$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team are expecting to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts from a government the billionaire Trump megadonor claimed was riddled with fraud, waste, and graft.
To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15 percent of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash. It’s a mere one-fiftieth of what the federal government spent just last year alone, would shave off only one-tenth of one year’s worth of the average federal deficit over the past decade, and is a whopping less than half a percent of the overall $36.21 trillion of US national debt.
Three months of Musk feeding the US government through a woodchipper has done less than nothing about the ostensible problem it was meant to solve.
In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden. Three months of Musk feeding the US government through a woodchipper has done less than nothing about the ostensible problem it was meant to solve.
That doesn’t mean it hasn’t had an impact though. The miniscule amount that Musk claims to have “saved” American taxpayers has proven incredibly destructive to the functioning of the US government and to the essential services millions of Americans depend on, including:
- More than 216,000 workers pushed out of their jobs.
- Major downsizing of the…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
