As Elon Musk departs Washington, his mood resembles his Cybertruck: ugly and adolescent.
(Illustration by David Punkert/For The Washington Post)
Musk said his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, lacked the power to impose large-scale reforms “because there are three branches of the government that are to some degree opposed to that level of cost savings.”
He entered the same plea of innocence in an interview with The Post’s Christian Davenport, whining that DOGE became a “whipping boy” in Washington because it was trying to create such sweeping change. (He used the exact same phrase during an interview with CBS News’s David Pogue.)
Musk might comfort himself with this fairy tale, but no one else should believe or promote it. The reality is that he failed not because his ambitions were too grand, but because they were so pathetically small.
That’s not to say Musk’s Retribution Tour in Washington didn’t have huge consequences — because it did, and I’ve chronicled many of them over the past several months. If you were one of the hundreds of thousands of public servants who were deemed unnecessary or disloyal, you might now be unemployed. If you have a question about your Social Security benefits, you might find yourself waiting for hours on the phone. If you are an AIDS patient or a malnourished child in southern Africa, you might have lost your only lifeline.
No, what I am saying is that these impacts were the result not of some Icarus-like ambition, but rather a pedestrian kind of pettiness. Which is the last thing you would have expected if you had followed Musk’s career at all. Musk, after all, is said to have been one of the models for the Tony Stark character in the Iron Man movie series: brilliant, daring, uncontainable (and, ultimately, a superhero). His wealth always seemed an almost accidental product of his grandiose, comic-book-inspired dreams.
Tesla’s rise was fueled by Musk’s lifelong passion for saving the Earth by transitioning from oil-and-gas power to electric. SpaceX grew from his unshakable belief that humans would someday need to colonize Mars to survive. In Starlink, Musk saw the potential for a planetary wireless internet, at a time when most U.S. cities were struggling to offer decent WiFi in their libraries.
And don’t forget Musk’s Boring Company and its proposed “Hyperloop”: the thing was supposed to shoot us between cities in some lightning-quick, underground pod, like a pneumatic tube for humans. Sure, not much came of it, but you had to admire the audacity.
Even in his petulant takeover of Twitter, which in some ways presaged his strategy in Washington, Musk claimed to have a farseeing vision. He talked about the necessity of Twitter as an uncensored town square for all humanity; the policing of thought by engineers seemed to him an intolerable evil. (This is before he started manipulating the site to elevate his own views above all others.)
All of which is why, if we’re being honest, Musk’s bizarre strutting around with a chain saw — and even his Nazi salute during President Donald Trump’s postinaugural festivities — didn’t damage his public standing much. Brilliant inventors are usually a little wacky, aren’t they? Henry Ford was a blatant antisemite. Maybe it’s the price you pay.
And if ever there was an ossified institution crying out for this kind of mad genius, it was the federal government. It’s not just that Washington is on a perilous path to fiscal ruin and can’t face the fact — a situation Musk seemed to grasp when he immediately declared, somewhat absurdly, that DOGE would cut $2 trillion from an annual budget of just over $7 trillion.
It’s also that trust in the government’s ability to do anything well, among a citizenry that now does most everything on digital platforms, appears all but spent. The comically bad rollout of the Obama administration’s health-care website in 2013 stands out to me, still, as a crucial moment in this disillusionment. President Barack Obama spent five years trying to convince Americans that government could manage the largest new social program since the 1960s — and then asked them to enroll on a nonfunctioning site that would have embarrassed a high school coding class.
Surely, some of us thought, Musk must have come up with some so-crazy-it-just-might-work plan to modernize the federal bureaucracy. Even if he couldn’t reform the policies that really drove our spiraling debt — runaway entitlement spending and obsolete weapons systems — then at least he and the best minds in tech could find some major savings in the software systems they used.
And even if he wasn’t going to cut $2 trillion from the budget (Musk quickly amended that figure, setting a floor of $1 trillion instead), then perhaps Musk had in mind something almost as important: the reinventing of government as an app you could trust. How much public faith could you regain if people could log on to a single website and access any service at any time, or get answers to any question from an AI Uncle Sam? Hell, why not a hologram?
It’s not like no one has thought of these things before. (Well, a hologram might have been new.) But people who spend their careers in government are not by nature re-inventors. They do not come with superhero aspirations or decades of entrepreneurship, nor are they lifted above the bureaucracy and given exceptional power by the president himself.
Musk had a singular opportunity to create the government of our sci-fi dreams. Not just leaner, but better. More accessible. More fun.
Unfortunately, this is where Musk’s ever-expanding universe of creativity bumped up against his outer wall of dark energy. He did not have a plan for the budget, nor did he even seem to understand it. He did not have in mind any wild innovations that would make navigating government services feel more like using CarPlay.
No, Musk seemed motivated to do only one thing with DOGE: terrorize the federal workforce. Maybe he was just blinded by rage at the federal regulators who oversaw his industries, and he could see Washington only as a Final Boss whose lair needed to be infiltrated and destroyed by a bunch of gamers drinking Red Bull and crashing on foldout couches.
Whatever the reason, Musk’s only Big Idea for his brigade of former interns was to fire as many people as he could, in as humiliating a way as possible. As a reform strategy, it struck me as shockingly lightweight. I mean, really, Elon? You’re supposed to be this great, visionary, hyperloopy guy, and this is all you’ve got? A reorg. plan? The Cat in the Hat arrived with more sophisticated tricks.
The public career executions, of course, did nothing to reform federal spending. By its own, highly suspect accounting, DOGE has saved the taxpayers about $175 billion to this point — or less than 3 percent of the budget.
To say that Musk didn’t make anything better during his five-month stint, however, is to understate the damage he inflicted. In fact, DOGE has earned the distinction of being the first in a long line of reform initiatives to actually make the problem worse. And not just because its cuts, by one estimate, actually cost the government $135 billion.
During his CBS interview, Musk decried the Trump-backed budget bill that just passed the House, because it will add trillions to the public debt. “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk said, referring to the bill’s cringeworthy title, “but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”
It’s an opinion I share. What Musk doesn’t seem to realize, however, is that Trump would have had a much harder time selling that bill to resistant Republicans had it not been for Musk’s silly cosplay with a chain saw.
“For many months, when DOGE was the bright, shiny object with promises of annual savings of a trillion or more, it gave cover to lawmakers crafting a massive reconciliation bill dependent on borrowing,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told me just after the bill passed. “Now, we’re left with a debt-exploding tax package and DOGE savings that are at most a tiny fraction of what was advertised.”
I suppose it’s possible that DOGE will live on for a while after Musk, making token cuts here and there — though I highly doubt it. What awaits Musk after DOGE is a more interesting question.
As I’ve written, Musk has taken full advantage of his time at the peak of power. He has personally negotiated deals for Starlink with foreign leaders as they try to avoid crippling tariffs — a shakedown by implication, at a minimum. Meanwhile, Trump has put his considerable prowess as a pitchman to work for Tesla, using the White House as a backdrop.
But Musk’s standing among the public — not to mention some of his board members and investors — has plummeted. At a time when electric cars are selling at a higher rate in most of the world, Tesla’s sales are down at least 9 percent domestically and closer to 50 percent in Europe, almost certainly because Musk’s personal brand has become so toxic.
And, so, Musk’s Rehabilitation Tour has begun. He says he is done with political activism. He will now tell and retell the same story of disillusionment he offered last month: that he came to Washington as a private-sector patriot, offering to take government to new heights, and found himself smacked down to earth by powerful forces of gravity and inertia.
It’s a convenient fiction. Musk’s flameout had nothing to do with gravity, and everything to do with the lack of it.