Why Elon Musk and his team have struggled to make the spending cuts they promised.
The way Elon Musk tells it, cutting government spending is easy.
“If you add competence and caring, you’ll cut the budget deficit in half,” he declared in the Oval Office in February.
Nearly three months in, though, Musk seems to be finding that there isn’t a silver bullet for his project, even in what he recently described as a “target-rich environment.” For all of the shock and awe of Musk’s efforts — with mass layoffs and the shuttering or hobbling of entire agencies — even the inflated figures of savings that he claims are falling well short of his goals.
Musk has promised to cut $1 trillion from the next fiscal year’s federal budget by Sept. 30. At one point, he promised that his Department of Government Efficiency — a vehicle to shake up government that is not an actual department — would save $4 billion a day until then. Then last week, he seemed to revise that goal down to $150 billion, which is where DOGE puts its estimated savings on its website.
He seemed to be moving the goal posts.
My colleagues David Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine report, though, that even that $150 billion figure may be more savings than the group can actually deliver. As they analyzed the group’s math, they noticed billion-dollar errors and claims of cutting spending that wasn’t actually planned for the next fiscal year — including the cancellation of a $318 million contract that did not yet exist. Phantom spending, if you will.
What’s more, as Musk and his team look for cuts, my colleagues Alicia Parlapiano, Margot Sanger-Katz and Josh Katz point out, they have trained their attention on just one part of the government: nondefense discretionary spending. That part of the budget, which does not include spending on Social Security or Medicare, adds up to only $950 billion — so even if the Musk team cuts every dollar, it would still fall short.
Musk is finding out what every government streamlining effort that came before him discovered: Shrinking government, and cutting its costs, are really hard.