After a brief, intense bout of fiscal conservatism and focus on excessive spending, President Tump has reverted to factory settings.
I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but every couple of days, we get some new story indicating that the Department of Government Efficiency was something of a Roman candle for reducing federal spending, burning brightly but dimming fairly quickly. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Weeks after the billionaire left his role at the Department of Government Efficiency amid his feud with President Trump, a small band of [Elon] Musk loyalists is fighting to preserve the legacy—and power—of the government-slashing office.
Current and former officials close to DOGE say that in closed meetings, staffers have been quizzed on questions of their loyalty: Trump or Musk?
The fight has pitted DOGE officials against some in the White House who are seeking to diminish DOGE’s role, and has triggered infighting and paranoia within the group’s diminished ranks, according to people familiar with the matter.
In his cabinet meeting Tuesday, President Trump appeared to distance himself from the decisions made by DOGE.
“We cut hundreds of billions of dollars with DOGE. We could have done it differently,” Trump said. “I would have done it differently a little bit maybe, but it was something that we saved a lot of money. You can always second guess. I guess some of the people in this room maybe would have done it slightly differently, and some would have done it exactly the way it was done.”
(It’s just a shame that the president of the United States had no way to influence the decisions of DOGE, an advisory group to the executive branch of the federal government.)
A week earlier, Trump said, “We might have to put DOGE on Elon. You know what DOGE is? DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon, wouldn’t that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies.”
I began my allegedly too-pessimistic magazine article on DOGE by noting, “President Donald Trump was never much of a fiscal hawk in his first term, but at least for the first stretch of his second term, he established the Department of Government Efficiency and put the world’s most energetic — probably hyperactive — billionaire in charge of it, and made cutting wasteful spending a priority.”
Trump appears to have reverted back to factory settings. He wasn’t worried about the deficit spending projections from the “big, beautiful bill,” he doesn’t seem particularly enamored or enthused about what DOGE did while Musk was a temporary government employee, and other than some basic moves like confirming eligibility for Medicaid, Trump is as opposed to entitlement reform as ever. Give DOGE credit for what it was able to accomplish — $190 billion in savings, according to its own website — but I don’t think it’s the least bit unfair to call DOGE a disappointment so far, considering the expectation of $2 trillion set by Musk in his appearance at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden.