Comment: No one saw Musk’s DOGE rampage coming or its threat

By Carl P. Leubsdorf / The Dallas Morning News

Anyone who followed Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and the detailed reporting about his plans could hardly have been surprised when he moved promptly to stem illegal immigration and punish perceived political enemies.

But the fact that his new administration has moved far more quickly and far more extensively to shutter or remake large portions of the central government stems largely from a less anticipated factor: the emergence of billionaire Elon Musk as a one-man wrecking crew, acting without significant political or legal restraint.

Trump may be issuing dozens of questionable edicts, but Musk is running with them; and, in some cases, going beyond them. He is forcing thousands of government employees out of their jobs to halt programs they manage without the required congressional approval, spawning both chaos and dozens of court cases.

Six months ago, the once-and-future president had not even met the South African-born entrepreneur who became the world’s richest man as the manufacturer of Tesla electric cars and the purchaser of the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. Like others in Trump’s orbit, he had once been critical of him.

He resigned in 2017 from a business advisory council to protest Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. In 2022, he said Trump was “too old” to be president, backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis instead. Trump said Musk “should focus instead on getting himself out of the Twitter mess,” referring to the fallout from his purchase of the social media site.

But they bonded when Musk endorsed Trump and poured millions plus his technical expertise into the successful Republican campaign to carry Pennsylvania. Trump named Musk and the since departed Vivek Ramaswamy to head an ill-defined Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to help cut federal spending. But the extent of its sway was in no way evident, since the presumption was it would make recommendations for Congress to consider.

That presumption has proven to be very wrong. Without any formal grant of authority besides Trump’s say-so, Musk has taken the president’s agenda and gone well beyond making recommendations, trying to remake vast portions of the federal government like he managed Tesla and remade Twitter, wrecking agencies and employees’ lives as he goes.

So far, Trump seems to love it, the pliant Republican Congress seems acquiescent if not supportive, the Democrats are critical but powerless, and the main resistance is coming from legal challenges by state attorneys general and government employee unions that may take months if not years to resolve.

Public opinion, which Trump follows closely but Musk apparently doesn’t, is only beginning to reflect what is happening. Some polls show overall approval of Musk and what he is doing has declined some. But Trump’s job approval is holding up, and anecdotal evidence indicates most of his voters are happy about his varied initiatives, even if legally questionable.

For a neophyte, Musk has shown substantial political deftness in choosing his initial targets, primarily agencies and programs that are unpopular with the public — and especially Republicans — though they constitute only a small part of the $7 trillion annual cost of the federal government.

Foreign aid, through the U.S. Agency for International Development, an early Musk target, totals barely 1 percent of the budget but has long been a GOP political whipping boy, though most goes to health, feeding and other do-good projects that bolster the U.S. image globally.

Also unpopular with Republicans are the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the federal bureaucracy in general. For years, Trump has stigmatized public servants in the federal work force as a secretive “deep state” seeking to undermine his initiatives, though they are the necessary engine providing many Americans with benefits and services on which they rely.

In fact, the entire federal work force costs $300 billion, or 4 percent of the federal budget. And this year’s total cost of the health, education, housing and food programs, which constitute the budget’s discretionary domestic spending, is about $1 trillion, or 14 percent, compared with more than $6 trillion for defense, required benefit payments like Social Security and Medicare, and interest on the national debt, all areas where cutting will be difficult.

Musk justifies his actions by contending he is acting to rid the federal government of widespread waste, fraud and abuse. And anyone who has examined the line-by-line items in the federal budget would find it hard to justify some of them.

But the savings to be gained by rooting out true abuses are less than could be achieved by modestly reforming the Social Security and Medicare entitlements systems which account for 60 percent of all annual federal outlays.

And Musk’s unauthorized, illegal rampage through the federal bureaucracy will almost certainly do more damage than good, by defunding programs that benefit thousands of people like rural hospitals, Head Start programs, and medical research, not to mention the impact of forcing out valuable nonpolitical employees with years of experience.

Since the Republican Congress seems disinclined to stop what Musk is doing and opposition Democrats lack the votes to stop it, the federal courts are emerging as the prime hope of restraining this administration. In the process, they are reminding Trump and Musk that this is supposed to be a government of laws, not a private company where the boss can do whatever he wants.

But that assumes an administration acting without self-restraint will obey legitimate judicial restraint.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com. ©2025 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.