Trump told Musk to use a scalpel rather than a hatchet when cutting government spending.

 

Elon Musk

There was an excellent article on the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and Musk in the UK Financial Times (FT) yesterday. Elon  Musk vowed to cut U.S. government spending by $2 trillion but DOGE's website claims $170 billion in savings.

An FT investigation shows that only a sliver of that figure can actually be verified. The FT said there's evidence of inflated valuations being used to boost the numbers while contracts that were already lapsing, have been claimed as new savings. U.S. Treasury data has also shown no drop in government spending. 

Musk's appointment to DOGE was supposed to last until next summer but he's left after just six months because he faced a backlash from members of the Trump cabinet and persistent protests from Congress. Musk also gave disgruntled senators his personal phone number in attempt to calm their fears. His political exploits have also wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off Tesla's share price.

The FT says that DOGE's emissaries appeared to have had little appreciation of what branches of government they were targeting actually did, which alarmed some people in the Whitehouse. The Trump administration had to halt the firing of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration which guards the nation's nuclear stockpile. The FT says that DOGE should have learned how government works before they started tearing it apart. Trump told Musk to use a scalpel rather than a hatchet and told him that the Secretaries of State had the final say over decisions affecting their departments.

Musk has repeatedly claimed that DOGE is operating with "extreme transparency" but he refused to provide information about the number of staff it has hired, the number of agencies targeted, and the number of criminal referrals it has made for "tremendous fraud." There has also been disquiet about giving young coders working for DOGE access to sensitive data.

Last month Senator Richard Blumenthal alleged that Musk and his companies faced at least $2.37 billion in potential fines from federal investigations and regulatory actions being carried out by the very agencies being gutted by DOGE.

Although DOGE claimed that there was widespread fraud in the U.S. welfare system and welfare programmes such as social security, Medicare and Medicaid, account for more than half of annual government spending, DOGE didn’t target these programmes. This is probably because many of Trump’s supporters are reliant on these programmes.