Elon Musk is already backing away from DOGE’s $2 trillion budget-cutting targets

Ever since the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) was announced, Elon Musk has claimed he will use the organization to attack and dismantle large swaths of the federal bureaucracy. However, Musk is already backing away from his promises, arguing that his previously stated goal of cutting $2 trillion in spending from the federal budget is unlikely to happen.

“I think if we try for $2 trillion, we have a good chance of getting it,” Musk said. during the last live chat X on his platform. He added that canceling the $2 trillion was “like the best outcome.”

Those familiar with the federal budgeting process have already noted that Musk’s goal sounds quixotic, if not impossible. Indeed, the biggest items in the federal budget—Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending—are all political third rails, and so cutting none of them is easy. “A bird’s-eye view of the federal budget shows it’s mostly two things — the military, plus health and Social Security,” Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post wrote before.

Of course, maybe cutting popular social welfare programs is the plan – although that would be political suicide. Certainly, the right-wing libertarian organizations behind Trump are focused on reducing government benefits to Americans they describe as government “waste.” Alex Novrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy at the Cato Institute, recently told the Utah newspaper that DOGE is “at the very least a welcome opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of the areas where the federal government needs to be cut and where the federal government’s intrusion into our lives can be rolled back.”

According to Nowrasteh, government “interference” is probably when the Social Security Administration sends you a check in the mail. Cato recently published a report proposing to “raise the Social Security age by three years, reduce the size of the Social Security inflation adjustment, cut Medicare spending by one-third, and allow enrollees to self-spend Medicare.” This was reported by Desert News. Musk likewise upset the prospect Cutting mandatory programs like Social Security and Medicare, even though those programs are very popular among Trump’s base. Trump has also proposed tax cuts on Social Security benefits, which would hasten the program’s financial demise.

Musk, though a critic, said he would like to see DOGE “eliminate” various regulatory agencies they noted that it would be difficultif not possible. In general, Musk’s takedown targets could be agencies investigating his companies. Musk’s firms have been investigated by various agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and others.

This regulatory scrutiny is probably well-established, but Musk’s companies have been known to cause controversy. For example, the directors of Tesla this week agreed to pay close to a billion dollars to settle allegations that they had previously overextended themselves through stock options worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The lawsuit stemmed from a 2020 lawsuit filed by the City of Detroit’s Police and Fire Retirement System, which argued that Tesla’s executive compensation package was completely independent of normal compensation practices. Reuters notesfor example, board chairwoman Robyn Denholm earned $280 million in compensation.