What is Elon Musk doing? Not slashing the budget.DOGE isn’t getting anywhere near $2 trillion in spending cuts. Here’s a plan that would.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/05/doge-musk-budget-cuts-stockman/
In my first essay about President Donald Trump’s so-called DOGE commission last month, I wrote about David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and his failed crusade to roll back federal spending in the 1980s. Imagine my surprise when I sat down at my desk that very morning and found, at the top of my inbox, a cheerful message from Stockman himself.
Stockman, now 78, wanted me to know that he had written a 100-page memo for the original co-leaders of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, laying out a detailed plan to cut the $2 trillion in federal spending that they had set as their goal. (Ramaswamy has since departed and left Musk firmly in charge, because he wants to be governor of Ohio, and because Musk apparently grew tired of hearing him talk.)
Stockman’s note immediately piqued my interest, because the “Department of Government Efficiency” itself hasn’t offered anything like a road map for getting to its destination. And when I actually read Stockman’s plan, I understood very clearly why.
Before we get to that memo, though, let’s talk about the panic that DOGE has ignited in Washington, partly because everything about its mission seems squishy and suspect, like a bargain hotel pillow. All we really know right now is that, after conquering the U.S. Digital Service and occupying its offices, the world’s richest man is said to be sleeping on a pullout couch in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. (The place is rumored to be haunted, by the way. There’s a Jordan Peele movie in here somewhere.)
I’ve talked to multiple agency officials and policy experts in the past week who reported different versions of the same basic story about DOGE. In each case, young Musk acolytes called with questions or demands that betrayed stunning confidence in their own abilities along with total ignorance of how the federal government works. Among these experts is a 19-year-old Northeastern student named Edward Coristine, who goes by the name “Big Balls” online and, according to Wired, interned for one of Musk’s companies last summer. His since-deleted LinkedIn profile said he graduated from Rye Country Day School in New York and recently worked as a camp counselor in New Canaan, Connecticut.
Musk and the newly appointed interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Edward R. Martin Jr., have decreed that it’s a crime to publicly name anyone who works for DOGE. I look forward to my trial.)
In the past week, Musk’s minions have engaged in dramatic clashes with senior officials at the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Musk called a “criminal organization” shortly before barricading its building and folding the whole thing into the State Department. It’s not entirely clear what the purpose of these raids is, but from the outside it appears that DOGE is mainly concerned at this point with amassing huge stores of data, from payment information to private personnel records.
There are two schools of thought about all this. According to one interpretation, Musk has scaled back the original ambitions for DOGE, which has now been relegated to a role as glorified IT consultant, bent on automating systems and slashing jobs, rather than meaningfully reducing the size of government. The evidence most often cited for this is in the executive order that established DOGE, which went out of its way to make clear that the new department is not to tread on the budget office’s turf.
Others, however, reason that Musk didn’t spend nearly $300 million on Trump’s campaign and relocate his life to Washington just so he could reduce the federal head count. The thinking here is that Musk and his lieutenants are running tests and gathering intel as the prelude to an all-out assault on government spending.
Newt Gingrich, for one, predicts that DOGE will ultimately produce “dramatically smaller government,” even if it flails a bit at the start. “Assume that they are astonishingly eclectic and that they’ll try almost anything that works,” he told me. “And they’ll keep what works and drop what doesn’t.” (Gingrich also told me that Democrats would regret not ceding Trump the presidency in 2020, because now he’s had four years to plan this assault. I reminded him that Trump lost that election. “Well,” he said, pausing. “Not in his mind.”)
If Gingrich is right about DOGE, then we have to take Musk at his word when he says he intends to hunt down $2 trillion worth of savings in the $7.5 trillion federal budget. Let’s assume, too, that when he says even $1 trillion in savings would be significant, he’s effectively setting a floor for what he intends to accomplish. How close can he and his strike team actually get?
This is where we get to Stockman’s sprawling memo, which Musk probably hasn’t read, although he should. What makes Stockman’s analysis interesting is that, unlike most budget-cutting plans issued by experts and commissions, it doesn’t reflect a sober, center-right approach. Stockman remains, after all these years, a radical critic of the so-called deep state and a proponent for blowing it up.
So it’s fair to say that if Trump and Musk were to get serious about slashing federal deficits, Stockman’s road map, which he has since self-published as a book, would be a reasonable place to start.
Stockman begins with a dramatic dismantling. He proposes eliminating 16 federal agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. (Yes, eliminating, as in not existing anymore.) He would cut 50 percent of the funding for nine other agencies, including the FAA and NASA, and about a third of the budget from all the others. He also proposes eliminating farm subsidies and virtually all pro-business tax breaks.
