President Donald Trump kicked off his second term with the establishment of the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project headed by business mogul Elon Musk. It was over by this summer, and now Musk is looking back on the effort.
When asked during an interview on The Katie Miller Podcast this week if he would ever do DOGE again, Musk said: “I mean… no. I don’t think so. I think, instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically built… you know, worked on my companies, essentially.”
During his tenure leading the effort to cut government spending, Musk saw electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla – a company he owns that he is perhaps most associated with – wobble. At one point, he lost an estimated $16 billion in one day.
DOGE’s methods of cost cutting also garnered criticism from experts, courted legal trouble and resulted in backlash from the public. After a series of vandalism incidents against Tesla vehicles, Trump even threatened people who attacked the cars with 20-year prison sentences.
Musk added that “they wouldn’t have been burning cars,” if he didn’t decide to take on the DOGE project. Regarding its effectiveness, he told Miller “we were a little bit successful – we were somewhat successful,” and that he was proud to reduce what he called “zombie payments,” that he said should not have been going out.
He also told Miller that the first days working with Trump in Washington D.C. were “surreal” and credited the internet with DOGE’s name. In those early days, he also called the initiative a “revolution.” Before he left the project in May, Musk and Trump had a public falling out that included the two men trading barbs on social media. Musk usually took to X – the platform he bought back when it was Twitter and rebranded, and Trump typically used the app he helped found, Truth Social.
According to the DOGE website, its savings were found through a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reduction,” with the total amount estimated at $1,329.19 per taxpayer as of Dec. 10.
However, experts have noted that the impact of DOGE is complicated and will have ripples for some time.
For example, the department initiated controversial mass layoffs that were met with lawsuits. Audacy reported in November that layoffs in the nation had reached a 22-year high, citing a report from executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which identified DOGE as the main source of those layoffs.
“This includes direct reductions to the Federal workforce and its contractors,” said Challenger, Gray and Christmas. “An additional 20,976 cuts have been attributed to DOGE Downstream Impact, which reflects the loss of federal funding to private and non-profit entities.”
DOGE’s staffing cuts resulted in concerns, including some about the nuclear sector as experts with knowledge of how to handle dangerous materials were let go. There was also a whistleblower complaint out of the Social Security Administration that indicated DOGE’s actions could have necessitated the re-issuing of every Social Security number.
In June, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington group said in a report that its “review of some of the programs targeted for cuts by DOGE and the Trump administration found that the elimination or reduction of these government agencies have directly cost over 50,000 people their jobs.” It also said that “DOGE’s cuts at these select agencies and programs could result in a loss of over $10 billion in U.S.-based economic activity and the shuttering of programs that have put over $26 billion in funds directly back into the pockets of taxpayers. Moreover, many of these affected programs have both economic and less quantifiable social benefits.”
Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institute also said in June she found “that early DOGE efforts were enacted on dubious legal grounds, which poses a threat to their permanence,” and “that they were undertaken without attention to and understanding of the government’s mission.”
She further explained that the early DOGE actions served to “demoralize and terrify the federal workforce into leaving their jobs.” However, she noted that Musk’s approach was not embraced by the public: “Brandishing a chainsaw on the stage of the winter meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee and vowing to use it to cut government was, it turns out, too much for the public to bear.”
CNBC reported in October that DOGE’s impact was also rattling the real estate market.
“A lot of private landlords are renting space out to government agencies, and they were counting on these agencies being in their space paying rent for five years. Now landlords have to find new tenants,” Cameron LaPoint, assistant professor of finance in the Yale School of Management, explained. LaPoint went on to note that this has an impact on “thousands of loans across the country the way the commercial debt market works.”
Writing for Rolling Stone late last month, veteran Michael Embrich said “America’s veterans,” have actually “paid the heaviest price for this Frankenstein’s monster, which spent months clumsily strip-mining the federal government in order to make the rich richer,” of DOGE. He named “firing veteran federal employees en masse,” and “pushing GI Bill mortgages toward default,” as examples.
Musk agreed with Miller when she said he sacrificed a lot to be part of DOGE. He characterized its actions as an attempt to stop money used for “political corruption” and later said he doesn’t want the U.S. to become a “communist hellhole.”
Despite any disappointment he has with the endeavor, the South African-born often-richest-man in the world has landed on his feet post-DOGE. Last month, Reuters reported that Tesla shareholders approved the largest corporate pay package in history for Musk. With it, he could get as much as $1 trillion in stock over the next decade.