Even Elon Musk admits that the Department of Government Efficiency he ran was only “somewhat successful”. He told an interviewer last week, given his time again, he would have continued working with his companies instead.
Doge closed last month, less than a year old – a historically bad example of how not to reform government. Musk promised $2tn in savings by this summer. When he quit in April, he had lowered his estimate to $150bn in fiscal year 2026. Even that is probably wishful thinking. A recent study by the Partnership for Public Service estimated that Doge’s actions will cost taxpayers $135bn this fiscal year alone. Add legal fees to defend multiple lawsuits alleging Doge acted illegally, lost tax revenue due to cuts in staffing at the IRS (maybe over $500bn in the next decade), lost economic growth due to slashing of research funding, and more.
Was government efficiency ever the true purpose of Doge? Perhaps the real goal, successfully achieved, was to shatter silos that kept separate kinds of data collected by the government, undermining long-standing privacy protections? How much data, as a result, has ended up in the hands of artificial intelligence businesses run by the likes of Musk and his tech bros (or worse, of hostile foreign powers)?
Even the Trump cabinet is washing its hands of Doge. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick says that by slashing jobs, Musk got things “backward”, and that his “focus should have been on cutting the waste, fraud and abuse, and the people you could do over time”.
There may be useful things public-sector reformers can learn from business. But surely no one now believes you can improve government by adopting the Silicon Valley creed of “move fast and break things”.
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