Leave aside for the moment that all of this would require congressional action. Stockman’s impressively detailed analysis shows that if you could wave a magic wand and do all the things he lays out, eliminating 535,000 federal jobs and shuttering dozens of buildings in the process, you would save approximately … wait for it … $400 billion.
That’s 20 percent of Musk’s stated goal, and less than half of what he considers an acceptable fallback.
No worries, though, because Stockman then moves on to a radical rethinking of American foreign policy, in line with Trump’s “America First” mantra. Stockman would surrender what he calls the American empire, bringing home all the troops from Europe and Asia, in favor of a “Fortress America” approach that focuses on protecting the homeland. After junking all the aircraft carriers and overseas bases, Stockman projects an additional $500 billion in savings. That’s still not even halfway to Musk’s goal.
The rest, of course, has to come from social programs — mainly Social Security and Medicare, which are the biggest drivers of long-term spending, and which Trump has already vowed he won’t touch. Stockman would means-test these programs, which is something any serious plan to reduce long-term debt would have to do (and, I would argue, is actually more progressive than the current Democratic stance of walling off entitlements for rich people). But to get to the $2 trillion target, Stockman takes means testing to an extreme: Social Security cuts would start for individuals at incomes above $75,000, with benefits phasing out entirely once you earn six figures.
Does Stockman think his plan is realistic? Of course not — he’s not crazy. His real point is to illustrate the challenge Musk has set for himself. Stockman’s data-crunching demonstrates what experts have been saying for years — that “efficiency,” while a nice enough idea, has very little to do with making federal spending sustainable. Doing that would require a total rethinking of American foreign policy and the social contract.
“It’s a delusion-killer, okay?” Stockman says of his memo. “I’m all for Musk. I think he’s good. I think he’s refreshing. He’s saying, ‘Hey, most of what you’re doing here is a fairy tale. You can’t keep doing that, okay?’
“The problem is I don’t think he’s dived into this pretty seriously. I don’t think he even understands the full depth of this.”
All of which gets to the central question about Musk that no one in Washington seems able to answer. When he said he wanted to cut more than one-quarter of federal spending, did he just have no clue what he was talking about? Or was it part of some clever plan, a bank shot that we’re not smart enough to see coming?
People who met with Ramaswamy at the outset of DOGE came away with the impression that it was the pompadoured provocateur who really got jazzed about debt, which he wanted to attack quickly through executive action. Musk, on the other hand, was said to be mainly passionate about smashing the bureaucracy and creating a vastly smaller workforce.
So maybe Musk got stuck with this $2 trillion goal, because that’s what Ramaswamy wanted, but in reality the whole subject of the federal budget just bores him to tears, and he has no idea what any of those numbers really mean.
My problem with this theory, though, is that you’re talking about a guy who almost single-handedly — and against all prevailing wisdom — built the country’s first successful electric car and then a private space company on which NASA is now dependent. Musk may be a lot of things, but dumb isn’t among them. I find it hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have bothered to familiarize himself with the federal budget before shooting off his mouth. I can see him devouring the entire thing while simultaneously stabbing his way through a swarm of goatmen in “Diablo.”
Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 is a useful case study here. At the time, the $44 billion impulse buy seemed like an act of petulance and bad business acumen, and by some measures it was; Musk terrorized and fired its employees, vacillated between business models, drove away advertisers and ultimately lost billions.
In retrospect, though, most of us who laughed at his hubris can see that Musk pulled off something remarkable. Whatever havoc he wreaked on the platform for its users and engineers, Musk created for himself the loudest personal microphone in the country — the modern equivalent of Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. Musk’s dominance of Twitter took his cultural and political influence to a new level and made it possible for him to become the second-most powerful man in Washington. Not a bad return on investment.
Was that always the plan for Twitter, or did Musk have to improvise when the whole thing started going south? I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters. The episode suggests that even if Musk doesn’t have a coherent plan for DOGE right now, he eventually will. And whatever that plan ends up being, you can bet it will be good for Elon Musk.
In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clearShrink government, control data and -- according to one official closely watching the billionaire’s DOGE -- replace “the human workforce with machines.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/08/doge-musk-goals/
Elon Musk appears at a Trump campaign event at the Butler Farm Show in Pennsylvania on Oct. 5, just months after Trump was injured in Butler during an assassination attempt on July 13. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Billionaire Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg on Washington has brought into focus his vision for a dramatically smaller and weaker government, as he and a coterie of aides move to control, automate — and substantially diminish — hundreds if not thousands of public functions.
In less than three weeks, Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified. Gain control of the flow of funds. And push hard — by means legal or otherwise — to eliminate jobs and programs not ideologically aligned with Trump administration goals.
