What’s next for Elon Musk and DOGE’s ‘authoritarian’ wrecking ball

Stepping on the stage at Madison Square Garden, nine days before Donald Trump was declared president a second time, Elon Musk told a crowd of screaming fans that their “money is being wasted.”

Musk — dressed in all black, topped with a black “MAGA” hat in blackletter type — vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending, a figure he apparently came up with on the spot. He pledged to put his so-called Department of Government Efficiency to work getting the “government off your back and out of your pocketbook.”

Nearly six months later, after pumping tens of millions of dollars into president’s campaign and deploying an army of loyalists across the government to fire workers and slash budgets, the wealthiest person on the planet announced plans to “significantly” withdraw from the White House to focus on his company Tesla.

One week before Trump’s 100th day in office, the billionaire said he plans to spend less time in Washington, D.C., cutting back to only a “day or two per week.”

Musk’s position as a “special government employee” is limited to 130 days within the year. But the White House says those working hours don’t fall neatly within the calendar — Musk will remain a fixture within the administration, whether it’s at the White House or Mar-a-Lago.

DOGE’s cost-cutting crusade isn’t going anywhere, officials told The Independent.

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Musk’s critics say his tenure within Trump’s White House thus far was as pointless as it was destructive, which was likely the point all along.

“Elon Musk in government is completely unprecedented, but there has never been a single person, certainly not a single non-presidential person, who has been as utterly and pointlessly destructive as Elon Musk,” Robert Weissman, co-executive director of Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights advocacy group, told The Independent.

“He has commercial motivations,” he said, “but primarily he’s been engaged in an authoritarian wrecking project with no actual purpose, but really deadly impact.”

On the campaign trail, Musk predicted “hardship” for Americans under Trump’s economic agenda. Musk and a DOGE team shredded foreign aid, gutted consumer protections and throttled funding for libraries, public health research and combating homelessness, among other programs, while hoovering up information about Americans.

Musk estimated DOGE would trim the federal budget by $1 trillion by the end of September, the end of the fiscal year.

The White House has celebrated the expected “savings” thus far: roughly $150 billion, falling 85 percent short of its goal.

Public backlash has been swift, and brutal. Tesla saw a profit drop of 71 percent within the first three months of the year.

“If the ship of America goes down,” he told Tesla shareholders on April 22, “we all go down with it, including Tesla and everyone else.”

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Musk — a man with a net worth of more than $370 billion who wants to accelerate the human population of other planets — predicted and welcomed economic “hardship” and a market crash if Trump won.

Musk and Trump have characterized DOGE, operating as the U.S. DOGE Service, formerly the U.S. Digital Service, as “tech support” to end “waste, fraud and abuse.”

DOGE is not so much an agency than it is an idea, according to the White House. Employees within federal agencies are doing its work. Musk functions as an adviser.

Musk first promoted the idea of DOGE, a reference to Musk’s favorite meme, at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on October 27.

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s then-campaign adviser and now Commerce Secretary, asked Musk on stage how much they can expect to “rip out” of the federal budget.

“I think we can do at least $2 trillion,” Musk said.

Last month, Lutnick told the podcast All-In that he spoke with Musk about what they would say when they walked out. They agreed on a figure: $1 trillion, from an annual federal budget of $7 trillion. And then they walked onstage.

“He says $2 trillion,” Lutnick said on the podcast. “I’m sitting there going, and I’m like, I think I said, ‘Alrighty then.’ Or something like that … what was I supposed to say?”

Global economists and think tanks across the ideological spectrum warned that Trump’s economic agenda would explode inflation, the deficit and the costs of everyday goods. Musk wanted to take a “wood chipper” to the federal budget on top of that — money that Musk says is being “wasted” in the trillions.

With an apparent mandate from Trump, who routinely sings Musk’s praises, DOGE has swept through government agencies without any apparent supervision to reshape, and crush, a bureaucracy Musk despises.

The pace and scope of those initial actions within the first weeks of the administration led to intense public scrutiny and a mountain of lawsuits that have thrust DOGE and Musk into more than a dozen legal battles questioning whether the whole enterprise is even constitutional.

DOGE pledged to cut “wasteful” spending, but cuts were often carried without warning. Tens of thousands of federal employees have either been forced out of their jobs or put on leave. U.S. Agency for International Development is virtually closed.

“Whether Musk ends up going anywhere or not, the facts are clear and will not change: his initiatives failed,” according to Norm Eisen, executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund, which has brought lawsuits questioning the legal legitimacy of DOGE authority.

“That is proven, for example, by the chaos his chainsaw surgery caused in the functioning of government to benefit Americans, the adverse court rulings that we and others secured, and, above all, in his public unpopularity,” he told The Independent.

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In March, Musk spent millions of dollars supporting a conservative candidate for Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election, a race he characterized in apocalyptic terms with the “destiny of humanity” and future of “the world” at stake. His candidate lost.

The election — the first major test of Musk’s political influence under Trump — served as a national “referendum” of “the people versus Musk,” Eisen said.

Musk’s popularity with voters has dropped. Polls show a majority of Americans hold a generally unfavorable view of the billionaire, and protests popped up across the country at his Tesla properties, which Musk alleges are paid for by his political opponents. Trump’s Department of Justice is investigating vandalism and arson attacks at Tesla facilities as acts of terrorism.

His withdrawal from Washington has been telegraphed for weeks, but it followed several reports of alleged scraps with administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and economic adviser Peter Navarro. White house officials have chalked them up to passionate disagreements.

Those tensions reportedly recently spilled out in front of the president himself, after Musk’s DOGE team helped install Gary Shapley as the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, brushing up against the authority of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has repeatedly bristled at DOGE’s injection into the agency. Then Musk unfollowed Bessent on X.

On Tesla’s earnings call on April 22, Musk condemned protesters and baselessly alleged they’re being funded by outside groups, the “recipients of wasteful largesse.”

He said he will keep up with DOGE through the remainder of Trump’s term, “just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we have stopped does not come roaring back.”

“So I think I’ll continue to spend, you know, a day or two per week on government matters for as long as the president would like me to do so, and as long as it is useful,” he said.

DOGE’s critics are hopeful its work will be undone by the courts, but any judgment against Musk’s government work will face an administration resistant to court orders and sharing Musk’s “commitment to the destruction of the government apparatus,” Public Citizen’s Weissman said.

“We’re really looking at a post-Trump period. And it’s obviously way too soon to really say,” he said. “I mean, one thing is no one will be able to snap their fingers and just put it back together.”

“He was a tremendous help, both in the campaign and in what he’s done with DOGE,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on April 23.

“What he does is good,” he said. “And we have to, at some point, let him go and do that. And we expected to be doing it, about this time.”