Leviathan has shrugged off Elon Musk and DOGE.
It’s hard to disagree with Luther Abel’s conclusion about Elon Musk and L’Affaire DOGE.
“Musk,” Luther writes, “a man who knows only the supremacy of an owner’s ability to slash whole corporate departments in a day, was ill-prepared for the finicky, exasperating work of prying apart the many knots that protect federal employees and their reporting agencies from censure, let alone termination.”
Yes, indeed. But it’s critical to understand that DOGE and Musk have been undone not by the sometimes good work that they undertook and the prudent cuts they identified. They haven’t been undone by their mistakes and missteps, of which there were more than a few. They haven’t even been undone by the resistance they encountered within the broader Trump administration, in the courts, and in civil society.
They have been undone by their sky-high promises, and their hubris.
DOGE was supposed to fundamentally transform the U.S. federal government. That was the promise. Elon Musk bragged that he thought “at least $2 trillion” could be removed from the budget — an always crazy idea, considering that the entirety of the non-defense discretionary budget is more like $1.7 trillion. In his address to Congress in March, President Trump declared, “In the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget.”
“We’re going to balance it,” Trump promised, while implying that Musk and DOGE were going to go a long way towards getting us there by slashing lunacy like “$8 million dollars to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho.”
The U.S. government very obviously should not be funding LGBTQI+ programs in Lesotho. And Trump, Musk, and DOGE should have the thanks of the Republic for having put a stop to such embarrassing, counterproductive waste.
But the U.S. government’s financial crisis is not built on the foundation of such waste. It’s not built on transgender puppet shows in Guatemala. It’s not built on the entirety of the U.S. foreign aid budget, even the good stuff. It’s built on decades of debt-fueled overspending on entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — for Americans, right here in the U.S. of A.
DOGE never seriously confronted that problem, because — rightly — the executive branch and its appendages have no power to fundamentally alter the trajectory of our entitlement programs. That’s Congress’s job — a job the Congress has routinely shirked, of course.
The entirely predictable tragedy of DOGE — after all the Sturm und Drang — is that the failure to fulfill even the slightest shadow of the huge promises made by Elon Musk will tarnish its legacy and brand the critical and necessary project of bringing efficiency to government with an unmistakable patina of failure.
Leviathan has shrugged off the DOGE.