The DOGE campaign has generated chaos on a near-hourly basis across the nation’s capital. But it appears carefully choreographed in service of a broader agenda to gut the civilian workforce, assert power over the vast federal bureaucracy and shrink it to levels unseen in at least 20 years. The aim is a diminished government that exerts less oversight over private business, delivers fewer services and comprises a smaller share of the U.S. economy — but is far more responsive to the directives of the president.
Though led by Musk’s team, this campaign is broadly supported by President Donald Trump and his senior leadership, who will be crucial to implementing its next stages. And while resistance to Musk has emerged in the federal courts, among federal employee unions and in pockets of Congress, allies say the billionaire’s talent for ripping apart and transforming institutions has been underestimated — as has been proved in the scant time since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
“Chaos is often the birthplace of new orders, new systems and new paradigms. Washington doesn’t know how to deal with people who refuse to play the game by their rules,” said investor Shervin Pishevar, a longtime friend of Musk’s.
Noting that Musk’s political inexperience has long been derided in Washington, Pishevar added: “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are two different storms backed by a majority of Americans — one political, one technological. But both are tearing through the same rotting structure.”
DOGE’s early directives, its technology-driven approach and its interactions with the federal bureaucracy have provided an increasingly clear picture of their end goal for government — and clarified the stakes of Trump’s second term.
If Musk is successful, the federal workforce will be cut by at least 10 percent. A mass bid for voluntary resignations — blocked by a federal judge who has scheduled a Monday hearing — is expected to be only the first step before mass involuntary dismissals. Those are likely to include new hires or people with poor performance reviews, according to a plan laid out in memos issued over the last week by the Office of Personnel Management, which is now under Musk’s control. Unions this week advised workers to download their performance reviews and personnel files in preparation for having the information used against them.
As much as half the government’s nonmilitary real estate holdings are set to be liquidated, a move aimed at closing offices and increasing commute times amid sharp new limits on remote and telework. That is intended to depress workforce morale and increase attrition, according to four officials with knowledge of internal conversations at the General Services Administration, another agency taken over by Musk.
“We’ve heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave,” said one senior official at GSA, which manages most federal property. “I think that’s the larger goal here, which is bring everybody back, the buildings are going to suck, their commutes are going to suck.”
To replace the existing civil service, Musk’s allies are looking to technology. DOGE associates have been feeding vast troves of government records and databases into artificial intelligence tools, looking for unwanted federal programs and trying to determine which human work can be replaced by AI, machine-learning tools or even robots.
That push has been especially fierce at GSA, where DOGE staffers are telling managers that they plan to automate a majority of jobs, according to a person familiar with the situation.
“The end goal is replacing the human workforce with machines,” said a U.S. official closely watching DOGE activity. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”
The defenestration of the federal workforce could clear the way for Trump and Musk to cancel federal spending or eliminate entire agencies without approval of Congress, an unprecedented expansion of executive power. This week, Tom Krause, a Musk ally, was installed to oversee an agency in the U.S. Treasury Department responsible for executing trillions of dollars in annual payments to the full array of recipients, from contractors and grantees to military families and retirees. The Bureau of Fiscal Service has long simply cut the checks as ordered by various federal agencies, but Krause’s appointment may change that.
Meanwhile, White House officials have begun preparing budget documents that seek to cut some agencies and departments by as much as 60 percent, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal deliberations. It’s unclear whether Trump will feel compelled to ask Congress to approve those cuts. Though the Constitution specifically invests spending power in Congress, Musk and Trump budget chief Russell Vought have argued they should have authority to slash spending unilaterally.
Taken together, experts say, these shifts amount to one of the most aggressive attempted overhauls of the federal government in American history.
David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown University, said the proposed cuts would return the modern civil service to the late 19th century, before the enactment of anti-corruption reforms. Super said the two biggest previous power grabs were President Richard M. Nixon’s 1973 attempt to cancel federal programs he didn’t like and President Harry S. Truman’s 1952 effort to nationalize the steel industry — both of which were struck down by the courts.
“The administration is doing the equivalent of these moves several times a day, every day,” Super said. “The division we’ve had since 1787 is checks and balances — that no one branch is preeminent, but that all three are required to work together. The vision here is an extremely strong executive and a subordinate judiciary and Congress.”
Musk’s defenders say he and Trump are applying the long-standing idea of “zero based budgeting” — taking all spending to zero and then rebuilding from scratch — to the federal government for the first time. The moves are also characteristic of Musk’s boundary-pushing management style. When he took over Twitter, he fired more than 75 percent of the staff. He also has had a preference for a lean workforce at Tesla, an opposition to unions at all his companies and a habitual willingness everywhere to push past norms and rules.
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