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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has slashed thousands of federal jobs and decimated entire departments and agencies, leaving a trail of chaos and dysfunction in its wake. One thing it hasn’t done, however, is meaningfully cut spending.
At the end of January, as he deployed strike teams made up of inexperienced coders, some of them barely adults, across the federal government, Musk boasted that by cutting $4 billion in spending a day he could reduce the federal deficit by $1 trillion—without causing inflation. Musk’s January 30 tweet now looks quaint: The “no inflation” promise was tied to optimistic growth forecasts that President Trump has since trashed with two and a half months of economically suicidal policies. But it’s also now obvious that DOGE has caused a lot of devastation—cutting jobs and slashing federal aid that literally saves lives—without doing anything to actually cut spending.
Musk has already decreased his $1 trillion forecast to just $185 billion, but even reaching that number by his September 30 deadline—the end of the 2025 fiscal year—seems unlikely. On Monday, The New York Times’ David Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine reported that even the $150 billion DOGE claims to have cut so far is wildly inflated. “Musk is finding out what every government streamlining effort that came before him discovered,” concluded another Times...
A Guatemalan national residing in the U.S. illegally has been indicted for his alleged role in smuggling a 14-year-old girl into the country. Juan Tiul Xi, 26, was indicted on Thursday for alleged...