Gabe Kaminsky
Elon Musk was back at SpaceX this week, planning to update the world about the company’s plans “to make life multiplanetary” right after launching the latest test flight of its Starship rocket. The update was canceled after the rocket spun out of control, but at least it didn’t explode after liftoff like SpaceX’s last two flights. Notwithstanding the two failed launches, Musk is back to doing what he does best.
But now that the world’s richest man has returned to a mission he had long before Donald Trump tapped him to lead DOGE, what will become of the bureaucracy-hunting, cost-cutting attack dog that Musk unleashed on the federal government?
Musk, who said this week he is back to “spending 24/7 at work” for X, xAI, Tesla, and SpaceX and “sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” might find more success in his quest to reach Mars than he did as the leader of DOGE. His exit followed a chaotic five months that spurred a conveyor belt of legal challenges and resistance from top Trump officials, as well as pushback from Republicans to what looked like DOGE’s inflated estimates of how much in federal spending it helped cut. DOGE’s website puts the total at $175 billion, but outside budget experts and some conservative critics have said the actual savings are much smaller due to DOGE overcounting grants and contracts awarded by the government.
“Musk made himself a total pariah,” Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist in Trump’s first White House, told The Free Press. “He had access, admiration, unlimited resources—and by his own actions toward people, blew it all.”
On Wednesday night, Musk thanked the president in a post on X and wrote that DOGE’s mission “will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”
While Musk is gone, he is leaving behind dozens of DOGE staffers that he helped install at federal agencies across the bureaucracy to cut the waste, fraud, and abuse that Musk said was rampant. They have backgrounds in software engineering, human resources, law, finance, and real estate. Many are young and had no prior government experience.
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