Musk Now Skeptical DOGE Effort Can Cut $2 Trillion From Budget
(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire Elon Musk expressed doubt that his government efficiency panel in President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration will actually be able to achieve $2 trillion in cuts to the US federal budget, backtracking from a lofty target that the tech entrepreneur himself had floated.
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“I think we’ll try for $2 trillion. I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” Musk told Mark Penn, a political strategist and the chairman of Stagwell Inc., in an interview broadcast on X, adding that he thought “we’ve got a good shot” at getting $1 trillion in cuts.
Musk’s downsized expectations come less than two weeks before Trump is set to be inaugurated and begin his second term. The tech entrepreneur along with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been tapped by Trump to lead a planned Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — tasked with reducing federal spending.
The $2 trillion target is one Musk himself floated during a rally Trump held in New York’s Madison Square Garden days before the 2024 election, and a figure which instantly drew skepticism from budget experts.
That amount exceeds the figure Congress spends annually on government agency operations, including defense. Achieving that target would likely require savings from programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which are popular with voters and which Trump himself vowed not to cut on the campaign trail.
In fiscal year 2024, the government spent $6.75 trillion, with more than $5.3 trillion of that stemming from Social Security, health care, defense and veterans’ benefits and interest on the debt.
Musk isn’t the only one to backtrack on a campaign trail pledge in recent days. Trump himself told reporters on Tuesday that although he had predicted he’d be able to broker peace between Ukraine and Russia on his first day in office, the project could actually take six months.
Musk is the world’s richest person and his own companies, including Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, have benefited from government contracts and spending, such as electric vehicle tax credits and infrastructure investments.
Similar efforts to slash federal expenditures in Congress, such as one by Republican Senator Rand Paul, which proposed cutting six pennies out of every dollar projected to be spent in the next five fiscal years, have failed to pass. While Republicans control both chambers of Congress, their slim majorities make it unlikely such sweeping legislative efforts will make it to Trump’s desk.
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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