Musk gets out—and gets off easy

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Elon Musk packed his bags and skedaddled out of Washington, DC, last week, proclaiming that his run as a “special government employee” was done. It’s a good bet that he’ll continue to meddle in administration business, especially when he has a financial interest at stake, and will keep in contact with DOGErs and their ongoing crusade to dismantle crucial government programs. But his very public departure from Trump Town prompted reporters to pen farewells that did not do justice to the profound damage this erratic and dishonest gazillionaire has caused.

Writing up an interview he conducted with Musk, the Washington Post’s Christian Davenport opened with a “reflective” Musk musing, “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized. I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least.” Davenport observed that Musk’s “attempts to reshape the federal bureaucracy ran into fierce institutional resistance.” He allowed Musk to praise himself as a hard-driving visionary—“If we’re not ultra-hardcore, how are we going to get to Mars?”—and to define his mission in Washington as “reducing waste and fraud.”

All of this bolsters the phony narrative pitched by Trump and Musk that DOGE was (and is) a project to ferret out the supposed rampant fraud and waste that infect the federal government. That has not been the case. Musk’s venture has been an assault on government services, not inefficient government expenditures. He and his DOGE minions slashed programs and decimated agencies without evaluating them. Waste and fraud was just a cover story. Too many in the news media have enabled this con and even promoted it.

Davenport did note that Musk’s “claims about finding massive savings and slashing waste in government have been shown to be exaggerated” and that he “did not achieve as much as he wanted.” But even this poke at the billionaire accepts Musk’s noble-sounding premise. His endeavor has not been to merely “reshape the federal bureaucracy,” as Davenport put it, but to eviscerate services and protections for millions and allow powerful interests to escape scrutiny, regulation, and oversight.

At the New York Times, a multi-bylined article—Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Theodore Schleifer, Jonathan Swann, and Ryan Mac—reported that Musk was “disillusioned with Washington and frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he upended the federal bureaucracy.” Upended the bureaucracy is another all-too neutral way to characterize how he and his henchpeople demolished agencies. The piece noted that Musk had thanked Trump for “the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending” and called his effort “an initiative to drastically cut spending.”

Like the Washington Post, the Times wrote, “Musk’s DOGE team has repeatedly inflated its cost-saving efforts, at times posting erroneous claims about ending federal contracts that they later deleted.” And it noted that the “cuts he wanted to enact were far more difficult than he expected.” Again, the story presented was that of Musk seeking to counter wasteful spending and failing to achieve as much as he desired.

Neither piece mentioned how Musk and his libertarian shock troops killed the US Agency for International Development and ended lifesaving assistance for recipients throughout the world. Nor did they cover other dishonorable DOGE accomplishments. Musk and his posse blew up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which prevents vulturous financial firms from ripping off billions of dollars from Americans. They undermined or closed programs key to food safety, workplace safety, environmental safety, and aviation safety. DOGE cuts at the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and other agencies have devastated a generation of science and research. They forced mass firings at the State Department and the CIA that will weaken these organizations and imperil national security. They ripped up programs to track and address climate change. Firefighters, park rangers, weather forecasters, IRS tax collectors, Social Security clerks, Census Bureau workers, employees at Veterans Affairs who help our wounded warriors—all booted out of important jobs.

None of this was related to waste and fraud. And let’s stick with Musk’s attack on USAID. In February, he called this agency that has helped millions of people around the world avoid malaria, Ebola, and AIDS, obtain clean water, and gain access to food and health care “a criminal organization.” Yes, the richest man in the world said that. The following month, not surprisingly, he belittled the idea of empathy. He also claimed, “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.” Not true. Brooke Nichols, an infectious-disease mathematical modeler and health economist at Boston University, has created a tracker that estimates the number of deaths overseas caused by the Musk-driven suspension of foreign aid. As of this weekend, the number of adult deaths reached 100,000, and deaths for children topped 208,000. This is obscene.

Yet the big idea for these media outlets is that Musk was frustrated he didn’t make more progress in his battle against waste and fraud. But it wasn’t a war on waste and fraud in government. It was a war on government.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have done wonderful investigations of Musk and DOGE. Last week, the Times exposed his intense use of drugs, including ketamine, and reported on how DOGE-driven reversals of regulations will cost Americans billions in higher bank fees, electric and water bills, and health insurance payments. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has penned moving pieces about the lethal consequences of Musk’s annihilation of USAID.

But throughout the Musk Terror, much of the media failed to accurately characterize what this alt-right, conspiracy-pushing, oddball, drug-addled (?), anti-empathy tech billionaire was really doing. (Then there’s the whole DOGE effort to get its grubby mitts on government data for who-knows-what reasons.) Musk waged a vicious assault. He did not seek to evaluate programs and agencies to root out inefficiencies or activities that were no longer vital. He aimed to destroy. Hundreds of thousands of people will die because of him. Millions of Americans will suffer. Who cares if he is frustrated or disillusioned? The story is not what happened to Musk; it’s what he has done to all of us.