Future historians of the United States will no doubt be fascinated by the 130-day period in which the richest man in the world was permitted to take a chainsaw to the institutions and agencies of the federal government. Much remains to be discovered about what really transpired under the auspices of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge),but there is good reason to believe that most of it was calamitous..
We do have a sense of whether or not Musk succeeded in his stated aim of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. He later described that figure as a “best-case outcome,” suggesting that achieving $1 trillion in cuts would be a more realistic and still significant goal. By April 2025, the department claimed to have saved approximately $160 billion, a figure that was met with scepticism and scrutiny regarding its accuracy and the methods used to calculate it. In fact, many agencies actually incurred new costs due to the chaos left in Doge’s wake, from severance payouts to emergency re-hires and legal settlements.Even if the figure of $160 billion were to be believed, it is dwarfed by the trillions of dollars of additional debt contained in Donald Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill”, if it is approved by Congress.
Despite their protestations, it is clear that deficit reduction and elimination of waste were not the true purposes of Musk or Trump. This was a massive exercise in vindictiveness and vandalism against the very idea of public service. It was therefore both highly ideological and intensely narcissistic.
Musk arrived in Washington promising to apply Silicon Valley principles to the sprawling machinery of American government. What unfolded was something altogether cruder. Mass layoffs were announced via social media before the agencies affected were informed. But far worse was the damage inflicted on international aid and humanitarian relief programmes. USAID, once a cornerstone of American soft power, was left scrambling to maintain basic operations in famine zones.The human toll was stark: disrupted refugee resettlements, delayed disaster responses and stalled global vaccination campaigns.
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Musk, predictably, blamed “deep state resistance” and entrenched bureaucracy for his failures. But his refusal to engage with the reality of public service reveals the deeper flaw in his approach. Government is not a start-up. Its success is not measured in quarterly earnings or viral acclaim.
Musk’s brief, brash time at Doge offers a lesson in the costs of mistaking disruption for leadership. Efficiency, when pursued without empathy or accountability, becomes little more than cruelty in spreadsheet form. The damage may yet be repaired, but the myth of the benevolent tech disruptor has surely, at last, been punctured.
