Musk leaves Washington behind but with powerful friends in place.

 

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.