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It’s only February and we might already have our Word of the Year: “efficiency.” As in the Department of Government Efficiency, created by President Donald Trump and led, according to Trump, by Elon Musk. Officially, the White House has walked back Trump’s original claim, which he posted on Truth Social, about Musk’s leadership, and maintains that Musk is not even a DOGE employee but simply “a patriot.” Regardless of his official title, he seems to be intimately involved with DOGE’s work, which has inspired speculation that he stands to gain from this work personally.
An Executive Order from President Trump makes it clear that “efficiency,” though never quite defined, has to do with the elimination of “waste” and “bloat” by way of “reforming the federal workforce to maximize efficiency and productivity.” According to Trump, there’s a lot of bloat in “The Bureaucracy,” which Musk calls the fourth branch of US government. Appearing with Musk and his four-year-old child at an Oval Office press conference, Trump said Musk’s team has “already found billions of dollars. Not, like, a little bit: billions, many billions of dollars. And when you get down to it, it’s going to be probably close to a trillion dollars.”
Musk says that DOGE will cut $55 billion from the annual US budget. Reporters have questioned the accuracy of this claim. Politico, reviewing DOGE’s first comprehensive public listing, called it “messy” and “inaccurate.” And the New York Times pointed out that an $8 billion contract DOGE bragged about canceling was in reality just $8 million. Elizabeth Linos, a public policy researcher at Harvard, wondered if the endgame is really the destruction of any recognizable form of US government. Whether Musk’s DOGE will save any real taxpayer money by dismantling public goods in the name of “efficiency” remains to be seen.
