduce the federal deficit.
Even before an amazing explosion on Thursday with the president, he helped him, Mr. Musk stumbled in political, legal and bureaucratic battles. In recent weeks, it has turned more focus on his business, including Tesla Electric cars, which have suffered sales this year, Especially in friendly markets in EuropeWith the increasing efforts to reduce the size of the federal government in a controversial way.
Although Mr. Trump said that a government ministry, or Doug, will continue, this effort is now facing increasing suspicion, including Republicans, because of its alleged savings of cutting programs and employees. Democrats argue that Dog caused irreparable damage to government services and broken laws on privacy, data protection, employment, and more, with almost not to reduce debt.
In the end, analysts say, Mr. Musk came to Washington pledging to bring the spirit of innovation to the federal government, but it will leave few successes to show it. Despite the optimism that he initially expected, his short term showed that the federal government cannot be operated like an emerging technology company in Silicon Valley, and strangers were unable to lead as an executive president. This job, of course, is reserved for the president.
“We are talking about one of the greatest minds not only about our generation, but about our history. It has brought the future here. But it may be easier to go to Mars than solving problems in Washington, DC.” “Successful as it was in the private sector, you can say that it was a failure in the public sector.”
A journey in Dog
In the first months of Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Musk was everywhere: the Oval Office, Cabinet meetings, Air Force One, Mar-A-Lago. As for Mr. Musk’s work in Doug, Mr. Trump gave the billionaire, who was called “Super Genius”, a full arrival to his administration and himself. The two men seemed to share a comprehensive vision of dramatic change, and the approach of Mr. Musk, who is not heading to their prisoner in the bureaucratic reform that is compatible with Blitzkrieg for the first 100 days of Mr. Trump. Both men posted vague ideas and successes, sometimes in the early hours of the night, on millions of followers on their social media platforms, X and Truth Social.
The separation began with heat enough. On May 30, before Mr. Musk, who was wearing a black shirt saying “The Dogefather”, accepted a large gold key in the Oval Office of Mr. Trump, who praised the businessman as “one of the greatest business leaders and innovators who have ever produced the world.” Although Mr. Musk was leaving Washington as a temporary job for 130 days, Mr. Trump said he would remain involved in Doug, his “child.”
But in recent days, their competing platforms have become hosts of the war of ugly words between the two strongest men in the world, like any good feelings of goodwill.
Mr. Musk went after the president’s tariff, claiming that it would cause stagnation later this year. At the post after the Post, the “Great Great Law”, which Mr. Trump, is criticized through the Republican Congress, saying that he will go bankrupt and “undermine” Doug’s work.
“Bedni, Trump had lost the elections,” Mr. Musk wrote on x Thursday. “Such inflammation.”
Mr. Trump, for his part, said Mr. Musk.Just go crazy!When he learned that the tax spending and spending bill will remove the tax credit for electric cars, which benefit from Mr. Musk Tesla.
“The easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars, is to end the government subsidies and contracts,” as Mr. Trump has published.
Mr. Musk insisted that he does not press for his interests, but to avoid the future financial crisis. The spending law “is more than the defeat of all the cost savings achieved by the DOGE team at a personal cost and great risks,” books Wednesday.
Featured targets to cut off waste
These “cost savings” are, at best, a small part of what Mr. Musk promised when he came to Washington for the first time, he claims fraud alone It represents 10 % of all federal payments – Emphasis was unable to prove it. Mr. Musk also pledged to rid 10 % of the federal government’s workforce of 2.3 million federal workers. More than 75,000 took the acquisitions submitted by DOGE, and according to the May Jobs report at the Treasury Department on Friday, the federal government reduced 59,000 jobs since January. However, some employees have been returned, as agencies abandoned workers to obtain basic duties; Other workers are returned after court orders.
Despite the initial goal of reducing $ 2 trillion of $ 7 trillion government budget Only 8 % reduce it Through employee discounts, cancellation of contracts, grants and real estate contracts. Moreover, many news outlets found errors in the “receipt wall” in Dog. For example, the New York Times found many contracts Double or threefold.
Even if Duji’s claim is $ 180 billion in accurate discounts, this amount (less than half of the net value of Mr. Musk) will not record in the national public budget. This is especially true in light of the “Big Beautiful Bill” of Mr. Trump, which will add $ 2.4 trillion to debt during the next decade, according to the non -partisan Congress budget office.
