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I have to admit that even now I’m not sure how the Donald Trump/Elon Musk breakup will play out. We’ve seen so many Trump critics eventually cave, engaging in humiliating acts of self-abasement, that it’s hard to be sure that even Musk — who has a monstrous ego, but whose business interests can be badly damaged by a vengeful president — is immune.
But one indication that this breach won’t be easily resolved is the pace at which anti-Musk stories are being leaked to the news media.
I was especially struck by reports of a confrontation between Musk and Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary. We have solid reporting of the fact that the two men fought over the choice of acting IRS commissioner, and that Bessent won. Unfortunately, our only account of what happened next comes from Steve Bannon. But that story is almost too good not to be true.
According to Bannon, after the meeting the two men began exchanging insults, with Bessent pointing out that Musk had promised to find trillions of dollars in wasteful spending but come up empty. “You’re a fraud. You’re a total fraud,” Bessent supposedly said. At that point Musk body-checked the Treasury secretary, who hit back, and White House staff had to break up the fight.
Is this story plausible? Is the world’s richest man so lacking in self-control that he would behave like a hopped-up adolescent in the White House? Of course he is — that’s the completely plausible part of the story. I’m a little more skeptical of the portrayal of Bessent as someone willing to speak the truth that bluntly.
But in any case what Bessent supposedly said was completely true. Musk is a total fraud. He failed to deliver on his promises of huge deficit reduction. In fact, DOGE almost certainly lost money. There’s no evidence for many of the cost savings it claims, and the “receipts” it has provided are full of misstatements and errors. And the disruption it caused almost surely cost taxpayers more than any minor savings it may have found.
Furthermore, its depredations have left both the federal government and the nation as a whole degraded and weakened in ways that will take years to reverse.
Of course, you shouldn’t expect anyone in the Trump administration to admit that DOGE was a complete, costly bust. These people never admit being wrong. But if you look at what is actually happening right now, there’s clearly a frantic effort at de-DOGEification. The Washington Post reports,
Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.
The people DOGE installed in federal agencies appear to be losing most or all of their influence now that they no longer have a patron with the president’s ear, and it appears that at least some of the young tech bros Musk tried to put in charge of government programs they didn’t understand are self-deporting.
Oh, and if you think I’m being disrespectful by making fun of the Muskenjugend, consider what we’ve learned about the U.S. Institute for Peace, which DOGE took over for a while before being forced by the courts to give up control. Returning workers reportedly
found the office full of cockroaches and rodents, with leftover marijuana and empty beer bottles strewn about.
All of this was completely predictable. Well, maybe not a fistfight in the White House, but anyone who knew anything about how the federal government spends its money knew that DOGE would fail.
To repeat the old line, the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army. Musk made a brief stab at going after the insurance side, with his ludicrous claim that millions of dead people were collecting Social Security, but aside from that all of DOGE’s efforts were focused on where the money isn’t — nondefense discretionary spending (NDD).
Was this small segment of the budget bloated and full of waste? Hardly. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities documents, NDD on the eve of Musk’s arrival was historically low as a percentage of GDP:
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And if you look at the major categories within NDD, nothing stands out as an obvious waste of money:
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Or maybe I should say, nothing looks like an obvious place to make big cuts unless you think it’s a good idea to slash spending on international affairs — largely foreign aid — along with spending on science, environment and medical research. The Trump administration is indeed making big cuts in all these areas, but not because they involve waste and fraud. Instead, the goal seems to be to undermine U.S. influence in the world and destroy U.S. scientific leadership.
In any case, none of this has anything to do with the massive savings Musk claimed he would achieve by eliminating waste and fraud.
So how could he have made such foolish claims? After all, Musk is a brilliant businessman, creator of fantastic products like the Cybertruck. Oh, wait.
But the real point isn’t Musk’s personal failings. It’s the falsity of the whole claim that the U.S. government wastes vast amounts of taxpayers’ money. Of course there’s waste and fraud there, as there is in any large organization. But the federal government has in fact historically been a well-run organization, with many dedicated workers doing their jobs as best they can despite often being paid less than they could earn in the private sector.
Then Musk marched in, told these workers that they were worthless and pushed many of them out. He was wrong, and now he’s gone. But after the way they’ve been treated, the best federal workers are probably the least likely to return now that even the Trump administration is beginning to realize that it needs them.
America will spend years paying the price for Musk’s fraudulence.
MUSICAL CODA
