Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – Serving as gangster President Trump’s hatchet man, Musk promised a lean efficient government but gave us chainsaw-massacre firings that devastated government functionality. While gloating about solving the fabricated grift and criminality of US foreign aid, Musk terminated life-saving medications for dying babies and ended food supplies for starving children. After ruining the lives of untold thousands of people here and around the world, Musk thankfully ended his crashed experiment in “upgrading” the government last Wednesday, announcing the good news on his propaganda network X.
“It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least,” said the pathetically disillusioned, billionaire arsonist as he walked away from the smoldering government wreckage he caused with his slash-and-burn tactics. Shrinking the government is especially difficult when it’s done callously and carelessly while consuming large doses of hallucinogens that cause bladder pain and incontinence, as the New York Times reported.
Musk apparently did not realize that it would be bad PR for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s most destitute children. He hadn’t foreseen the intensity of the reputation-destroying blowback to his phony, falsely named “Department of Government Efficiency”.
Last week, in anticipation of returning to his damaged business empire centered on cars, satellites and rockets, he attempted an image rehabilitation tour. Uncomfortably sitting for a few interviews, Musk played the predictable, self-pitying violin notes of a naïve businessman undermined by Washington’s tough political reality. It all rings hollow. His haphazard and cruel cuts to the government were a wanton assault on dedicated workers and worthwhile federal programs .
Musk’s Waterloo moment came fittingly on April Fool’s Day when the $20 million he donated to elect a Trump-backed Republican to an open State Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin backfired, driving more Democrats than Republicans to the polls. A political liability, many Republicans have distanced themselves from him: “People hate him,” a GOP operative said. “He’d go to Wisconsin thinking he can buy people’s votes, wear the cheese hat, act like a 9-year-old. . . . It doesn’t work. It’s offensive to people.” Democrats easily turned Musk‘s villainy into a campaign punching bag and will keep punching, whatever his future role.
The public has not only soured on Trump’s handling of the economy but strongly loathes Musk. He leaves Washington with his reputation as a genius, multi-tasking, jack-of-all-trades — a reputation that once boosted his company’s stock prices and won investors for his ambitious projects — severely damaged.
Tesla, which is the major source of Musk’s wealth, has suffered significant brand degradation while sales plummeted due to his pernicious political work and despite Trump hawking the car in the White House driveway. Disgruntled Tesla owners are trading in their cars. Rapidly losing market share to the Chinese electric carmaker BYD, Tesla dealerships have become scenes of protest and vandalism in the US and beyond. The ugly, impractical Cybertruck that he championed proved a historic flop — the Edsel of the 21st century.
Financially countering the truck debacle and ignoring the blatant conflict of interest, the State Department plans a $400 Million purchase of armored Cybertrucks, probably to be used at the border or to break up demonstrations when Trump instigates the Insurrection Act of 1807 — a law that allows the president to use active-duty military personnel to perform law-enforcement duties inside the US.
Despite Musk’s sham efforts to reduce government spending, he has won more than $13 billion in government contracts in the past five years and $6.3 billion in 2024 alone. Flush with taxpayer money, he leaves Washington in disgrace — his stint in government an abject failure by every conceivable metric other than the corrupt accumulation of wealth. In this, he mirrors mob boss Trump.
While relishing Musk’s unpopularity and his getting abruptly off-boarded by the MAGA government he spent a quarter of a billion dollars to install, any jubilation quickly dissipates with a moment’s reflection upon the catastrophic damage he caused. A toxic combination of entitlement and ignorance, Musk rampaged through Washington proclaiming vastly overstated claims while his move-fast-and-break-things ethos resulted in civic ruin that will take years to fully assess.
Without regard for the law or the human toll, Musk and his Doge minions spread chaos through Washington — dismantling the federal government with preposterous threats and actions, harassing federal employees with insulting emails, locking staff members out of computer systems, gleefully treating government employees as disposable, firing thousands of workers without justification, gaining access to personal data on private citizens, eliminating entire departments that work to prevent bird flu and safeguard our nuclear arsenal, paralyzing national parks, and sabotaging medical research by the National Institutes of Health.
Lifelong experts in key positions have lost their jobs, causing untold carnage to the fabric of government. For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “is not ready” for next month’s start of the hurricane season, according to an internal agency review reported by CNN. The disaster relief agency, which employs more than 20,000 workers, has lost roughly 30% of its full-time staff to layoffs and Doge buyouts.
Vindictive like his malicious mentor Trump, Musk attacked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration [OSHA], an agency that has scrutinized Musk’s companies — Tesla, Space X, and the Boring company — with numerous investigations, citations, and fines related to workplace safety violations. While OSHA has not been officially abolished, Musk and Doge have significantly sabotaged its effectiveness through groundless staff reductions, diminished enforcement capabilities, and political pressure.
