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What Elon Musk Learned (and Donald Trump Didn’t) About Governing
It turns out public policy is harder than it looks.
by Bill Scher
What do President Donald Trump and now-former Senior Adviser to the President Elon Musk have in common? They are both cranks.
They
lob baseless accusations against those in power—veteran politicians,
executive branch appointees, and career civil servants—as incompetent or
evil or both. They claim they can run the government better with a
trove of seemingly common-sensical yet overly simplistic ideas.
Unlike
average cranks, who resign themselves to venting on social media, Trump
and Musk used their wealth to fuel their critiques and lend them
legitimacy. This helped the duo obtain power, a rare achievement for
cranks.
Both
men are billionaires, but the nature of their respective fortunes is
different, which explains why Trump remains in government while Musk is
bailing, and not just because one was elected and one wasn’t.
Musk
owns successful companies that make things people want: cars, trucks,
rockets, and satellites. Trump’s business is basically a brand licensing
scheme selling his name, often, courts have determined, in a corrupt
fashion. His family business, The Trump Organization, was convicted of
criminal tax fraud and found by a judge to have engaged in civil fraud.
He has filed for bankruptcy numerous times. The list of his failed
enterprises is long—from casinos to airline shuttles to universities to
steaks —though he continues to slap his name on products such as “Swiss” watches partly made in China, Bibles, and meme coins.
Musk’s
government stint was a distraction from his wealth-making endeavors.
For Trump, government is part of the lifelong hustle—a way to keep his
name in the spotlight and maintain a following of loyal MAGA-mad
consumers willing to buy whatever he’s selling.
Both
discovered that governing is harder than it looks. But once Musk
reached that conclusion, he had every reason to return to making money.
Trump
may have found out that he can’t breezily cut government spending;
impose stiff tariffs; lower retail prices; revitalize the American
manufacturing industry; deport millions of immigrants; forge peace
between Ukraine and Russia; turn Gaza into a beachfront resort, and
seize Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal as easily as advertised.
But if he can still use the White House to boost his cryptocurrency, he
might as well stick around.
Musk
may have learned something during his few months as a special federal
employee, but not enough to shed his membership in the Brotherhood of
Mansplaining Crankery. As he prepared to turn in his government ID, Musk
has been on a pout-filled media tour, lambasting the “federal
bureaucracy” rather than admitting the intellectual bankruptcy of his
dishonest demagoguery.
Back
in November, when a freshly elected Trump tapped him to lead a new
Department of Government Efficiency (but before the Trump administration
claimed Musk didn’t really run the Department of Government
Efficiency), Musk co-wrote a Wall Street Journal column previewing “The DOGE Plan to Reform Government.”
Musk
declared, “The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an
existential threat to our republic,” so he would implement “mass
head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy” and take “aim at
the $500 billion-plus in annual federal expenditures that are
unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never
intended.” (He did not repeat his claim from October that “we can do at least $2 trillion” in
budget cuts.) He scoffed at “critics” who “claim that we can’t
meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement
programs like Medicare and Medicaid.”
Yet the DOGE’s tally of savings from employee firings, canceled contracts, and programmatic cuts is only $175 billion, which is almost certainly inflated. As CBS News
reported, “only $70.9 billion is itemized, and many of those entries
continue to raise serious doubts about their accuracy ... Nat Malkus, a
senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute
... said his review indicates the savings are more likely to be around
$80 billion.” The Partnership in Public Service found that after
accounting for paid leave, decreased productivity, and other
consequences, DOGE has cost taxpayers $135 million.
Meanwhile,
in the One Big Beautiful Bill that recently passed the House,
Republicans are taking aim at Medicaid and other health insurance
programs—a hit of $912 billion over 10 years, paired with over $4 trillion in tax cut extensions and expansions. According to the conservative Tax Foundation,
the bill's net fiscal impact is $2.6 trillion in additional debt over
10 years, or $1.7 trillion assuming the bill stimulates additional
economic growth. (Although a new survey finds 83 percent of CEOs expect a
recession in the next 12-18 months.)
Musk
isn’t wrong to complain to CBS News that the bill “undermines the work
that the DOGE team is doing.” While it’s accurate to say the One Big
Beautiful Bill wipes out the savings produced by DOGE, Musk isn’t
copping to the fact that his critics—people who were not cranks and
understood the federal budget far better than he did—were right and DOGE
didn’t produce the savings he promised.
As part of his self-pity tour, Musk spoke to The Washington Post and
retreated to crank mode. “The federal bureaucracy situation is much
worse than I realized. I thought there were problems, but it sure is an
uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.” This
isn’t wise hindsight. It’s wild revisionist history. Remember, Musk
wrote seven months ago that the “entrenched” federal bureaucracy didn’t
pose a few problems but was “an existential threat to our republic.” If
that were true, that we face an “existential threat,” he wouldn’t return
to launching rockets; he would do everything he could to save the
country from fiscal destruction. Musk can’t admit that he oversold
“waste, fraud, and abuse” and his ability to curtail it.
But
Musk deserves a smidge of credit for acknowledging the reality of his
failure, which Trump would never do. The president routinely oversells
what he can deliver and then pretends he succeeded. Contrary to the
perception that Trump always “gets away with it,” in his first term,
public frustration with Trump’s performance led to a Democratic takeover
of the House in 2018, then the White House and Senate in 2020.
Unfortunately,
the public’s memories are short, so Trump could memory-hole the
failures of his first term, return to crank mode, blame Democrats for
everything, oversell himself, and win back the White House.
To quote George W. Bush,
“Fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me—we can’t get fooled
again.” We are again learning what happens when we listen to our inner
crank, blame government professionals, and embrace dopey solutions. A
free people must resist the seductive oversell prized by power-hungry
demagogues.
Governing
is more complicated than it looks. Trump and Musk may have limited
capacity for personal growth, but the rest of us can be better than
them.
Bill Scher is the Politics Editor of the Washington Monthly.
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