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In a breaking news story, apparently Trump has privately said Musk will step back from his role in the admin.
Of course, this has been claimed multiple times before somewhat falsely, so take it with a grain of salt! However, over the last couple of months it does seem that Elon has been wearing out his welcome in the admin, as many posters here predicted might happen.
I'm curious what exactly the problems have been internally - do you think it's just that Elon hasn't been able to defer to Trump enough? Or to put it more bluntly, to flatter Trump's ego?
Or is it more of an issue of a lack of cuts? I haven't been able to get good numbers, but I do think that the general 'vibe' is that Elon's cutting has been disappointing so far. Perhaps this is because of the coordinated media attack against him, but it also could just be that cutting the federal government is a beastly task. Personally I'm of the opinion he should have more time, but sadly that may not be the case.
The ostensible reason Elon is giving is apparently to focus more on business interests. This could be the case, as I'd imagine running multiple giant companies while also trying to head a govt. department is... basically impossible. That being said, it goes against a lot of the messaging Elon and Trump put together when they first started DOGE.
Either way, this turn of events, if it bears out, seems bad for team Trump as a whole, given how many eggs were put in the cutting government spending basket. Without Elon cutting hardcore, I fail to see how their admin can get even close to balancing the budget.
Already denied by Trump administration
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/musk-not-leaving-yet-wrapping-up-work-schedule-once-incredible-work-doge-complete-white-house
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What makes you think Trump cares at all about this? Nothing he has ever done indicates any kind of concern for the deficit - even the DOGE spree ended up targeting 'woke' spending specifically rather than 'waste' writ large. And of course he's lining up for the usual Republican budget-busting tax cut.
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I've been listening to a Tim Dillon (a standup comedian) for a lot of my political news. He called it a while back that Musk and Vivek were going to be fall guys.
The strategy that makes sense to me, and I think the one they've talked about before is to break down the government for the first part of the administration and then build it back up in the form they want for the second part. The building up will be easier if done by someone with a clean record. Someone seen as a voice of reason and stability.
You'd like talking to my girlfriend. She gets half her political news from Tim Dillon. Not sure I've ever laughed as hard as when she showed me the video about two very private people just trying to get home -- Prince Harry and Megan Markle.
Is Vivek even involved in the administration? It seemed like his influence cratered after the immigration twitter debate. I don't want to admit that we're at the point where internet flame wars determine presidential advisors, but we are.
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Musk was always going to be there only for 130 days. This is all the media speculating that he's going to stay on forever and then being surprised when they stuck to their stated plan.
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I think the answer is simpler: Elon is becoming a political liability. A Quinnipiac poll back on 3/13 found Elon and DOGE even less popular than Trump. Trump is under water by about 11 points (42-53) but Elon is under water by 21 points (36-57). Especially among independents, he's under-water 2:1 (31-63). A pretty solid majority also indicate they believe DOGE is hurting the country more than helping (40-54) and disapprove of the way Elon and DOGE have been treating federal workers (36-60). Heck, back in February an Economist/YouGov poll found that a plurality of respondents (46%) wanted Elon to have no influence in the administration. Compared to 25% who wanted him to have "a little" influence and 13% who want him to have "a lot."
This brings us to the Wisconsin Supreme Court election last night. Elon inserted himself pretty directly in the election, doing a $1 million dollar giveaway to promote the Republican candidate. In addition he spent upwards of $25m dollars to campaign for the Republican candidate. The democrat ended up winning anyway. I've also seen some analysis that Schimel (the Republican candidate for judge) did worse state-wide than other Republicans running, which some are attributing to Elon's prominence.
People have seen what Elon Musk has on offer and they mostly don't want it!
I wouldn't call him a "political liability"-- I'd call him the "fall man." Associating elon with the cuts means that as soon as elon is gone low-information voters will think the cuts have "stopped" and will forgive trump (and the republican party) as a consequence. Elon's role is to absorb the reputational hit for carrying out what the republicans already wanted to do.
This is another area where the opposition seems horribly unable to do its job -- most of the grassroots anger I see is directed at Elon Musk personally and not Trump, when all his power comes from Trump and the president has gone on record saying he believes in what Musk is doing at DOGE. Before the tariff debate, it seemed like we were in full Rasputin mode: it's not the tsar, it's his crazy advisor! I recall the "Elon Musk is AN UNELECTED MAN creating a coup against the government" thing from major Democratic politicians even early on in the Trump administration... it made no sense then and makes even less sense now. Everything Trump's opposition seems to say is exactly the opposite of what you'd want to say if you were working hard to stage a strong opposition and put pressure on the executive. It seems like everything the GOP is doing comes straight from Trump's mind, and everything the Democratic party is doing comes straight from grassroots anger and not strategy.
Those are two separate issues.
Musk creates anger because of his perceived or real (or trolling) far right views, because he’s the richest man in the world (naturally evil according to economic leftists) and because he was responsible for firing a lot of federal government workers directly and a lot of NGO types indirectly (by cutting spending), who are a core progressive class.
Trump himself doesn’t seem to care much about government efficiency, he only cares about tariffs.
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I think that elon has become too unhinged lately. Trump/JD Vance know that they have to deliver big on at least one of the two things they got elected on - culture war or economy. And Elon hasn't delivered big wins on the CW front - it seems that the authors of Project 2025 seems to be quieter but more effective on that front.
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Is there conclusive evidence on how these cuts are actually going, and how much money is being saved? It’s nearly impossible to navigate the media landscape of propaganda, lies, and hit pieces to really know what the numbers are saying.
