Elon Musk Decimated the Government and Saved Almost Nothing
jacobin.com
Elon Musk’s cuts may have “saved” the public less than half a percent of the national debt, but they are already making Americans poorer and sicker and forcing them to spend hours waiting on phone help lines.

Summary

$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his DOGE team are “expecting” to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts.

To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15% of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash.

In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden.

“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    136·
    1 day ago

    “Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”

    So, mission accomplished then? I never believed for a moment it was ever about reducing waste / increasing efficiency. At best, it was scrounging the government couch for change to pay for tax breaks for the rich.

    • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      1 day ago

      Well, yeah. He should have named it the Department of Dismantling the Administrative State, but that’s not a meme.

    • Zachariah@lemmy.world
      241·
      1 day ago

      The only waste in government is corruption. “Inefficiencies” are actually resiliency—a crucial trait of any social system.

      • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        Underappreciated fact.

        I was listening to conservative AM radio (combo of morbid curiosity and masochism), and they talked about a social security warehouse full of documents and how inefficient that is in 2025, and we should get rid of it.

        I’m just like:

        First of all, there’s no way that’s their primary data source. So if you’re crying for modernization, that already happened a long time ago.

        But if you’re saying we shouldn’t preserve paper copies, then you’re opening the door to all sorts of terrible things.

        Like, saying we should just trust whatever the government says and not have to prove it in a court of law, or making our systems vulnerable to hackers, or making it so certain government actions can never be undone.

        But uh… I guess all three of those things have become hallmarks of this administration anyway, huh?