It ended, of course, with a tweet. Late Wednesday evening, Elon Musk announced the official end of his short traumatic mandate as head of an invented agency called the government's ministry. Musk job On X, the social network of the media he owns and had sought to arm in the service of a radical assault on cost cost against the federal government, was brief. After thanking Donald Trump for “the opportunity to reduce unnecessary spending”, the richest man in the world, deflated but always provocative, added: “The @doge mission will only strengthen with time because it becomes a way of life throughout the government”.
The criticisms of Musk's unleashing in Washington have rightly been vicious: who, in recent months crazy, could not have taken note of his toxic combination of law and ignorance, his largely overestimated claims, and his ethos with blows and the break that led to ethos who move and the break that led to years that will fully evaluate? Musk, the biggest individual donor in a single electoral cycle in American history, really seemed to believe what his criticisms feared – that his hundreds of millions of dollars spent for the name of Trump and the republican causes had bought him a disproportionate part of the presidency itself. He sought to collect in an unprecedented manner, settling in the White House alongside Trump, helicopter on Marine One with his young son in a trailer, speaking during meetings of the cabinet, although he did not hold any official seat confirmed by the Senate at the table. He demanded sensitive government data on millions of Americans, empowering a former trainee known online under the names of large balls and has exploded the United States program. In February, he seriously bought on stage at a conservative event with a chainsaw – no metaphorical subtlety there – and, when he dismissed thousands of workers and fully abolished agencies, he became the joyful personification of the GOP federal campaign to denigrate and reduce the American federal government.
In a series of release interviews this week, Musk rang all the predictable notes of a naive billionaire businessman aggravated by Washington's political reality. He said The Washington Job That he found that things were “very worse” that he had achieved it inside the federal bureaucracy, and that he turned out to be a “difficult battle” to take this chainsaw to the government. In a interview On “CBS News Sunday Morning”, he started the disorderly work to separate from the president. “I was, as, disappointed to see the bill for massive expenditure frankly,” admitted Musk, given that the “big and beautiful” Trump tax reductions for the rich and the discounts of expenditure for the poor will add billions of dollars to the budgetary deficit. Indicating the evidence, which, nowadays, counts as an act of lese majesty among the republican sycophants which surround Trump, Musk added that the measure “undermines the work that the Doge team does”. (What a “lie”, Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff, said, even if it was not.) Trump himself, as is often the case, was directly embarrassing why he had sold musk. “We need to get a lot of votes, we cannot cut-we need to get a lot of support,” he told journalists in the White House on Wednesday when he was asked about Musk's comment. Restification, Trump has never even mentioned the name of Musk.
Watch Trump brushing with casualness of the balance that remained for him as well as glue for most of the first months of the administration, I could not help thinking of Reince Priebus, the chief of staff of the White House in the long term, who was thrown by Tweet during the unboking of the air force and left on the padded tar of Andrews Rolluming without him. The truth is that Trump can barely afford one of these disorderly divorces in which he and Musk excellent; He still needs Musk, who spoke of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in his fortune to help pro-Trump groups before the mid-term elections next year. The oligarch may have left the building, but it is not clear that the president can afford to live without him.
I was in Madison Square Garden last October when Musk, during an electoral rally for Trump, said that he would reduce an incredible two dollars of dollars, at least, from the American budget-a little bravado that attracted less attention than racism from the head of the rally and his vibration of Trump-As-Dear-Leader. Later, Musk composed his ambitions to cut a billion fresh dollars. Of course, it was never going to happen either, as anyone who had already spent a minute in Washington could have said it to Musk, if he had wanted to listen.
For all Musk's breathless claims on the “Revolution”, the final count of its efforts seems to have been somewhere about one hundred and fifty billion dollars. And even it is unlikely to be held. Lots of savings that musk boasted on the DOGE The website proved to be nonexistent; Many agencies and departments he attacked are now pursuing to block the wave of shots and cuts he has set in motion. In the end, its reckless approach to the reduction, with little or no reflection on the consequences, can cost the government up to a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars only this exercise, according to recent estimates of the Public Service Partnership. It turns out that it is not inexpensive to place tens of thousands of workers on paid leave and to rehire employees wrongly, not to mention the lost productivity of a traumatized and uncertain workforce. Who would have thought?
Musk's failure to follow his boasts, however, should not harm a clear evaluation of the extraordinary damage he has managed to do. The wise men laughs in musk outside the city, and I understand. His “performative vandalism”, as Jonah Goldberg said on CNN, was in some respects just a new pernicious and very dangerous variant of a Washington Perennial: the Pol who makes promises he cannot hold. But it is difficult to think of any other unlealed official who has done so much trouble in the American government in such a short time. The fact that the deficit can become even greater at the end of the day only aggravates the injury.
A few hours before Musk's announcement, I spoke with one of his thousands of victims. Until a few weeks ago, Mary Boyle was a Consumer Product Safety Commission commissioner, the historically bipartite agency which, for more than fifty years, assured that the car seats and the baby ovens and the strollers for babies are safe. Boyle, one of the three people named Democrats of the Commission, said how Musk's men had indeed ended his office work in a few hours. The rumor came for the first time, the evening of Wednesday May 7: “DOGE arrived. By 2 PM The next day, two young men appeared in the agency's offices, in Bethesda, Maryland. At 3:45 am PMBoyle and the other commissioners received an e-mail from the interim republican president of the commission, informing them that he planned to provoke the two DOGERS who, “at no cost for the Commission”, would help the agency “with the evaluation and improvement of internal processes and operational procedures”. The commissioners had up to 6 PMHe said, to let him know “if I have your support”. It would be funny if it was not the kind of thing that should have been inconceivable in a functional democracy: here are the guys who will put us bankrupt, and they come really cheap. Boyle sent his answer, an email to the sole word: “No.” Not even an hour later, when he stopped at a rest on the New Jersey Turnpike, she received a kind of answer, from Trent Morse, the deputy chief of the White House office office: “Mary, on behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I write to you to inform you that your position on the Commission for the Safety of Consumer Products is dismissed immediately. Thank you for your service ”.
It did not seem to have any importance that the Consumer Product Safety Commission had been created by the Congress, had its budget provided by the Congress and had its commissioners confirmed by the Congress. The law itself governing the agency, was first submitted in 1972, could not be clearer: there were only two reasons to dismiss a commissioner – “negligence of duty” or “embezzlement in office”. Boyle is now found as the main plaintiff in a case that it did not expect to deposit: Boyle c. Trump. Although the attack on his agency was “cheeky” and “more atmospheric”, Boyle told me that she knew that it could succeed. The day after last week, she and her colleagues put their trials last week, the Supreme Court said that she could cancel the previous one of the New Deal era who protects the commissioners of the independent agencies against the president. In the meantime, you can forget new rules to restrict potentially dangerous ion batteries in electric bikes and scooters on which the Safety Products Safety Commission worked. Thank you, Elon.
Musk victims are not only in Washington, but worldwide, in refugee camps and scientific laboratories whose funding has been suddenly cut, in national parks, you cannot enter this summer, and in communities through the country where polluters will no longer be prosecuted. All these upheavals “will affect the functioning of the government in a way that we cannot even anticipate,” said Boyle. She is right. We were notified. ♦
