Outside the Beltway

Musk Has Left the Building

Is the worst of the idiocy over?

James Joyner · Saturday, May 24, 2025 · 13 comments

Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker detail “The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk” for The Atlantic. After detailing a profane shouting match between the megabillionaire and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent outside the Oval Office, they observe,

Musk came to Washington all Cybertrucks and chain saws, ready to destroy the bureaucracy, fire do-nothing federal workers, and, he bragged, save taxpayers $2 trillion in the process. He was a Tech Support–T-shirt-wearing disruptor who promised to rewire how the government operates and to defeat the “woke mind virus,” all under the auspices of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. For weeks, he and his merry band of DOGE bros gleefully jumped from agency to agency, terrorizing bureaucrats, demanding access to sensitive data, and leaving snack wrappers on employees’ desks. But as Musk winds down his official time in Washington, he has found himself isolated within the upper reaches of the Trump administration, having failed to build necessary alliances and irritating many of the department and agency heads he was ostensibly there to help. His team failed to find anything close to the 13-figure savings he’d promised. Court challenges clipped other projects. Cabinet secretaries blocked DOGE cuts they said reduced crucial services. All the while, Musk’s net worth fell, his companies tanked in value, and he became an object of frequent gossip and ridicule.

Four months after Musk’s swashbuckling arrival, he is effectively moving on, shifting his attention back to his jobs as the leader of Tesla, SpaceX, and X, among his other companies. In a call last month with Wall Street analysts, Musk said he was planning to spend “a day or two per week” focusing on DOGE issues—similar to how he manages each of his various companies. The next week, he seemed to suggest that he’d be slimming down his government portfolio even more, telling reporters that he expected to be in Washington “every other week.” Yesterday, he told the Qatar Economic Forum in a video interview that he no longer sees a reason to spend money on politics, though that could change in the future. “I think I’ve done enough,” he said.

He remains close with Trump, who still shows genuine affection for his billionaire benefactor, according to advisers and allies. But Musk’s decision to focus elsewhere has been greeted as a relief by many federal leaders, who have been busily undoing many of his cuts in their departments or making DOGE-style changes on their own terms. Cabinet leaders—who did not appreciate being treated like staff by the man boasting about feeding their fiefdom into a “wood chipper”—have widely ignored some of his efforts, such as his February demand that all federal employees send weekly emails to their supervisors laying out their accomplishments in bullet points.

“How many people were fired because they didn’t send in their three things a week or whatever the fuck it was?” one Trump adviser, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, told us. “I think that everyone is ready to move on from this part of the administration.”

My wife and I work for the Defense Department, which did not ignore the demand to send in weekly emails detailing five accomplishments. We both got an email yesterday morning, though, announcing the abrupt end of that requirement.

Musk and his DOGE Bros caused an enormous amount of distress, disruption, and chaos across the government at a level far beyond what I imagined possible. And, it turns out, without the slightest gain in government efficiency.

At the core of Musk’s challenges was his unfamiliarity with reforming an organization that, unlike his own companies, he does not fully control. Rather than taking the time to navigate and understand the quirks and nuances of the federal government—yes, an often lumbering and inefficient institution—Musk instead told his team to move fast: It would be better to backtrack later, if necessary, than to proceed with caution. (One administration official told us that Musk’s view was that if he hadn’t fired so many people that he needed to rehire some, it would mean that he hadn’t cut enough.) As he sought to solve spending and digital-infrastructure problems, he often created new issues for Trump, the president’s top advisers, and Capitol Hill allies.

“He came with a playbook that comes from outside government, and there were mixed returns on that,” Matt Calkins, the CEO of Appian, a Virginia-based software company that automates business processes and has worked with the federal government for more than two decades, told us. “He comes in with his idealism and his Silicon Valley playbook, and a few interesting things happened. Does the ‘move fast and break things’ model work in Washington? Not really.”

Calkins told us that he very much supports Musk’s stated goals: government efficiency and modernization, and harnessing technology to improve the lives of citizens. But, he explained, Washington will never work the way Silicon Valley does. Its capacity for disruption is lower; although people may enjoy summoning Uber rides or ordering food via their phone, they do not rely on these innovations the way many do on, say, public education or Medicaid. “Government is a foundation, versus a technology company that usually provides a bonus—something we enjoy consuming, but not something we count on,” Calkins said.

Everyone agrees that government, at all levels, can be frustratingly inefficient. Mostly, that’s by design: legislators have created all manner of rules to ensure taxpayer funds aren’t being wasted. While understandable, it ironically creates considerable waste of taxpayer money. Further, efficiencies themselves create inefficiencies. Cutting staffing to the bare minimum creates bottlenecks if the one person who has the expertise or authority to handle a problem is sick or on leave.

By most accounts, Musk’s Break It Fast methodology made the entity formerly known as Twitter a far worse place. But at least in that case he owned the company and had every right to fire whomever he damned well pleased. He lacked that authority in the federal government, because, even empowered with broad discretion from the President via Executive Order, much of what he was destroying was created by Congress. The Supreme Court is sending worrisome signals that longstanding protections of Congressional authority will be going away. But, in the meantime, the lower courts are rightly yelling STOP!

Musk’s operation claims to have found $170 billion in savings by cutting grants, contracts, leases, and other spending, though the numbers have frequently been revised down owing to errors and program reinstatements. The federal workforce—roughly 4.5 million employees, including military personnel—is slated to be reduced by tens of thousands, though many of those cuts are now in limbo because of recent court orders. White House aides privately admit that a high-profile claim of fraud that Musk uncovered—that some people in Social Security databases are listed as unrealistically old—is a data problem but not evidence of actual fraud: The government had already blocked payments to those people before Musk pointed them out. (Nevertheless, Trump repeated the claim in his first official address to Congress, in March, and Musk caused a mini political crisis for the administration when he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and declared Social Security—an entitlement that Trump has promised not to touch—“the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”)

Again, there are doubtless substantial amounts of waste to be rooted out. But, shockingly enough, it’s the people with expertise in the various agency functions, not kids from Silicon Valley, who have the know-how to find it.

Ultimately, though, Musk’s premature ouster was not due to DOGE’s dubious legality and ineptitude but rather to politics.

Most important, Trump has made clear that Musk did not have the freedom to reshape the government as he would one of his companies. Weeks after Musk appeared onstage with a chain saw to illustrate his plans for the federal government, Trump rebuked the approach on social media: “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet,’” Trump wrote. Musk’s legal opponents have taken to celebrating his departure as a defeat for his larger ambitions. They point to public polling that shows that his public favorability has fallen markedly since the start of the year, as well as to the backlash he faced when he went to Wisconsin to campaign for a Republican-backed state-supreme-court candidate who ended up losing by double digits.

“We kicked him out of town,” Rushab Sanghvi, the general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, told us. “If he had stayed in the shadows and done his stuff, who knows how bad it would have been? But no one likes the guy.”

At a Cabinet meeting at the end of April, possibly Musk’s last, the Tesla and SpaceX leader reduced himself to a punch line, wearing two caps—a red Gulf of America one perched atop his signature black DOGE hat. He joked about all the jobs that he was juggling. “As they say, I wear a lot of hats. And as you can see, it’s true. Even my hat has a hat,” he said, prompting genuine laughter.

As every schoolboy knows, there’s a difference between people laughing with you versus at you.

There’s quite a bit more to the piece but that’s the gist.