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“President Donald Trump said on Friday that billionaire Elon Musk will remain a close adviser, after the Tesla CEO ended a chaotic four-month stint leading the administration's sweeping cost-cutting campaign. During a farewell event in the Oval Office, Trump lauded Musk's work as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, which has eliminated thousands of jobs and canceled billions of dollars in spending - including the majority of U.S. foreign aid.” Reuters
The left is critical of DOGE, arguing that it caused chaos while failing to cut spending.
“Musk has acknowledged recently that his dream of cutting $1 trillion had been a fantasy. He said changing D.C. was ‘an uphill battle’ and complained that Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ budget bill, which could add over $3 trillion in debt, undercut his DOGE attempts to save money…
“A guy who went bankrupt six times doesn’t really care about spending. And Trump certainly didn’t want to see the headline, ‘Trump Cuts Social Security.’ He just wanted to get revenge on ‘the bureaucracy’ by deputizing Musk to force out a lot of federal employees and give the impression they were cutting all the waste. As always with Trump, the former reality star, the impression matters more than the reality.”
Maureen Dowd, New York Times
“Musk had a singular opportunity to create the government of our sci-fi dreams. Not just leaner, but better. More accessible. More fun… [But] He did not have a plan for the budget, nor did he even seem to understand it. He did not have in mind any wild innovations that would make navigating government services feel more like using CarPlay. No, Musk seemed motivated to do only one thing with DOGE: terrorize the federal workforce…
“To say that Musk didn’t make anything better during his five-month stint, however, is to understate the damage he inflicted. In fact, DOGE has earned the distinction of being the first in a long line of reform initiatives to actually make the problem worse. And not just because its cuts, by one estimate, actually cost the government $135 billion.”
Matt Bai, Washington Post
“We saw a pattern repeated over and over: Musk’s DOGE staffers would descend on a government office, demand access to critical systems and start destroying programs they didn’t bother to understand. Officials who stood up to them were fired. Contracts were canceled, offices were closed, and people who relied on services were abandoned… The demise of USAID is one of the most horrific legacies of Musk’s time in Washington…
“The abrupt cutoff of food aid to vulnerable people around the world ‘has destabilized some of the most fragile locations in the world and thrown refugee camps further into unrest’… The withdrawal of medical assistance — especially through PEPFAR, the spectacularly successful U.S. program that fights the spread of HIV in Africa — is already leading directly to people’s deaths, almost certainly by the thousands.”
Paul Waldman, MSNBC
“It would have been easy for Musk to take his private plane to a country like Uganda to see for himself the work U.S.A.I.D. has done providing medicine to people with H.I.V. or feeding refugees from South Sudan. Instead, he drew on the counsel of internet trolls and staffed DOGE with lackeys who were similarly ignorant… This kind of intellectual carelessness should make people re-evaluate their faith in Musk’s brilliance.”
Michelle Goldberg, New York Times
The right urges Republicans in Congress to enact the cuts identified by DOGE.
The right urges Republicans in Congress to enact the cuts identified by DOGE.
“DOGE’s crack team of mostly young techies shined a light on surreal instances of fraud and waste— from the literal mine where all federal government employee resignations are processed by hand to millions of dollars in fake unemployment claims filed with birth dates 15 years in the future. But… the department’s actual power was limited to mostly cancelling grants and contracts, which put a major cap on how much in savings could actually be realized…
“Republicans [must] make sure that DOGE’s efforts aren’t fruitless, and should, as quickly as possible. First, pass the $9.4 billion ‘rescissions package’ that the White House plans to deliver to the House on Tuesday, which will claw back $8.3 billion in foreign aid from the African Development Foundation and the US Agency for International Development… But $9.4 billion is barely a drop in the bucket of the $1.9 trillion deficit… DOGE started the war on waste; now it’s up to Republicans in Congress to finish the job.”
Editorial Board, New York Post
“DOGE estimates that it has saved taxpayers $160 billion. A sneering NPR claims that there is only data to prove $63 billion, but even if that is true, that’s an enormous amount of waste being cut. Was Musk shooting for a higher number? Sure. This is, after all, a guy who is literally trying to get to Mars. But the savings DOGE has already found and will continue to find until it sunsets in July of next year are nothing to sneeze at…
“The impact of Musk and DOGE also goes well beyond the mere grand total dollar figure… What Americans had felt as a vague sense that the federal government is wasteful became one concrete example after another of blatant and frivolous waste. These revelations have moved the Overton window in American discourse around spending. We will no longer accept blue-ribbon commissions with no power studying the problem for years on end, only to do nothing. We want action now.”
David Marcus, Fox News
“The U.S. government very obviously should not be funding LGBTQI+ programs in Lesotho. And Trump, Musk, and DOGE should have the thanks of the Republic for having put a stop to such embarrassing, counterproductive waste. But the U.S. government’s financial crisis is not built on the foundation of such waste. It’s not built on transgender puppet shows in Guatemala. It’s not built on the entirety of the U.S. foreign aid budget, even the good stuff…
“It’s built on decades of debt-fueled overspending on entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — for Americans, right here in the U.S. of A. DOGE never seriously confronted that problem, because — rightly — the executive branch and its appendages have no power to fundamentally alter the trajectory of our entitlement programs. That’s Congress’s job — a job the Congress has routinely shirked.”
Mark Antonio Wright, National Review
Meet Dozens of Gecko Species at a Tiny Brooklyn Zoo.
New York Times