“” Dogi’s discounts “may seem a lot of money.”
Experts say any meaningful budget savings cannot be found by handling estimated spending. By not touching the main sources of federal spending – entitlements and defense – any Doug’s discounts have always been marginal for the upper number. Ultimately, to significantly reduce the nation’s debts, politicians in Washington will have to reduce benefits such as social security, medical care or tax raising – the moves that will come with many political risks to the extent that elected officials hate doing so.
The charitable view of Doug’s failures is that it reflects the lack of understanding and perhaps naive on the part of Mr. Musk. For Linda Belges, a professor of budget and general finance at Harvard University, it was an arrogance for Mr. Musk to believe that he could eliminate waste, fraud and ill -treatment from the federal government, as the legions of others previously failed to do so. She says that the public inspectors and the US government accounting office were in this decades ago, and Mr. Musk could have been more successful if he adopted ideas to reduce costs from within the government, instead of the workforce of the workforce as a whole.
A more charming view indicates that Duji has always been an exercise in politics, not judgment. Rajland witnessed with the Center for the Left Transformation of the American Progress, which created an interactive map of Duji discounts by the Congress region, the outline of the collective uses of the collective in the controversial project 2025. The disposal of veteran bureaucrats was last year last year.
However, Mr. Rajland was surprised by the designated Doge tactics. Initially, “I thought there should be a kind of systematic approach – which is more cautious coming than the richest man in the world who runs many successful companies,” says Mr. Rajland. But when Mr. Musk took the stage in a conservative political conference with a saw, and said that working in Dog was similar to the closure of your eyes and shooting at a weapon in any direction, Mr. Rajland said that he stopped giving Mr. Musk to benefit from doubt.
“He was following an arbitrary number of discounts,” says Mr. Rajland. “Anyone has any experience he was telling him that this is crazy.”
Dr. Belmes says that an attempt to obtain a real account of Doug’s influence is a “fool’s mission.” Even if the “receipt wall” is accurately placed, real savings cannot be known because some of these cuts are likely to end the cost of government money in the long run, she says. For example, internal revenue service customers, for example, may result in tax dollars. Likewise, there are unknown costs that can come from the loss of “soft power” of the United States Agency now for international development or scientific research in the national health institutes.
There is also the cost of all the lawsuits in which the government is now intertwined with Duji’s actions.
“You really need to retract this and think in terms of cost and return,” says Dr. Belmes. “Because of the way it was, there are costs related to the chaos caused by Dog.”
Political and personal repercussions
This chaos may also leave its mark on Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk threatened X to fund primary opponents against Republicans who vote for the president’s major law in the upcoming midterm elections. In an X -poll, he asked if it was time to create a new political party in America. He pointed to the support of the concept that Mr. Trump should be isolated and replaced by his vice president.
Mr. Trump threatened to cancel government contracts worth billions of dollars. Steve Bannon, Trump’s ally and the White House strategists during the first term of Mr. Trump, called for investigations in the event of Mr. Musk’s migration, the reported drug abuse, and his companies. Amid the decrease in social media, the telsa shares decreased by 14 %, Erasing 152 billion dollars in the company’s market value and eradicating 34 billion dollars in the net value of Mr. Musk.
It was also eliminated is a lost opportunity. Mr. Musk and his team had a window for reforms required for technical issues within the government, and it is full of old information technology systems that face difficulty in speaking between departments or agencies. Dog’s success, to this point, is the Personnel Management Management Office from A. The entire digital retirement application system. (However, the OPM employees, which Dog, said this new system He was already in progress))
A former Trump campaign official tells the screen that Tiraid Musk against Mr. Trump and Robe may actually pay some Republicans who control the fence to support the legislation, fearing that they will be seen on the side of Mr. Musk instead of the president.
With Mr. Trump’s legislation through Congress, Mr. Musk Town leaves the brand of Tesla, without his favorite official at NASA, and is no longer a bill of billions of dollars from the Federal Aviation Administration of Starlink to repair air contacts, and the CEO of America “is not interested” in making his calls anymore.
“If you look at it from the perspective of Musk, it is likely to ask,” says the former Trump official. “
