Martin De Silva
21st Century Wire
This may go down as one of biggest con jobs in the history of politics. After four months of conjuring evocative media headlines, stage antics, and fabulous claims of “trillions in government savings,” billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk has finally called it quits – saying he is leaving the Trump administration to go back to focusing on his business ventures.
Despite the high bar of expectation set by Musk early on, his departure comes in the wake of a string a major failures, and a political train wreck that’s almost hard to comprehend.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of X, announced he will be leaving his pièce de résistance known as DOGE, aka the Department of Government Efficiency, the ad hoc non-governmental government agency (hard to work out what it actually was), initially chartered by Trump to enact widespread federal spending cuts, which to date, has only yield merger results at best.
“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” posted Musk on X this past weekend. “I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out.”
This hasty exit comes on the heels of a recent ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll revealing that 57% of Americans disapprove of Musk’s job performance in the Trump administration, with only 35% said they had a favorable view. In other words: Americans are quickly seeing through the facade of Musk and DOGE.
More to the point: his announcement of absconding from DOGE came shortly after an unprecedented week of disastrous operations at X, where the platform began malfunctioning in ways no one has seen in its 18 year history, and leaving hundreds of millions of users unable to see direct messages or posts on their timelines. The latest meltdown at X started following a two-hour user outage, with multiple reported failures of basic functions – including the inability to log-in, view posts, and refresh news feeds. Website Downdetector, which tracks user-submitted reports of technical issues, registered over 25,800 reports at the peak of the outage around 12:50 GMT.
“As evidenced by the X uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” Musk said, adding that “the failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
DOGE: All Hat, No Cowboy
Back in March, Musk made the wild claim that DOGE was on track to save the federal government a whopping $1 trillion by May, without providing any evidence to back-up the big headline-grabbling soundbite. Well, May came and went… and so has Musk.
During a rather wet, softball interview with FOX Business host Larry Kudlow back in March, Musk was still spinning the yarn that his Department of Government Efficiency would somehow reach $1 trillion in savings, a goal significantly reduced from Musk’s initial claim of saving $2 trillion.
“Yeah, I mean, unless we’re stopped, we will get to a trillion dollars of savings.”
Later in April, Musk was forced to admit DOGE may only cut $150 billion in spending — a mere 15 percent of his previously revised pledge of $1 trillion goal.
During the Kudlow interview, Musk went on t0 make the unsubstantiated claim that, “Our savings at this point exceed $4 billion a day, so it’s very significant.”
Based on that math, by now DOGE would have saved the government over $360 billion, not counting February savings Musk claimed to have registered.
He also claimed that there were 20 million dead people drawing social security payments in America, but to date there has been no evidenced presented to the public to confirm whether or not this is true or completely made-up by Musk.
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DOGE: More False Claims
Perhaps the most embarrassing DOGE tale spun by Musk was a claim of savings which actual took place under the previous administration.
It turns out that Musk made a series of fraudulent claims to the media about alleged ‘savings’ made through the diligent work of DOGE, one of which was his claim of saving $1.9 billion from a canceled IRS contract. However, this contract had actually been canceled under former President Joe Biden.
Desperate to generate headlines about their conquests, Musk and DOGE continued to fabricate claims of massive savings, including one instance where Musk touted some $1.75 billion in savings from a supposedly canceled grant for a vaccine nonprofit organisations, according to the Times of London. Some basic research revealed that the nonprofit in question were already paid this year’s grant in full – which meant that DOGE saved nothing by canceling it.
According Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, “They’re just spinning their wheels, citing in many cases overstated or fake savings.”
“What’s most frustrating is that we agree with their goals. But we’re watching them flail at achieving them,” she added.
Just doing the basic math, Musk’s headline generating claim of saving $1 trillion goal was never possible. In reality, even if it could – DOGE could save just $245.8 billion a year – if it fired every single federal worker outside the military or USPS.
In an audit of DOGE’s claims done by The Atlantic, even more fraudulent claims emerged about alleged government savings:
In late February, its website claimed to have achieved $55 billion in annual-spending reductions. However, its “wall of receipts” detailed only $16.5 billion of this total. Half of that figure came from a typo claiming $8 billion in savings from terminating an $8 million contract. As The New York Times has reported, that was far from the only accounting error. Once such mistakes as false contract cancellations, triple counts of the same reform, and the inclusion of contracts that expired decades ago were fixed, verified budget savings stood at just $2 billion.
Moreover, while DOGE went after low hanging fruit to generate MAGA-friendly headlines, the bottomline hasn’t changed at all. In fact, Trump spending is now out pacing Biden:
Total federal outlays in February and March were $86 billion (or 7 percent) higher than the levels from the same months a year ago, when adjusted for timing shifts. This spending growth—approximately $500 billion at an annualized rate—continues to be driven by the three-quarters of federal spending allocated to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest costs. These massive expenses have been untouched by DOGE’s focus on small but controversial targets such as DEI contracts and Politico subscriptions.
There were a number of other amusing sideshows. In one incident, Musk deployed his army of wunderkinds to chase and harass various non profits and NGOs, many of who received very little if any federal funding. One nonprofit, the Vera Institute of Justice which advocates for prisoners’ rights, reported that staff from DOGE had contacted them on the orders of Musk in order to assign a team to Vera, even though the organisation is mostly privately funded. It is believed that Musk was on a crusade which targeted any NGO which he believed harboured ‘radical left ideology’, vowing to cancel their funding. It’s not known what methodology, if any, which Musk used to determine what he considered to be a latent subversive political agenda.
