Some folks didn’t like my recent piece in the magazine, entitled, “DOGE Takes a Nibble Out of Big Government,” because it was allegedly too pessimistic and critical. I wrote that despite a great deal of effort, the savings generated by the Department of Government Efficiency are, so far, way below Elon Musk’s pledges at Trump rallies in autumn 2024 ($190 billion as of this morning, compared to $2 trillion predicted at the Madison Square Garden rally). Throw in all the clashes with other cabinet members and a lack of support from Congress, endless lawsuits, erratic decisions on firing and then quickly re-hiring federal government workers, the posting of erroneous data, and so on, and DOGE looks like a good concept that ended up being poorly executed by a Washington outsider who underestimated the scale of the challenge, and the intensity of the opposition to spending cuts.

Finding $190 billion in savings is not nothing. But in the scope of the nearly $5 trillion the government has spent so far this fiscal year, it’s small potatoes, and it was absurd for President Trump to ever be talking up the idea that DOGE was going to save so much money that the savings would be returned to taxpayers in the form of “DOGE checks.”

Today I would simply add that Musk himself is sharing posts on X, asking, “What’s the point of DOGE if the government’s just going to add $5 trillion more in debt?”

If even Elon Musk believes that the work of DOGE is more than nullified by the spending in the Big Beautiful Bill and is questioning the point of all of his work there, there’s no need for his fans to insist that DOGE was an unmitigated roaring success.