The fact that Elon Musk continues to go to White House Cabinet meetings has become routine, but it remains bizarre. Never before in American history has a president welcomed his top campaign donor to join — and participate in — Cabinet meetings alongside actual, Senate-confirmed department heads.
Nevertheless, Musk, in his capacity as the leader of the quasi-governmental DOGE initiative, keeps sitting alongside powerful Cabinet secretaries, and as The New York Times noted, also continues to make news.
While stumping for Donald J. Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign, Elon Musk said he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. After Mr. Trump took office and placed Mr. Musk in charge of the budget-slashing so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk lowered that projection by half, to $1 trillion in the upcoming fiscal year. In a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk appeared to set his group’s goal lower still.
“I’m excited to announce that we can anticipate savings in [fiscal year 2026] from reduction of waste and fraud by $150 billion,” Musk told the president and his team.
The Republican megadonor delivered the line as if the figure represented a triumph of sorts, but the closer one looks, the less impressive his figure appears.
As regular readers might recall, about a week before Election Day 2024, Musk appeared at a campaign rally and made a striking boast: If voters elect the GOP ticket, Musk said, he’d uncover ways to cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal budget.
After Election Day, Trump not only said that Musk would find $2 trillion in cuts, he added that these cuts would “have no impact” on the American public, which was utterly bizarre given that $2 trillion in cuts would require, as a New York Times report put it, “shutting down almost the entire federal government.”
Ahead of Trump’s second inaugural, Musk apparently came to realize that he’d over-promised. Indeed, in early January, the billionaire conceded that his original goal was more of a “best-case outcome.” He added, however, that he believed he had a “good shot” at cutting $1 trillion, instead of $2 trillion.
Three months later, Musk appeared in the White House and said he “anticipates” spending cuts of $150 billion — a small fraction of his original $2 trillion goal.
In fairness, as the Times’ report noted, “It was unclear if Mr. Musk meant to say that the $150 billion was merely what his team had found so far — meaning that $1 trillion in savings was still possible — or if that $150 billion was all it expected to find.”
Either way, it’s difficult to characterize the efforts from Musk and his DOGE operation as a great success. In fact, The Wall Street Journal did a detailed analysis of daily financial statements issued by the Treasury Department since the president’s second term began, and the newspaper found that government spending since Trump returned to the White House has actually gone up by about $150 billion.
Complicating matters further, Musk claimed at the Cabinet meeting that the administration “can anticipate savings” of $150 billion, but many of the billionaire’s other claims have been false; he and the DOGE operation haven’t substantiated his latest claims; and when Musk and DOGE have tried to provide the public with more detailed information in the recent past, much of the data was wrong.
So let’s take stock. Musk and DOGE have now twice downgraded their spending cut targets; federal spending is going up, not down, in the Trump administration; DOGE appears to be making the government less efficient, not more; and recent polling suggests much of the American public has come to see Musk as a villain, not a hero.
The president said at the Cabinet meeting that Musk is doing a “fantastic” job. There’s ample evidence to the contrary.
