Musk
leaves Washington behind but with powerful friends in place.
Just three
months ago, Elon Musk stood before a crowd of roaring conservatives and held up
a chain saw. He was at the height of his influence, swaggering in a
self-designed role with immense power inside and outside the government.
May 29,
2025, 7:37 p.m. ET6 hours ago
David A.
Fahrenthold Eric Lipton and
Jess Bidgood Reporting from
Washington
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05/29/us/trump-news
“We’re
trying to get good things done,” he said, using the chain saw as a metaphor for
the deep cuts he was making in government. “But also, like, you know, have a
good time doing it.”
Mr. Musk’s
time in government is over now. His good time ended long before.
Mr. Musk is
leaving his government position after weeks of declining influence and
increasing friction with both President Trump and shareholders of his own
private companies. But Mr. Trump on Thursday suggested that he was still
aligned with one of his chief political patrons, saying that he would appear
with Mr. Musk at the White House on Friday afternoon for a news conference.
“This will
be his last day, but not really, because he will always be with us, helping all
the way,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on his social media site. “Elon is
terrific!”
Mr. Musk’s
time in Washington has brought significant benefits to his fastest-growing
company, SpaceX, the rocket and satellite communications giant. Musk allies
were chosen to run NASA and the Air Force — two of SpaceX’s key customers — and
one of the company’s major regulators, the Federal Communications Commission.
But Mr. Musk
never came close to delivering on the core promise of his tenure: that he could
cut $1 trillion from the federal budget.
His
Department of Government Efficiency was full of government newcomers who
struggled with both the law and the facts. They posted error-filled data and
made procedural mistakes undercutting their credibility. They also rushed
through cuts without seeming to understand what they were cutting. On the
group’s website, 47 percent of the contracts they canceled are listed as saving
taxpayers nothing.
The group
eviscerated agencies and laid off thousands of federal employees, disrupting
services — and workers’ livelihoods — without providing the payoff Mr. Musk
promised. When he left, DOGE said it was only 18 percent of the way toward his
savings goal. Mr. Musk’s team also saddled the government with dozens of
ongoing lawsuits, including several in which judges have paused the cuts.
So just
months after Mr. Musk wielded the chain saw, playing the villain in
Washington’s nightmare, he left claiming another role: Washington’s victim. He
departed complaining.
“The federal
bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he told The Washington
Post. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to
improve things in D.C., to say the least.”
Mr. Musk has
said he is leaving because he has reached the legal limit for how long he can
work as an unpaid “special government employee.” He said in a post on X, his
own social media platform, that his budget-cutting group’s “mission will only
strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.” He
did not respond to requests for comment from The New York Times.
His
departure brought another sign of his waning influence in Washington. Mr. Musk
publicly bashed a bill backed by Mr. Trump that recently passed the House.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, thanked Mr. Musk for his
service, but said Mr. Trump still supports the bill.
“The
president is very proud of the One Big Beautiful Bill, and he wants to see it
pass,” she said, referring to the legislation’s name.
Mr. Musk, a
former ally of President Obama’s who had been drifting right for years, became
Mr. Trump’s biggest donor during the 2024 presidential election. During the
campaign, he suggested himself as head of a “Department of Government
Efficiency” — taking the name from an internet meme about a Shiba Inu.
It was an
example of the way Mr. Musk mixed the serious and the ridiculous during his
time in power: The most fearsome force in Washington, for several months, was a
small group of casually dressed young people named after a dog.
Yet Mr. Musk
was a highly useful ally for Mr. Trump during the 2024 campaign, and he
remained so once he became an official adviser to the president. Mr. Musk’s
social media presence became a potential weapon against cabinet officials and
administration staff members who might have voiced concern about his aggressive
measures against the work force.
Mr. Musk’s
power was clear on Feb. 26, when Mr. Trump held his first cabinet meeting. It
was Mr. Musk — an unpaid employee with little formal power — who spoke before
any of the cabinet secretaries.
“They will
follow the orders,” Mr. Trump said.
But in the
weeks that followed, Mr. Musk became less of a help and more of a magnet for
headlines that Mr. Trump’s advisers considered damaging, particularly in how he
described the social safety net, such as claiming he had found “massive” fraud
in Social Security spending.
Mr. Musk’s
budget-cutting group, despite promising transparency, was secretive.
It provided
one public window into its work: an online “Wall of Receipts” that listed all
the contracts, grants and leases the group had canceled.
In early
March, it already showed $105 billion in savings, more than one-tenth of the
way to Mr. Musk’s goal. “Unless we’re stopped, we will get to a trillion
dollars of savings,” Mr. Musk said on Fox Business on March 10.
But from the
start, the site inflated what the group had achieved, and often seemed to show
that DOGE did not understand the bureaucracy it was cutting.
The group
double-counted the same cuts, posted a claim that confused “billion” with
“million,” and boasted about killing contracts that had been dead for years.
Some claims were deleted, but the group never solved its problem with errors.
More
recently, the group’s site has shown that Mr. Musk’s frenetic cutting fell far
short of its goal. On the day he left Washington, it showed his group had cut
$175 billion. That may be swamped at the behest of Mr. Trump himself: House
Republicans recently passed a domestic policy bill endorsed by the president
that could add trillions in new debt.
