Elon Musk said on the campaign trail that he would slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. Then it became $1 trillion. Then $150 billion. According to Steve Bannon, it’s now effectively nothing. “None of this makes sense,” Bannon said during the Semafor World Economy Summit in April, criticizing Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project for falling far short of its ambitious promises.
The Atlantic reported that DOGE’s actual verified budget savings totaled just $2 billion, a far cry from the $165 billion the agency claimed at the time of its analysis in early May. According to the report, the project has been plagued by false savings, repeated counting of the same cuts, and expired contracts being listed as fresh reductions. Musk’s team once claimed $8 billion in savings from ending an $8 million contract.
“If you thought DOGE was really about cutting costs, you weren’t in on the joke,” The Atlantic concluded.
Even Musk himself has admitted it didn’t go as planned. In an interview with the Washington Post recently, he said, “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized.” He acknowledged DOGE had become a political scapegoat: “DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything.”
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