“I’m just here trying to make government more efficient, eliminate waste and fraud, and so far we’re making good progress, actually,” said Musk then.
Sure, it sounded really good at the time, and as expected, none of his, or Trump’s supporters would ever ask for receipts. The headlines were good enough.
It’s also worth noting here: according to a report from Wired Magazine, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had been investigating DOGE, specifically targeting DOGE’s harvesting sensitive government data, and what has happened to tranches of data collected by his ad hoc teams. This overstepping by Musk may end up creating massive legal problems later for the Trump administration, and for Elon Musk himself – especially in the event of a Democrat-controlled Congress taking power in 2026, and a new Democrat President in 2028.
All that said, the final blow to the DOGE deception came this week, with passage of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” for this year’s budget, likely to far exceed the spending and debt levels of the Biden Administration – which puts Trump’s supposed “fiscal hawk” narrative at odds with reality. A large portion of Trump’s bloated budget comes from a proposed $1 trillion defense budget (likely to reach $1.4 trillion at end of year with overruns) – an area of spending untouched by DOGE for the obvious reason that Elon Musk and his tech oligarch cohort have already earmarked a large piece of that Pentagon spending for their own corporate contracts over the coming years.
DOGE Ends Up Costing Taxpayers
It gets worse. Musk’s cavalier approach (and staggering incompetence) to ‘cutting waste and fraud’ has seen DOGE waste billions in taxpayer money, with the longterm costs of his antics already mounting. In the end, it’s very possible that DOGE could be costing the federal government more than it saves. New York Times reports:
As the New York Times reports, mass firing and then re-hiring thousands of public sector workers could cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year alone. And the Internal Revenue Service, which has lost thousands of its employees due to the cuts, is expected to collect a staggering $500 billion less this year following the bloodletting, a loss that dwarfs Musk’s limited savings.
That’s in addition to the mountain of lawsuits and appeals Musk’s indiscriminate gutting of agencies has triggered. According to the NYT, 30 out of the roughly 200 lawsuits related to the Trump administration’s agenda implicate DOGE.
IMAGE: Elon Musk and Javier Milei at this year’s CPAC, showing off a chainsaw which represents ‘DOGE savings’.
Cryto Scam
Questions also remain about Musk’s involvement in a giant cryptocurrency ‘meme coin’ scam run by his close friend and President of Argentina, Javier Milei, who was under government investigation for a controversial pump-and-dump of the ‘$LIBRA’ crypto coin.
Despite the scandal, Milei was still invited, presumably at the insistence of Musk, to the CPAC conference in Washington DC, where the pair appeared on stage, with Musk sporting a baseball hat and dark ‘terminator’ sunglasses, and brandishing a chainsaw (meant to represent nonexistent DOGE ‘cost cuts).
Milei is now coming under even more intense scrutiny with accusations of a cover-up, after he moved to shutdown a special investigative unit which he himself established to probe alleged wrongdoing. Was Musk involved in Milei’s meme coin scandal, and if so, what implications would there be for the Trump administration?
“White Genocide” Oval Office Debacle
It was only a matter of time before Musk’s incoherent political mosaic would do severe damage to the White House.
Initially, Musk had bought his way into the Trump Administration by injecting $250 million into the Presidential campaign fund, giving Musk the ear of the President when it came to policy positions. At the time, many suspected this would not end well for Trump due to the flighty and flippant nature of Musk’s political exploits. For Trump, the final humiliation may have come this week following the embarrassing scene in the Oval Office, with the planned ambush of visiting head of state, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa – and disastrous event most certainly orchestrated by Musk, himself a South African-American duel national, who seemed eager to take revenge on Ramaphosa for denying Musk’s Starlink a monopoly in South Africa. Trump, Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the South African government of presiding over an alleged “white genocide” of white farmers in the country, which has since been proven to be a wild far-right conspiracy theory designed to sow racial division, and fueled in part by interests aligned with the Israel Lobby.
Understand that @realDonaldTrump @POTUS @marcorubio @StateDept & @ElonMusk LIED about a so-called “white genocide” in South Africa. The question is why? It’s not merely lowbrow race-baiting, there is more going on here…
Leading International Relations scholar Piet Croucamp,… pic.twitter.com/4lOqr1zyOT
— Patrick Henningsen (@21WIRE) May 24, 2025
It turned out that all the information which Musk fed to Trump for the attack on Ramaphosa turned out to either be devoid of any context or outright fabricated – in order to craft a false narrative.
Musk’s attempted public takedown of the South African President ended in disaster, as other world governments saw how willing the US is the deceive world leaders into visiting Washington, only to try and humiliate them for short-term political gain. The Oval Office debacle is now believed to have set back US-South African bilateral relations decades – and may have been the final straw for the Trump Team.
In the end, it’s clear that most, if not all, of what Elon Musk promised publicly about DOGE was simply public relations sizzle – designed to garner media headlines, and bolster his own personal brand and that of his businesses.
People should really be asking themselves how much of Musk promises of “human colonies on Mars” by 2035 – is actually grounded in reality, and not just pure hype designed to enrich his companies and further fuel his own corporate cult of personality.
If he can’t run an online App, how will he do Mars?
Although we’d be happy enough with a simple Moon landing.
ELON BASICALLY ADMITS DOGE MADE NO DIFFERENCE IN FED SPENDING – A BIG “L”
Here he says he's “disappointed with Trump's Big Beautiful Bill.”
Lamenting that Trump’s bloated federal spending is “Undermining the work DOGE team is doing' and increases budget deficit.”
How did you… pic.twitter.com/nQ2AAIRxVZ
— Patrick Henningsen (@21WIRE) May 28, 2025
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