Washington Got the Better of Elon Musk

The tech tycoon’s Department of Government Efficiency was prevented from achieving its full reform agenda.

It seems that the postmodern world is a conspiracy against great men. Bureaucracy now favors the firm over the founder, and the culture views those who accumulate too much power with suspicion. The twentieth century taught us to fear such men rather than admire them.

Elon Musk—who has revolutionized payments, automobiles, robotics, rockets, communications, and artificial intelligence—may be the closest thing we have to a “great man” today. He is the nearest analogue to the robber barons of the last century or the space barons of science fiction. Yet even our most accomplished entrepreneur appears no match for the managerial bureaucracy of the American state.

Musk will step down from his position leading the Department of Government Efficiency at the end of May. At the outset, the tech tycoon was ebullient, promising that DOGE would reduce the budget deficit by $2 trillion, modernize Washington, and curb waste, fraud, and abuse. His marketing plan consisted of memes and social media posts. Indeed, the DOGE brand itself was an ironic blend of memes, Bitcoin, and Internet humor.

Three months later, however, Musk is chastened. Though DOGE succeeded in dismantling USAID, modernizing the federal retirement system, and improving the Treasury Department’s payment security, the initiative as a whole has fallen short. Savings, even by DOGE’s fallible math, will be closer to $100 billion than $2 trillion. Washington is marginally more efficient today than it was before DOGE began, but the department failed to overcome the general tendency of governmental inertia.

Musk’s marketing strategy ran into difficulties, too. His Internet-inflected language was too strange for the average citizen. And the Left, as it always does, countered proposed cuts with sob stories and personal narratives, paired with a coordinated character-assassination attempt portraying Musk as a greedy billionaire eager to eliminate essential services and children’s cancer research.

However meretricious these attacks were, they worked. Musk’s popularity has declined rapidly, and the terror campaign against Tesla drew blood: the company’s stock has slumped in 2025—down around 20 percent—and the board has demanded that Musk return to the helm.

But the deeper problem is that DOGE has always been a confused effort. It promised to cut the federal budget by roughly a third; deliver technocratic improvements to make government efficient; and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. As I warned last year, no viable path existed for DOGE to implement these reforms. Further, these promises distracted from what should have been the department’s primary purpose: an ideological purge.

Ironically, this was the one area where DOGE made major progress. In just a few months, the department managed to dismantle one of the most progressive federal agencies, USAID; defund left-wing NGOs, including cutting over $1 billion in grants from the Department of Education; and advance a theory of executive power that enabled the president to slash Washington’s DEI bureaucracy.

Musk also correctly identified the two keys to the kingdom: human resources and payments. DOGE terminated the employment of President Trump’s ideological opponents within the federal workforce and halted payments to the most corrupted institutions, setting the precedent for Trump to withhold funds from the Ivy League universities. At its best, DOGE functioned as a method of targeted de-wokification that forced some activist elements of the Left into recession—a much-needed program, though not exactly what was originally promised.

Ultimately, DOGE succeeded where it could and failed where it could not. Musk’s project expanded presidential power but did not fundamentally change the budget, which still requires congressional approval. Washington’s fiscal crisis is not, at its core, an efficiency problem; it’s a political one. When DOGE was first announced, many Republican congressmen cheered Musk on, declaring, “It’s time for DOGE!” But this was little more than an abdication of responsibility, shifting the burden—and ultimately the blame—onto Musk for Congress’s ongoing failure to take on the politically unpopular task of controlling spending.

With Musk heading back to his companies, it remains to be seen who, if anyone, will take up the mantle of budget reform in Congress. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is that Republicans will revert to old habits: promising to balance the budget during campaign season and blowing it up as soon as the legislature convenes.

The end of Musk’s tenure at DOGE reminds us that Washington can get the best even of great men. The fight for fiscal restraint is not over, but the illusion that it can be won through efficiency and memes has been dispelled. Our fate lies in the hands of Congress—and that should make Americans pessimistic.