I Can Do MUCH Better Than Elon Musk at Government Cost-Cutting

Here’s My Plan to Slash Your Grocery Bills by 20% or More!

Mitchell Zimmerman, Progressive Charlestown guest columnist

 Photograph: Francis Chung/EPA

Elon Musk acquired his power over our federal government fair and square – he bought it from Donald Trump. 

The world’s richest man achieved the power to apply his chainsaw to millions of federal employees and to demolish entire government departments by contributing $277 million to Donald Trump’s election campaign.

But Musk and his DOGE cabal have made reducing the federal workforce way too complicated. Of course, Musk’s claimed DOGE cost-cutting has been shown to be pathetically erroneous (a supposed $8 billion contract that DOGE canceled was actually only $8 million), wildly inflated (he includes hundreds of contracts already fully paid out) and blatantly false (after acknowledging gigantic errors, the supposed total of “savings” shown on the DOGE website remained the same!).

No mind. Whatever reductions in government spending Musk has actually achieved by firing tens of thousands of government employees, I can do much better.

No need to demand that weather analysts, Medicaid employees, infectious disease researchers, forestry experts, letter carriers, and two million other federal employees submit five bullet-point essays on what they did last week. (Who would read them? And how would Elon’s 19- to 25-year old DOGE software whizzes, some of them still college undergraduates, decide which five pointers impressed them most?)

My simple plan: Fire everyone who’s last name begins with A through J. And cancel every federal contract whose contract number ends in a one, a two or a three.

These two actions would clearly generate staggering “savings.”

Before we consider your objections, let me present my “cost cutting” plan for the American family: Stop eating breakfast. Even without taking into account the cost of eggs, that would result in grocery “savings” of 20% to 25% for every American family!

Okay; I admit there’s a trick here. You can’t just stop buying things you need and then claim that you reaped “cost savings.” There’s a difference between cost cutting and cost saving.

The cost of cost-cutting

Cost savings are what began when Medicare was finally authorized to bargain with pharmaceutical companies for drug prices. The amount of money Medicare will pay for the same prescription drugs will go down.

Cost cutting is what happens when you just terminate a government program. If you close a public library and put the books in a warehouse, library costs will come down to nearly zero. But that’s not cost saving, it’s not enhanced efficiency, it’s not eliminating waste. It’s just taking libraries away.

If you freeze the research grants by the National Institutes of Health that pay for scientists to engage in medical research, you’ve “saved” money (in the short run). But that’s also not making government more efficient or eliminating waste. It’s slowing medical progress that could give us healthier lives.

When you cut costs, there’s a cost to the public.

When Elon applied his chainsaw to government employees across the board, he “saved” the salary of everyone he fired, but we’ve lost the benefit we reaped from their work.

If it’s a biologist, we will lose the insights into a disease her research would have uncovered. If it’s a banking expert at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we will lose a refund of fraudulent charges a bank has charged. If it’s a National Park Service janitor, we will lose clean toilets. If it’s a wildfire firefighter, we may lose our town or community. If it’s a hurricane forecaster, we could lose our lives.

Musk’s claim to have realized giant “government efficiency” savings is phony – and his cost-cutting is as arbitrary as my proposal to fire all A-to-J workers. We know that because in the real world you have to understand a great deal about how a government agency works, and what its various groups of employees actually do, in order to engage in cost saving. But Musk and his young, semi-secret team of cost-cutters are deeply ignorant of the workings of the agencies they are decimating.

Ignorance is not strength

Elon Musk knows a lot about the electric car industry and the space satellite industry (as well as how to tank a social network). But what can he claim to know about how government employees carry out their work at Medicaid, FEMA, Homeland Security, the Center for Disease Control, the National Park Service, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, OSHA, Atomic Energy Commission, Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, Defense Department, the Housing and Urban Development Department, NASA, and a hundred other government departments or agencies? He knows essentially nothing about how they work.

Likewise, his DOGE staff. They include no experts with comprehensive experience of any federal department or agencies, let alone all of them. Most DOGE team members are young (as young as 19 years old). Many are software engineers. Few have any government experience whatsoever.

None of them is an auditor or accountant. None is an investigator trained in rooting out corruption. And in fact, the Trump administration revealed its actual indifference to corruption almost immediately after the inauguration. At the end of his first week in office, Donald Trump celebrated Friday by firing 17 inspectors general – the independent watchdogs who investigate government waste, fraud and abuse within the federal government.

Is the federal government rife with inefficiency, waste and corruption? Neither Musk nor Trump has offered evidence of large-scale inefficiency, let alone widespread waste or corruption, throughout our government. You can’t root out what isn’t there.

Musk’s purpose is simply to wipe out a large part of the federal government – $2 trillion worth of federal jobs and programs – and deprive us of the benefits of those jobs because they interfere with the desire of the richest man in the world to become still richer.

The DOGE campaign isn’t about improving our government

That the Trump/Musk/DOGE agenda is slash-and-burn, not identifying and targeting inefficiency, waste or corruption, is confirmed by the way they are going about shriveling our government.

Indifferent to the impact on any particular agency or function (do we really want fewer air traffic controllers?), Trump offered all federal workers a bonus for resigning. Similarly, DOGE directed the termination of all probationary employees (those with up to two years of service), not just those with weak performance, without regard to the needs of their department.

