Elon Musk’s cost-cutting at DOGE has been a colossal failure. But he has achieved something more dangerous

After 128 days as Donald Trump’s chainsaw-wielding bureaucratic executioner, Elon Musk says he is leaving government.

As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk has a long history of failed forecasts and broken promises, and he has given mixed signals about his future involvement with the Trump administration.

But reports indicate that Musk, like Mark Zuckerberg before him, is genuinely disillusioned with politics and frustrated with the “uphill battle” he’s faced in trying to remake the federal government the way he remade Twitter.

There is also growing evidence of discord between him and the President, a collapse of the political bromance that defined the final weeks of the 2024 election and the beginning of the second Trump administration.

Things reportedly began souring last month after Musk donated millions to a MAGA-backed candidate that lost in Wisconsin. More recently, Musk allegedly flew to the Middle East with Trump to complain about an AI project his companies weren’t involved in, before publicly accusing Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” of undermining his work with DOGE.

So with Musk’s legal 130-day term as a ‘special government employee’ set to expire on Friday May 30 at the earliest, and Democrats gunning for his departure by that date, this is a good opportunity to suspend disbelief and evaluate his success so far.

Musk’s stated goal as the (apparently informal) head of DOGE was to slash government spending and save American taxpayers money. Before the inauguration, he claimed he could cut $1 trillion from the federal budget before September 30 by ending “waste, fraud, and abuse” — already a downgrade from his $2 trillion promise on the campaign trail. He further claimed that “most of the work” required to make this happen would be done within 130 days.

As of May 26, DOGE’s online “wall of receipts” touts estimated savings of $175bn since the start of Trump’s term, or $1,086.96 per taxpayer. The problem is that this figure may simply be nonsense.

Analysis by The New York Times last month found numerous errors in DOGE’s numbers, including counting government contracts that had not yet been awarded, counting contracts that had ended years ago, triple-counting the same savings, and confusing “million” with “billion”.

DOGE has since corrected some of those errors. Yet even today, many of its purported savings — including the three biggest on the list — treat the maximum potential value of a cancelled government contract as the actual amount saved, even if it did not legally require Uncle Sam to pay a single cent. (When The Independent tallied Musk’s own contracts back in February, we counted only binding commitments in our headline figures.)

Other entries on DOGE’s website give no information and offer no evidence, simply listing the name of the contract vendor or contract description as “unavailable”.

Some of these cuts arguably produce waste rather than reduce it. Cancelling ongoing scientific studies before they can deliver results means effectively throwing away any money already spent. And if we zoom out, more reliable data shows that overall government spending has risen by around six to seven percent compared to the same period last year.

All in all, then, DOGE’s cost-cutting crusade has been a dramatic failure. But there are other metrics by which one might consider Musk’s role in the White House a roaring success.

Suppose, for example, that you wanted to blur the lines between public service and private interest and build precedent for plutocrats’ direct participation in government. Musk’s tenure at DOGE, overseeing cuts to agencies investigating his companies while apparently dodging conflict of interest rules, has certainly done that.

Or suppose you wanted to execute a partisan purge of the federal government, seizing control of independent institutions and driving out your perceived enemies. Firing federal employees en masse and forcibly taking over quasi-government bodies, as DOGE has done, would surely help.

What if you wanted to centralize power under yourself, advancing a radical “unitary executive” theory and challenging Congress’s constitutionally-mandated power over government spending? A good start would be to demolish an entire government agency by fiat, then dare your opponents to reverse it.

Similarly, if you wanted to deport millions of immigrants while massively increasing your ability to surveil and control U.S. citizens, you could do much worse than inserting DOGE staffers into numerous federal agencies to access and merge sensitive databases that have long been kept separate, while allegedly playing fast and loose with security safeguards.

Courts are still deciding how much of this was actually legal, and DOGE has faced setbacks in that regard. Trump will also be seeking Congress’s permission for roughly $9 billion of past cuts. In the long term, it’s possible that Musk’s actions will prove just as toxic for Trump’s public image as they have been for his own.

Yet by moving quickly and asking forgiveness rather than permission, DOGE has already made American government more chaotic and more autocratic. That is a win for Trump and his allies, regardless of what the world’s richest person chooses to do next.

Perhaps, for them if not for Musk, that was the real point all along.