Is Elon Musk remaking government or breaking it?

Of all the things President Donald Trump has done at home since his inauguration in January, putting DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) under Mr Musk has turned out to be the most polarising. The world’s richest man is exalted by some as an altruistic genius and hated by others as a self-dealing villain. Is he remaking the government, or breaking it?

The Economist looked forward to what Mr Musk might do with some hope. He has transformed at least two industries. If he could reform the federal government—an organisation whose annual expenditure of $7trn is roughly equivalent to the revenues of America’s 20 biggest companies—that would be a boon for humanity. Across the West voters are frustrated because their governments are more adept at slowing things down than at making them go. Yet large democracies have for decades struggled to come up with a convincing fix.

So far, however, DOGE has stirred up animosity, as it has barged into one agency after another. It has broken laws with glee and callously destroyed careers. It has made false claims about waste and seized personal data protected by law. 

A sympathetic reading of DOGE is that Mr Musk is trying to bring creative destruction to bureaucracies by other means. His preferred method at Twitter (now X) was to break things and see what happened. Perhaps what America has seen so far is the destruction and the creation will come afterwards.  Others retort that the government is not like the companies Mr Musk has transformed.  Unfortunately, examples of DOGE making government less effective are much more numerous.

DOGE’s scope to save money is smaller than advertised. It is targeting discretionary spending (the part of the budget not on autopilot) and defence is excluded, for now. That means Mr Musk’s attack surface is just 15% of the budget. Because much of the rest of government spending is redistribution, there are no huge efficiencies to be had there. If he were cutting administrative costs wisely, that would be welcome. But too many of DOGE’s planned cuts have turned out to be misprints, like the $8bn contract it cancelled that was actually worth only $8m. Nor has it identified lots of burdensome regulation to cut, as was the hope of Vivek Ramaswamy, briefly DOGE’s co-head.  Worst is that DOGE’s actions so far look as if they are designed not to make government work better, but to expand the president’s power and root out wrongthink.

Even this does not mean DOGE has failed—yet. There are three possible outcomes. First, that just as rivals laughed at Tesla and SpaceX in their early days, DOGE will come good in time. Second, that Mr Musk will break the government. The third, likeliest scenario is that DOGE becomes snarled up in court; many good civil servants are fired or quit; fewer talented people see government as an appealing career; and America is left with a stronger president and a weaker Congress.  This would be a huge missed opportunity.