What Musk’s DOGE Really Cut: Trust, Safety, and Democracy

Yesterday evening, Elon Musk announced he would step down as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” he wrote on X. 

Under Musk’s leadership, DOGE promised a transformation of government by cutting trillions of dollars from the federal budget and revolutionizing its technological and customer service capabilities. It promised a more efficient government and taxpayer relief from the elimination of so-called “waste, fraud, abuse.” 

So what did Musk’s four-month stint as government efficiency tsar ultimately achieve? 

To start, the promised savings never came. The DOGE website currently claims to have saved the public $175 billion through a range of actions like eliminating “fraud and improper payment” and cancelling grants. But even that sum—which is believed to be falsely inflated through a combination of guesswork and suspect arithmetic—is less than 3 percent of the federal budget, and less than 9 percent of the $2 trillion in cuts Musk promised upon assuming his role. In other words, DOGE failed on Musk’s own terms. 

What did materialize is an unprecedented attack on public institutions, beginning with the people who carry out the work of public service. According to the latest data, around 284,000 federal employees have either been forced out, been slated for cuts, or chosen to leave their posts since DOGE began its work. These aren’t faceless “bureaucrats.” They are the people who test our water for contaminants, inspect our food for harmful bacteria, and ensure air travel is safe, among other public services. The department with the highest number of planned terminations is Veterans Affairs, with up to 80,900 personnel serving our nation’s veterans slated for future cuts, according to the New York Times. Many of these jobs are health-care workers who care for veterans directly. 

Like DOGE’s name, the initiative itself proved to be a lot of self-interested spectacle masquerading as good government reform. Musk said entire agencies like USAID “need to die,” and proceeded to slash its workforce by 99 percent. He thrilled crowds at the annual CPAC by wielding a chainsaw gifted to him by the far-right Argentinian prime minister Javier Milei. And he posted on X. A lot. 

This begs the question: Who ultimately benefited from Musk’s relentless cutting?

The clear answer is Elon Musk, who is $170 billion richer since endorsing Trump in the summer of 2024, even accounting for the drop in Tesla’s stock attributed to the public backlash over DOGE’s actions. Billionaires and financial predators can rest easy knowing that the IRS and the CFPB have been starved of people and resources to enforce tax and consumer protection laws, respectively. 

DOGE slashed basic science research and defunded the NIH, the world’s largest biomedical research agency, imperiling efforts to discover new cures and scientific breakthroughs. It attempted to “delete” another agency—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)—that stops predatory banks from scamming veterans, seniors, and consumers in general. And it destroyed the IRS’s ability to audit wealthy tax cheats, forcing workers and families to shoulder more of the nation’s tax responsibility. These three government functions—scientific research, consumer protection, and tax enforcement—work extremely well when adequately funded and return many times their costs in benefits to society. DOGE didn’t just make these functions less efficient. It left them barely able to function at all. 

The investments and safeguards that DOGE dismantled help give us real agency in our lives. In addition to inheriting a trail of destruction where some of our most important public institutions once stood, DOGE has also made us less free. The initiative’s most significant legacy may be what the writer Julia Anguin described as “a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration—the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.” In agency after agency, Musk and his lieutenants accessed the most sensitive data about Americans and handled it with reckless disregard. Information like social security numbers and bank accounts that once stood in the relative safety of government silos are now being merged to create more sweeping surveillance tools than ever before. They could be used to further crack down on immigrants’ speech, or to simply make it easier to target political enemies. 

This is what we’re left with. A public more exposed to harm—from preventable diseases, from corporate predation and scams, from toxins in our air and water—and a small group of wealthy elites more empowered to dominate our government and our democracy. Perhaps this is why a solid majority of Americans disapprove of Musk’s job performance, arguably accelerating his departure from government. 

The American public deserves a government that is fit for purpose and delivers on its promises. But Elon Musk never intended to create that. DOGE was built on the fiction of Musk’s mastery of all things, one of the many myths attributed to the ultra-wealthy. What it concealed was a public sector novice who failed to understand the basic mechanics of the institutions he railed against incessantly.

Just hours before Musk announced his departure, a lawsuit against him and DOGE was cleared to proceed, accusing him of wielding unlawful power over federal agencies, contracts, and data without democratic oversight. It’s a fitting coda. Musk leaves behind no durable reform, only institutions hollowed out, public trust frayed, and a template for how easily government can be turned against the very people it exists to serve.