Musk-Trump's Self-Driving Government -- Tom Sullivan

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/04/25/musk-trumps-self-driving-government/

Into the ditch

Elon Musk arrived triumphantly in Washington “brimming with Silicon Valley swagger,” Zachary Basu writes for Axios. He leaves (to spend more time with his several families?) “with his reputation wounded, relationships severed, companies in crisis, fortune diminished — and little to show for DOGE but chaos and contested savings.” His plan to slash $2 trillion in “bureaucratic fat” from the government has worked as well as his self-driving cars.

Don’t go spending your “DOGE dividend” on tariff-inflated consumer goods just yet. DOGE, an enterprise worthy of the Trump name, has cut only about $150 billion. And that number is contested.

But wait! There’s less!

Elizabeth Williamson of The New York Times explains:

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000.

Neither of these estimates includes the cost to taxpayers of defending DOGE’s moves in court. Of about 200 lawsuits and appeals related to Mr. Trump’s agenda, at least 30 implicate the department.

“Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”

That achievement makes Musk Employee of the Month in a Donald Trump dictatorship determined to sicken or poison us nuevo-poor. Trump’s tariff mania cost world markets $10 trillion since Inauguration Day. Don’t look at your 401k, said one analyst to Americans who have them.

. . .