Elon Musk Has Already Backed Out of DOGE’s $2 Trillion Expensive Plans

Ever since the Department of Public Works (or DOGE) was announced, Elon Musk has been saying that he will use the agency to attack and dismantle large parts of the federal bureaucracy. However, Musk is already going back on his promises, saying that his previously stated goal – to cut $ 2 trillion in money from the federal budget – probably will not happen.

“I think if we hit $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot,” Musk said. in a recent discussion on his platform, X. He added that removing $ 2 trillion was “like, a very good result.”

Those familiar with the federal budget process had already realized that Musk’s plan sounded quixotic, if not impossible. Of course, the biggest items in the federal budget — Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending — are all political third parties, so it’s not easy to cut any of them. Glenn Kessler, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote: he wrote earlier.

Yes, perhaps cutting popular welfare programs is the plan—though it would be politically suicidal if so. It is true that the right-wing organizations behind Trump are focused on reducing government benefits for the American people, which they see as government “waste”. Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social studies at the Cato Institute, recently he told a Utah newspaper that the DOGE represents “a welcome opportunity to, little by little, show some areas where the government should be cut and where government interference in our lives can be restored.”

For Nowrasteh, government “interference” is apparently when the Social Security Administration sends you a check in the mail. Cato recently published a report that said it would “raise the eligibility age for Social Security by three years, reduce the size of Social Security to adjust for inflation, reduce Medicare spending by one-third, and allow enrollees to use their own Medicare funds,” Desert News reports. Musk in the same way hope has floated cutting official programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, even though these programs are very popular with the Trump base. Trump has also proposed cutting taxes on Social Security benefits, which could cause the program to collapse.

Musk also said that he would like to see DOGE “get rid of” the various regulatory agencies, even the opposition. you realize that this is going to be difficultif not possible. In general, Musk’s intentions to remove may be the organizations that have investigated his companies. Musk’s companies have been investigated by various agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration, and others.

That regulatory focus is probably warranted, however, since Musk’s companies are known for stirring up controversy. For example, this week Tesla executives agreed to pay about one billion dollars to settle claims that he had already paid himself in stock options worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The lawsuit stemmed from a 2020 lawsuit filed by the City of Detroit’s Police and Fire Retirement System, which claimed that the Tesla director’s salary was not fully deducted from the payroll system. Reuters articlesfor example, that the board’s chairman, Robyn Denholm, made $280 million through her compensation package.