“The intent
and spirit of DOGE were excellent,” said Dominik Lett, a policy analyst at the
libertarian Cato Institute. “But it clearly fell far short of its goals.”
The cuts did
have the effect of causing fear and disruption within agencies and reducing the
federal work force. It is not yet clear how many employees have been fired at
the direction of DOGE. Around 20,000 probationary employees were dismissed in
February. But because of legal challenges, many are still getting paid in a
leave status. Tens of thousands more have left the government through voluntary
departure options.
It is also
difficult to measure the impact of another project taken on by Mr. Musk’s
group: accessing and centralizing huge amounts of data about average Americans,
including Social Security numbers, immigration records and documents about bank
accounts and employment.
This
information had been kept in separate databases, to limit what any government
employee could learn about one person. But Mr. Musk’s group sought to collect
the data and merge it, alarming privacy and security experts and profoundly
refashioning the way government data is used.
Already,
this newly assembled data seems to have been used in immigration enforcement.
The Social Security Administration agreed to provide the addresses of nearly
100,000 people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Internal Revenue
Service’s decision to provide taxpayer data to the Department of Homeland
Security to help it deport immigrants prompted some longtime I.R.S. officials
to resign.
Some of the
efforts to access and share data have been temporarily held up in court. But
DOGE has won key cases that have allowed it to make real progress on a top
priority of the Trump administration.
Even while
he led the government’s budget-cutting effort, Mr. Musk also sought to shape
public opinion from the outside — using his social media platform X to pressure
Republicans and rally public opinion.
It worked,
at least at first. In December, before Mr. Trump even took office, Mr. Musk
convinced House Republicans to block a spending bill. Even after Mr. Musk took
on his official role, he regularly weighed in on other matters before the
administration, voicing his personal frustrations with tariff policy and Mr.
Trump’s tax bill in a way that Mr. Trump would not tolerate from others on his
staff.
In April,
Mr. Musk got a harsh lesson in the limits of his power.
He and an
allied group spent over $25 million to help the conservative candidate in a
race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court — turning the race into a referendum on
himself at the peak of DOGE’s influence. Mr. Musk’s candidate lost badly.
Mr. Musk
appeared chastened by the experience, signaling to others close to him that he
realized his public role in the race had become a political liability.
At the same
time, Mr. Musk’s companies began to feel the impacts of his new, polarizing
political identity. Tesla sales have slumped in the United States and overseas,
as backlash to Mr. Musk’s politics combined with greater competition from other
electric vehicle makers.
In the
United Kingdom, one anti-Musk poster showed a picture of the world’s richest
man emerging from a Tesla’s roof with his hand pointing upward in a
straight-armed salute. “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds,” the ad read,
referring to the year that Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. Mr. Musk has
said that his gesture, made at an event for Mr. Trump in January, was not
intended to echo a Nazi salute.
Even as Mr.
Musk departs, his companies still have their friends — and their business — in
Washington.
Sean P.
Duffy, the transportation secretary, agreed at his confirmation hearing to
re-examine $633,000 in safety fines against SpaceX delivered by the Biden
administration. The Federal Aviation Administration, meanwhile, has continued
to approve launch licenses for SpaceX, even after two recent incidents in which
its newest rocket called Starship exploded over the Caribbean, forcing
airplanes to divert to avoid falling debris.
Asked if Mr.
Musk’s presence in the Trump administration has affected how the F.A.A. treats
SpaceX, the agency on Thursday had a one-word response: “No.”
SpaceX,
already one of the biggest NASA and Pentagon contractors, could win billions of
dollars in new contracts if Mr. Trump’s budget proposal is approved by
Congress, particularly plans to build a new missile defense system he has
called a “Golden Dome,” and to accelerate an effort by NASA to bring astronauts
to Mars.
The Justice
Department in February also disclosed that it was moving to dismiss a case
against SpaceX, first filed in 2023, that accused the rocket company of
discriminating against people based on their citizenship status.
Three days
before Brett Shumate, a senior Justice Department official, submitted the
document to dismiss the case against SpaceX, he filed a separate legal memo on
behalf of the government defending Mr. Musk’s work at DOGE.
“He is an
employee of the White House office,” Mr. Shumate wrote in his Feb. 17 memo to a
federal court in Washington, referring to Mr. Musk. “And he only has the
ability to advise the president, or communicate the president’s directives,
like other senior White House officials.”
Another
thorn in SpaceX’s side was also curtailed while Mr. Musk worked in government.
The Fish and
Wildlife Service had two local staff members who routinely monitored SpaceX
activities in South Texas. They had raised questions since testing operations
started there in 2019 about harm that SpaceX had caused to an adjacent state
park land and a National Wildlife Refuge, including fires from launch mishaps
and damage to nests of threatened bird species.
One of those
wildlife biologists retired, and a second was transferred late last year to a
new post.
“There is
not any real oversight going on now there on a regular basis,” said Jim
Chapman, a board member at SaveRGV, an environmental group in South Texas.
An email
sent to the spokeswoman still listed on the agency website as the regional
contact bounced back, saying she no longer worked for Fish and Wildlife.
Reporting
was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Zach Montague, Theodore Schleifer, Michael
D. Shear and Eileen Sullivan.
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