And they are targeting entire agencies and offices for destruction, among them FEMA, the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, any office in a federal agency that enforces civil rights and antidiscrimination laws, and NOAA (the agency whose scientists study and predict hurricanes and tornadoes and monitor climate change).

Why do Musk and Trump want to reduce our government to a shadow? Could it be about balancing the budget? If they felt a sincere need to deal with the budget deficit and the national debt, they could start with funding the IRS to collect the massive amounts of taxes the super-rich evade ($160 billion per year by the top 1%) and they could seek to raise taxes on those best able to afford it. Looking at you, Elon.

Instead, the GOP recently committed itself to tax cuts amounting to $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years – with the top 5% of taxpayers getting half of the benefit. The top one percent (people who make over three-quarters of a million dollars per year) would harvest nearly one-third of the $4.5 trillion bonanza!

The concerns over deficits, like the supposed concern over government efficiency, waste and fraud, are bogus. Musk and Trump are determined to free the rich and the powerful and their corporations from government regulation. They deride the agencies Musk is in the process of dismantling as the “Administrative State” or “Regulatory State.”

Call it instead the Protective State.

The Protective State includes agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, which enforce regulations to protect consumers from peddlers of impure food and dangerous drugs; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which protects workers from bosses who would put profits before safety and health; and the National Labor Relations Board, protecting employees’ right to organize into unions.

The Protective State also includes the Securities and Exchange Commission, which protects investors from cheating in the marketplace; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which protects you from losing everything you deposited when a bank goes bust; and the Environmental Protection Agency, trying to protect us from the worst of climate change.

But protecting ordinary people and the environment from greedy and heedless corporations – by imposing law and rules on them – can interfere with the pursuit of limitless profits by the super-rich and their corporations.

Clearing away the regulators is highly profitable for Elon Musk

That concern is quite personal for Elon Musk. He has a beef against many government agencies because he finds the rule of law inconvenient and unprofitable.

• In early January 2025, the SEC filed a complaint against Musk, charging he violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and profited by $150 million at the expense of Twitter shareholders. (This is Musk’s third run-in with the SEC.)
• The Federal Aviation Agency sought to impose $633,000 in fines against Musk’s SpaceX company for safety violations.
• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (Rolling Stone magazine reports) “has repeatedly clashed with Musk over his attempts to rush self-driving Teslas onto the road” and recently “opened a pair of probes into the dangers posed by the millions of Teslas equipped with ‘full self-driving’ and remote driving features.”
• U.S. Department of Agriculture is investigating Musk company Neuralink over Animal Welfare Act issues.

These charges might or might not be true. But we’ll likely never know. With DOGE nipping at the heels of these tiresome agencies, Musk’s problems will soon disappear. But escaping fines is the least of the advantages Musk can expect to reap as master of DOGE. Consider these business opportunities:

• The Federal Aviation Administration is on the verge of canceling a $2.4 billion communications system contract with Verizon – and awarding the work to Musk’s Starlink company. What government employee whose job is under siege by DOGE is now in a position to objectively determine whether Verizon or Starlink can better perform the work?
• Cryptocurrencies, the “Wild West” of the investment landscape, are thought by many to require regulation to protect investors. But the SEC recently ruled that meme coins like Musk’s Dogecoin are not securities and will be free of investor-protecting regulation. Good news for Musk. Good luck to investors!
• Musk intends to create a payment system associated with his social media company X. Inconveniently for X, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), was expected to police things like privacy, fraud and how disputed transactions are handled in social media payment systems. But then DOGE shut the agency down entirely down. Wrote Musk on X: “CFPB RIP.”
• NASA has invested more than $15 billion into Musk’s SpaceX over the years, and (reports the Washington Post) SpaceX has 53 contracts with numerous federal agencies, contracts on track to pay Musk companies $12.6 billion over the next few years. Don’t expect the DOGE contract hatchet to fall on any of these!

With DOGE on the job for years to come, what government official or employee will dare to conclude that a Musk competitor should receive a profitable government contract – or find waste or corruption in any of the contracts awarded to Musk’s enterprises?

The power to defund agencies that might investigate Musk projects, to terminate entire areas of regulation relevant to his enterprises, and to fire the people responsible for granting and monitoring multi-billion-dollar contracts will likely yield extraordinary profits for Elon Musk. His $277 million campaign contribution to Donald Trump is proving to be a very savvy investment.

Of course, Musk is not the only one to benefit from the destruction of our government. All of the giant corporations that find governmental regulatory bodies are too efficient – doing too good a job of protecting the public – may find advantage in eliminating the agencies that interfere with their greed-first, human-needs-last business practices.

DOGE and its workings have been challenged in numerous lawsuits, and opposition has arisen from many different constituencies impacted by DOGE attacks on various government programs. Americans need to recognize that the entire DOGE enterprise is illegitimate and dangerous, and based on lies. Our job as citizens is now to protect the protective state.

Subscribe to Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman. Launched a year ago. Engaging, evidence-based arguments on democracy, racism and justice. From a 1960s civil rights veteran, an opponent of two lies-based wars, and a long time social justice attorney and author. Since 1964.

Since 2012, Progressive Charlestown has published dozens of Mitchell's always interesting op-eds. We also loved his anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. Sure wish he'd write another.