Musk’s cruel disdain for federal workers led to unraveling countless lives. Their mental health has been shattered as they still struggle to find employment after being callously fired by Musk’s rabid desires to gut the federal government, as reported in the Washington Post. Musk’s dark legacy will partly be centered in the trauma and chaos so mercilessly imparted by him and his Doge creeps.
The Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, calculated that Doge’s attacks on government personnel — its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. This does not include the exorbitant price of trying to defend Musk’s indefensible actions in court. Numerous agencies and departments are now suing to block the wave of firings and cuts that he set in motion.
Musk’s berserk purge of the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible. It turns out it’s not cheap to place tens of thousands of workers on paid leave and to rehire mistakenly fired employees, never mind dealing with the lost productivity of a traumatized workforce.
Musk’s casualties are not only in Washington but all over the world, in refugee camps and scientific labs whose funding was abruptly terminated. His contemptible governmental work should be defined by this post on X: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper, could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” This is one area where Musk achieved his goals. He successfully shredded USAID — cancelling approximately 83% of USAID programs and imperiling services aimed at humanitarian assistance and disease prevention.
The impact on the Global South will be severe and far-reaching, where slashes to foreign aid will lead to needless suffering. Musk’s fellow billionaire Bill Gates warned that the cuts could cost millions of lives throughout the world. Gates starkly described Musk’s gutting of USAID as “the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children.”
Experts have also cautioned that tens of thousands of people could die as a result of defunding the AIDS relief program PEPFAR — its services reduced worldwide and its staff left in confusion over what they can still do for people who relied on their organization. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.
As Musk moves on, he consigns a mess of half-realized plans and dismantled agencies to his stooges installed in positions across the federal government. His departure plunges Doge’s already disruptive impact on the government into uncertainty, with questions over how much power the vague taskforce can wield without him.
Two prominent Doge staffers will follow Musk to the exit. The billionaire’s longtime top lieutenant Steve Davis, who was running the day-to-day operations of Doge, left his role last Thursday. Spokesperson Katie Miller, wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller, also left the White House to work full-time for Musk, according to CNN.
Digital parody. Dream / Dreamland v2, 2025.
However, Doge will not be left leaderless. Taking over for Musk, according to the Wall Street Journal, is Christian nationalist and key contributor to the rightwing Project 2025 manifesto Russel Vought, who is also the Office of Management and Budget Director. A longtime believer that the president should have sweeping executive powers, Vought has said that he hopes federal employees will be left “in trauma.” He has floated using impoundment to formalize Doge cuts to spending that have been legally appropriated by Congress — an action forbidden by the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.
Even at reduced numbers, Musk’s allies still have access to immense amounts of sensitive and confidential data they are reportedly intending to use to surveil immigrants and even create a massive database of all Americans. What seems farther away than ever, in the chaos, is Musk’s promise to make the government more efficient and better serve the public.
Last Friday, at a typically weird joint ”press conference,” the Propagandist-in-Chief struggled to rewrite reality, lying that Musk “helped to detect fraud, and slash waste” while promoting his own stupid, illegal, and unconstitutional tariffs. As the destructive love affair between the two delusional narcissists petered out, Trump tried to convey that they would remain tight, even though Musk probably would no longer be hanging out at Mar-a-Lago.
Refusing to kick him as he exists, Trump wants the $100 million Musk has pledged for his political operation. Trump never cared about cutting spending cuts anyway, as his ugly new tax bill shows: it is expected to add $2.3 trillion to the deficit, nullifying any miniscule savings Musk may have achieved. Trump simply wanted revenge on the fictitious “deep state” bureaucracy.
At the press conference, Musk — dressed in black like an awkward, uncharismatic Johnny Cash — stood next to a smirking and scoffing Trump sitting at his desk. Musk refused to answer a reporter’s question about a New York Times article which claimed that he was a habitual user of ketamine, ecstasy, and psychedelic mushrooms while Trump entrusted him with vast power over the government. Maybe that explains the childish onstage jumping up and down, the maniacal chain-saw wielding antics, the bizarre fixation on producing babies, his crusading for the far-right German party AfD, and his cosplaying as the Führer of the World with sinister Nazi-style salutes.
After Musk praised his gaudy, tasteless, golden Oval Office decorations, Trump gave him a tacky golden White House key and thanked him for his “incredible service.” It is hard to think of any other unelected official who has done so much harm to the US government in such a short period of time.
Having discarded his chainsaw, he was leaving town with a black eye. When a reporter asked Musk about it, he claimed that, while they were “horsing around,” his 5-year old son X punched him in the face. Getting clocked by little X was symbolically appropriate in that Musk deserves to suffer irreparable damage to his reputation for all the misery, chaos and death he has blithely engendered.
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