CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

GOP Claims of “Massive Fraud” Imply the Musk is a Moron

Donald Trump and DOGE adviser Elon Musk, May 30, 2025, in the Oval Office. Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok.

Remember Elon Musk running around in his DOGE garb with sunglasses and a chainsaw? The Republicans are hoping that you don’t.

The ostensible point of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” was rooting out trillions of dollars of government waste, fraud, and abuse. Musk gathered together a group of “super-high-IQ” MAGA boys who worked 80 hours a week ransacking all the various government agencies and departments in this effort.

Musk promised to cut at least $2 trillion from the U.S. budget with his DOGE gang. Musk came up largely empty-handed in this effort. He did manage to save around $20 billion a year by eliminating USAID, a program that provided healthcare and nutrition to millions of people in Africa. While this ended the Bush II AIDS program, PREPAR, which has saved tens of millions of lives, it did not do much to help U.S. taxpayers. The $5 billion cost of the program was roughly 0.08% of federal spending.

Mostly, what Musk ended up doing was creating chaos in programs that he........

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