Doge may have been quietly wound down, but the irreparable damage left in the department’s wake is still being counted
SEATTLE — When Donald Trump and Elon Musk announced their plan to cut alleged government waste they did so with typical boasts and swagger.
They claimed the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, would trim as much as $2trn from its bottom line, and did joint interviews on Fox News where they went out of their way to praise each other.
Trump said few things impressed him more than the ability of Musk’s SpaceX company to catch its boosters using large mechanical arms, meaning they could be re-used.
“I saw the rocket ship come back and get grabbed like you grab a beautiful little baby,” said Trump. “You can’t really have a rocket programme if you’re going to dump $1bn into the ocean every time you fly. You have to save it, and he saved it.”
During a previous meeting, Trump had praised the aggressive way Musk had fired striking workers at what is now X.
Now Doge is officially over, quietly wound down with a whimper rather than a bang, having almost certainly failed to save a fraction of the money it promised to do and accused of doing irreparable harm along the way.
While Musk, 54, set himself the target of cutting as much as $2trn, in the end he fell far short.
The government claims it cut $170bn, but journalists pointed out those numbers are hard to verify as information provided as proof, are often misleading or plain wrong.
On one issue there is less doubt.
The man, said to be worth $460bn and who was widely mocked when he appeared on stage at a conservative gathering wielding a chainsaw, is accused of having done real and lethal harm as he all-but scrapped entire government departments such as USAid, where he cut more than $30bn in global grants. Around 5,800 members of staff lost their jobs.
A recent estimate by Boston University epidemiologist Dr Brooke Nicholls suggested as many as 600,000 people had died as a result of the cutting of funds – two-thirds of them children.
When Musk claimed no-one died from what he termed “a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding”, people hit back with actual examples.
Veteran New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof travelled to South Sudan and Kenya and found individuals who had died because life-saving medicine had been cut off.
One, Peter Donde, 10, had been infected from his mother with HIV during childbirth, but kept strong as result of a programme started by George W Bush to provide antiretroviral drugs.
“If USAid would be here, Peter Donde would not have died,” health worker Okeny Labani told Kristof.
Predictably enough, Musk and Trump would fall out, neither man able to share the spotlight with anyone other than themselves, and the president someone ruthlessly willing to break with anyone who no longer served his purpose.
Musk claimed the tipping point was when Trump spearheaded his so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a spending package estimated to add as much as $3.4trn in debt over the next decade.
While Trump granted Musk an Oval Office sending off where he praised Musk and said he’d “put his very great talents into the service of our nation”, it was not long before he was threatening the South African-born entrepreneur’s own companies with inspections from the very department he set up.
“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far,” he said on social media. “Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”
This month, at the same time Musk was securing a $1trn pay package from Tesla shareholders, it was revealed that Doge had been wound down, with other departments taking on its work.
“That doesn’t exist,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters, when asked about the department’s status.
At the same time, it seems Trump and Musk may have at least partly made up.
Having been among the business leaders who traveled to Saudi Arabia with the president earlier this year where numerous deals were reportedly signed, Musk was among those invited to attend a special dinner for the kingdom’s crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, also known as MBS.
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The visit was controversial, not least because US intelligence believed MBS was behind the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. MBS has always denied having a role, and when asked about it, Trump told reporters: “Things happen”.
Musk also attended the US-Saudi Investment Forum the following day, where Trump, MBS and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, were among the participants.
Musk may have more lives than a cat, but he seems oblivious, or uncaring, about the harm he leaves in his wake.
