Elon Musk-Trump spat on X is a distraction from the failures of DOGE | Opinion

Bilal BaydounDetroit Free Press

Elon Musk stepped down from his position as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on May 30, only months after promising to transform government by cutting trillions of dollars from the federal budget and eliminating so-called “waste, fraud and abuse.”

Just a week later, Musk’s relationship with President Donald Trump ― the man Musk spent nearly $300 million to elect — went up in flames, as Americans watched the drama unfold in real time on X and Truth Social. Trump publicly denounced Musk as “disloyal” for criticizing the president's signature legislative effort, the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” while Musk called the bill a “disgusting abomination” and openly called for Trump's impeachment. The spectacle of the richest man in the world and the president of the United States exchanging insults online may be remembered as DOGE’s final chapter in the public imagination.

But it should not obscure the damage Musk wrought when he commanded one of the most powerful positions in the Trump administration.

What savings?

To start, Musk’s promised savings never came. The DOGE website currently claims to have saved the public $175 billion through a range of actions like eliminating “fraud and improper payment” and cancelling grants. But even that sum — which is believed to be falsely inflated through a combination of guesswork and suspect arithmetic — is less than 3% of the federal budget, and less than 9% of the $2 trillion in cuts Musk promised upon assuming his role. In other words, DOGE failed on Musk’s own terms.

What did materialize is an unprecedented attack on public institutions, beginning with the people who carry out the work of public service.

According to the latest data, around 260,000 federal employees have either been forced out, been slated for cuts, or chosen to leave their posts since DOGE began its work.

These aren’t faceless “bureaucrats.” They are the people who test our water for contaminants, inspect our food for harmful bacteria, and ensure air travel is safe, among other public services.

The department with the highest number of planned terminations is Veterans Affairs, with up to 80,900 personnel serving our nation’s veterans slated for future cuts, according to the New York Times. Many of these jobs are health care workers who care for veterans directly.

Government isn’t a business

In cutting both people and programs that provide essential services, DOGE attempted a bargain that Michiganders are painfully familiar with: treat government like a business, and attempt to cut public services to balance the books no matter the risks to public health, the economy or democracy.

During our state’s era of emergency management, decision-making power in several cities and school districts like Flint and Detroit shifted from democratically elected local officials to appointees of the governor.

In Flint, a series of emergency managers focused on cost-cutting to address the city’s financial crisis, including the ill-fated decision to switch the city’s water source. The result was the worst man-made environmental catastrophe in American history.

The view from Michigan

Flint should have been a warning to the country that “efficiency” without regard for public welfare is a dangerous proposition. Yet DOGE was a far more extreme expression of this logic.

Like Flint, the DOGE experiment is a grave warning about what happens when democracy is treated as a private enterprise rather than a public trust, when billionaires think they know best what people need in their own communities.

And while it may take decades to account for the potential harms DOGE’s actions might produce, we are already seeing some.

Here in Michigan, DOGE reportedly canceled $394 million in federal public health grants, money that ultimately supports local health initiatives statewide.

These cuts are not abstract. They will be felt in people’s bodies and the broader society. Local health providers will have to cut back on critical services such as vaccine administration and interventions for substance use disorder. According to a 2019 study, every dollar invested in public health departments yields as much as $67 to $88 of benefits to society.

DOGE also cut $15 million in AmeriCorps funding for our state, impacting programs that offered tutoring, support for seniors, and assistance for homeless residents. At a time when Michigan ranks 34th in the nation in overall child wellbeing, students in more than 60 school districts may see tutoring support disappear.

Who benefits?

This begs the question: Who ultimately benefited from Musk’s relentless cutting?

The clear answer is Elon Musk, who is $170 billion richer since endorsing Trump in the summer of 2024, even accounting for the drop in Tesla’s stock attributed to the public backlash over DOGE’s actions. (How this most recent fiasco will affect Musk’s bottom line remains to be seen.)

Meanwhile, DOGE spent months attempting to “delete” entire agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which stops predatory banks from scamming veterans, seniors, and consumers in general. And it destroyed the IRS’ ability to audit wealthy tax cheats, forcing workers and families to shoulder more of the nation’s tax responsibility.

DOGE has also made us less free. The initiative’s most significant legacy may be what the writer Julia Anguin described as “a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration ― the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.”

In agency after agency, Musk and his lieutenants accessed the most sensitive data about Americans and handled it with reckless disregard.

Information like Social Security numbers and bank accounts that once stood in the relative safety of government silos are now being merged to create more sweeping surveillance tools than ever before. They could be used to further crack down on immigrants’ speech, or to simply make it easier to target political enemies.

A fitting coda

This is what we’re left with. A public more exposed to harm — from preventable diseases, from corporate predation and scams, from toxins in our air and water—and a small group of wealthy elites more empowered to dominate our government and our democracy. Perhaps this is why a solid majority of Americans disapprove of Musk’s job performance, arguably accelerating his departure from government.

The American public deserves a government that is fit for purpose and delivers on its promises.

But Elon Musk never intended to create that. DOGE was built on the fiction of Musk’s mastery of all things, one of the many myths attributed to the ultra-wealthy. What it concealed was a public sector novice who failed to understand the basic mechanics of the institutions he railed against.

On the day Musk announced his departure, a lawsuit against him and DOGE was cleared to proceed, accusing him of wielding unlawful power over federal agencies, contracts and data without democratic oversight.

It was a fitting coda. Musk left behind no durable reform, only institutions hollowed out, public trust frayed, and a template for how easily government can be turned against the people it exists to serve. Even this spectacular fallout with Trump should not distract from the wreckage he leaves behind.

Bilal Baydoun is Director of Democratic Institutions at the Roosevelt Institute, a national policy think tank devoted to building on the legacy of FDR. A version of this column was previously published on the Roosevelt Institute’s Substack. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it online and in print.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Elon Musk-Trump spat on X is a distraction from the failures of DOGE | Opinion