Just wait and see what the next budget reports say? See if debt to gdp actually starts falling?
Here is a projection from the CBO (congressional budget office) projecting DOGE to be a massive failure, and note this analysis is from a right wing/libertarian news org so I’d actually give it more credibility: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cbo-forecasts-doge-and-ai-will-be-massive-failures-sees-us-debt-exploding-productivity
Unfortunately, according to DOGE's own numbers, it's a lot of "on paper" savings.
From some previous contracting work, I know an unfortunate amount about how Federal procurement works. The DOGE tracker sites I've found have direct links to FPDS (Federal Procurement Data System) pages for very specific contracts. That's good! But the devil is always in the details.
For any given government contract, there is the total lifetime value of the contract and dollars already obligated to it. As a toy example, let's say the Department of Commerce wants to do some general IT upgrade. It does some market research (not really, lol, but, whatever) solicits some bids, reviews proposals, and awards a contract. The total award value may be $500m, $1bn, or even more. But that doesn't mean the contract gets a big up-front payment of $1bn. It means that the Department of Commerce has given itself permission to spend up to that limit on this one particular contract (technically, depending on the contract type and structure, it could be across a lot of smaller contracts and/or task orders, but let's keep things simple for now).
When DOGE lists its numbers, its listing that full $1bn ceiling as the "savings." A few different media outlets tried to Point And Laugh at this, but the reality is that they're wrong as well. For the Department of Commerce (or anyone) to award a contract, they don't necessarily have to already have the budget approved by congress. In the industry, the term "unfunded opportunity" or "unfunded contract" is used in this case. The Government customer has a true need for whatever it says it does and can go through the bid and proposal process - but they have no obligation to actually pay you only because you've won a contract. Now, if you do any work on that contract, that's a different story. The fact of the matter is, unfortunately, that you can have a government contract that is effectively worth nothing even though it says "eleventy billion dollars" on the piece of paper.
Returning to DOGE, that they are canceling contracts and counting the ceiling value of those contracts could or could not be significant. If the agency in question already had their budget approved (and for several of these larger, longer term contracts, it is highly likely that was the case) then this the cancelling of these contracts does in fact save money from a future budget perspective. But it's not necessarily as if DOGE "found" $1bn dollars sitting in a commerce account somewhere and has now repurposed it for the General Purpose America Fuck Yeah account. They've freed up budget room next year and in the years following.
OR, they've cancelled a contract that was unfunded to begin with and so the savings are quite imaginary. It's like if you get an unexpected car repair bill and then mentally "cancel" your beach vacation. Did something happen? Not exactly. And certainly not in a true fiscal sense.
But wait, there's more. Just because a single contract within the Department of Commerce (to stick to my previous example) got cancelled, doesn't mean the agency as a whole won't find a way to reshuffle the budget and retain those dollars. Again, Congress controls the budget and they approve it every year (or, as has been the case for about the past 20 years - I'm not joking - the pass a weird series of CRs or otherwise out of order budgetary actions to sustain the budget as is with some new starts - kind of).
So, when do DOGE cuts get real and sticky? When Congress passes a budget. That's when you'll be able to actually see meaningful money stop flowing to agency / department X,Y, or Z. Until then, it's an on paper "win" (or not, see above) and, because it's happening totally within the executive branch, nothing stops a potential Democrat President in 2028 (or whenever) from flipping the switch in the other direction and directing Department of Commerce (and everyone else) to go ahead and try to get those IT contracts rolling again.
And I think this is part, though not the largest no most important part, of Elon's likely downfall in the Trump 2.0 admin. What he is used to doing in the corporate world is not possible in the Federal Government. The entire reason the founders set the system up the way they did was to make things intentionally hard to coordinate. They split the budget passers from the budget users and the law makers from the law enforces from the law interpreters. They did this because they wanted the default option to be "nothing happens." In the 18th century, this meant Americans were mostly free, then, to run their own lives. But through gradual executive overreach, aided many times by a cowardly Congress, we now have a poor situation in which the Executive kind of gets to do whatever it wants unless Congress or the Courts calls it out.
Very detailed explanation, thanks a lot.
Yeah, and this is why DOGE will likely fail. They will get some culture war cuts and furious headlines, but it’s actually up to Congress to not just pass CR bills that roll over the last budget into a new one. Congress will actually need to sack up and significantly cut outlays. Won’t hold my breath.
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The analysis is from the CBO, Zero Hedge's analysis (I would not put much stock in it, their analysis for years has been that the world is weeks/months away from economic collapse) is that CBO talks bullshit:
Actually I’ve found that the zerohedge in house analysis is pretty accurate (and sensational, but they are in the selling-clicks business). A lot of their reposts and features from different figures like Peter Schiff (long time gold bug) is very doom and gloom.
But also, they’ve been shilling gold for years and now it’s up >50% YoY on one of its biggest pumps ever?
Secondly, doom and gloom doesn’t mean that stocks are going to zero, economy dead. Really we are in a slow motion crack up boom, where runaway government spending moons the currency supply and this pushes home prices, stock prices, and asset prices all to unfathomable highs.
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Is that it? The idea that blabber mouth extraordinaire Donald Trump saying this is some insight into future actions of the administration seems like audacious wishcasting.
Was there some actual disagreement or complaint, I'd understand trying to game what's going to happen. If that quote is the whole of it, all I see here is concern trolling by the press.
People have completely forgotten that Musk and Trump have worked together before, had disagreements, and parted amicably.
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