04-14-2025, 06:13 PM
Reality gets in the way of Elon Musk’s latest misguided boast
Quote:Ahead of Election Day 2024, Elon Musk told voters that if Americans elected the Republican ticket, he’d uncover ways to cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal budget. After Donald Trump’s victory, Musk decided to walk that back — a lot — and told the public that he believed he had a “good shot” at cutting $1 trillion, cutting his original goal in half.
Last week, at a White House cabinet meeting, the president’s top campaign donor added to the pattern, declaring that he and the quasi-governmental DOGE initiative “anticipate” $150 billion in spending cuts — a small fraction of the goal he pitched to voters last fall.
Making matters worse, that figure appears to be wrong, too.
Quote:The Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that while the DOGE website claims to have saved $150 billion in federal spending, as of last week, “it has provided receipt-level breakdowns for less than 40 percent of that amount.” (When the Times sought explanations from DOGE and the White House, neither responded. Administration officials also made no effort to substantiate Musk’s claims.)
A companion report noted that the DOGE website has been “riddled with errors, double-counting and other large inaccuracies.”
I feel like you deserve to be able to visualize the scale of how much money is being mismanaged here so I even made you a little chart
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