Elon Musk came into the administration with a bang and left four months later with barely a whimper. His mission, on paper, was to make the government better and more responsive. He failed on both fronts. In the end, there was nothing efficient about the Department of Government Efficiency.
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May 31, 2025
Elon Musk came into the administration with a bang and left four months later with barely a whimper. His mission, on paper, was to make the government better and more responsive. He failed on both fronts. In the end, there was nothing efficient about the Department of Government Efficiency.
From day one, DOGE was an operation built on a series of failures and misfires. Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s first partner in efficiency, left the department after two months. The fact that he was even there in the first place was nothing short of ironic: Did the Department of Government Efficiency really need two people to do the same job?
Things went downhill from there.
DOGE illegally fired over 200,000 federal employees, terminated thousands of federal contracts and gutted the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to catastrophic levels. As you can imagine, it’s hard to be efficient when you’re severely lacking in employees and funding to get anything done.
Meanwhile, Musk was losing steam — and popularity. Polls showed...
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