A moment of silence for Elon Musk as Republican rep reveals how little impact his cuts will have

While Donald Trump is in no shortage of rhetoric against any number of supposed issues that currently plague the country and need him to step in as savior, his advisor Elon Musk‘s only claim to power has so far been to bring everyone’s attention to the vast budget deficit and the unhinged, potentially catastrophic rise of government debt.

One of the most problematic and often neglected aspects of the administrative branch is that it regularly runs a budget deficit. In simple terms, the government spends more than it earns in revenue, so it has to borrow money from elsewhere, giving rise to the increasing national debt —which is a whopping $34 trillion as of 2024 — and further inflation. While it’s entirely unlikely for the U.S. to default on its debt due to the dollar’s unique position in global finance, the government still runs the risk of higher interest payments and currency devaluation in the long term,

Elon Musk’s idea to curb this national debt was to propose the Department of Government Efficiency (referred to as DOGE) which intends to cut back on federal spending the only way Elon knows how; disrupting government agencies, firing their workers (the same thing he did to Twitter after buying it), and even undermining the work of entire bureaus.

The only catch is that what he has managed to achieve so far appears insignificant compared to the actual gap between government revenue (which is mostly through taxes; something that I’ll remind you Donald Trump and the entire MAGA camp are against) and government spending. While Elon could save billions of dollars by ruining thousands of lives, when we talk about accumulating federal debt, we’re talking in the trillions bracket.

In fact, as Republican representative David Schweikert expertly explained, Musk and Trump’s amendments so far have been almost superfluous in the grand scheme of things — even if they admittedly sound great on paper.

You can check out Schweikert’s statistical analysis in the House of Representatives down below.

While the rep’s charts leave no question as to whether Elon’s policies will have any discernible effect on the future of government spending, the billionaire has made it clear that his main priority is to use this newly found influence with the president — or perhaps it’s the opposite; it’s not clear exactly who holds the leash in that relationship — to further his corporate agendas. One of these apparently involves a bid to compete in the AI scene, with Elon recently offering to buy OpenAI for a staggering $97.3 billion.

“I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave a lot of them behind,” Musk said recently. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.” According to Schweikert, though, and even a new article on The Economist, all Elon has managed with these aggressive new policies is to disrupt the workflow of the government.

While there might one day be an effective way to deal with the mounting national debt, for the time being, it seems that Musk’s initiatives are coming up short.