Elon Musk looks like he will scale back his the US federal government role, leaving behind a great deal of chaos and a presidency that is growing more unpopular by the day. The world’s richest man is reportedly about to be peeled away from his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) by Donald Trump whose cabinet secretaries have grown weary of Musk’s meddling. Yet while the future of Doge is in doubt – its goal of saving the government $1trn nowhere close to being met – significant damage has already been done.
Musk oversaw the firing of at least 275,000 federal workers across government. If that number alone, in the context of the three million-strong federal workforce that Joe Biden oversaw, seems insignificant, the types of cuts Musk implemented have already hobbled a bureaucracy that serves many millions of Americans on a daily basis. Workers who process claims at the Social Security Administration – the agency that oversees the welfare benefits for elderly Americans – have been laid off. The tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service has lost a tremendous amount of manpower, meaning tax cheats will have a far easier time. Scientific research has taken a serious hit, as has the agency that oversees affordable housing programmes.
Musk’s Doge was the worst of all worlds: the savings weren’t nearly large enough to impact America’s yawning deficit (federal bureaucracy is not a cause of this deficit anyway) but the wanton nature of the lay-offs will make the government weaker and more inefficient, as talent is forced out or flees and a beleaguered workforce is left to pick up the pieces. It was the worst of all worlds for Musk too, which is one of the funnier ironies of this whole episode. Tesla, his crown jewel, has lost almost half its value since Trump took office, as American consumers rebel against Musk – he polls even worse than Trump – and the car-maker faces serious competition from Chinese electric cars.
Musk must now race back to Tesla. Tesla may stage a comeback, but it could also end up like Atari, the video game and electronics company which was dominant in the 1980s and 1990s but eventually lost out to more advanced competition. Musk will be absurdly rich for the rest of his life, but his status as global kingmaker is far from assured. If Chinese electric vehicles are blocked in America, they can flood European and Asian markets, drowning out Tesla.
Politically, Musk is also at a crossroads. Trump will not cut him loose entirely because he has become such a titanic funder of the Republican Party. Whoever, on the Republican side, runs for president in 2028 – whether that’s Trump illegally, JD Vance legally, or someone else – could benefit from hundreds of millions in spending from Musk. That cash is hard to turn down. Musk might still want to assert influence over the next administration.
But it’s also obvious the South Africa-born billionaire is an enormous political liability for Republicans. He invested heavily in a Wisconsin judicial race in early April – where he personally campaigned for the Republican candidate, and warned about the end of Western civilisation if he lost – and was beaten badly. All the Democrat had to do was invoke Musk. Next year, with the House of Representatives up for re-election, Democrats can campaign on stopping Doge. Musk is famous and alienating enough that he will remain a target, even if he steps back from political activities.
The reality for Trump, which he might be too dim to understand, is that almost no one voted for him last November thinking he’d farm out governing responsibility to Elon Musk. That might have been the greatest shock of his second term – that one billionaire who had not even backed him in prior elections could be allowed, in just a few months, to run roughshod over a stable and functioning bureaucracy. The 50 per cent of Americans who backed Trump imagined he would combat inflation and curtail immigration.
Instead, what they got was Musk randomly firing federal employees and snooping through government data to speed up the deportation of immigrants who are not violent gang members or even criminals. The cruelty and idiocy of Musk’s tenure is reflected in how few people in either party still want him around. Trump’s approval rating has plummeted since February – by one measure, from 47 per cent to 40 per cent, a tremendous drop in such a short period of time – and Musk, along with the market chaos Trump’s tariff policies have sowed, has been part of that. Musk himself, an international businessman, has opposed the tariffs, but Americans don’t care too much about that. He’s part of the Maga blob now.
In his quieter moments (does he have those?) Musk must wonder whether all of this political scheming was worth it. A decade ago, he was a widely popular tech mogul, famous for his electric cars and rockets. He was compared to a superhero, and enjoyed fawning press coverage. He was both Obama-friendly and revered by conservatives as a highly successful entrepreneur, the sort who rises to mythic status in America every few decades. In time, he might have been remembered as another Carnegie or Rockefeller, one of those legendary billionaires who was so integral to an American century.
Instead, he’s the blubbering Trumpist and serial X addict who has few fans left anywhere. Even Trump is tired of his act.
[See also: Trump’s plan for chaos]
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