Elon Musk Casually Admits DOGE Chaos Was All One Big Mistake

Amid a flurry of backlash against Republicans, Elon Musk desperately sought to temper the mood at Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting Wednesday.

“We will make mistakes, we won’t be perfect,” Musk said of the Department of Government Efficiency’s assault on federal spending and waste. Since Trump took office, DOGE has laid off thousands of federal workers and gutted funding for a number of federal agencies and programs.

The billionaire’s plan is still backed by Trump, but backlash against Musk and DOGE is rising across the GOP’s base as lawmakers face their own angry constituents and legal challenges arise.

His response? Oops, we’ll do better next time.

To reassure Trump’s Cabinet, Musk, who is not a Cabinet member himself, gave the example of DOGE “accidentally” canceling Ebola prevention as part of the stunning 90-day freeze on international aid and shutting down of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“I think we all want Ebola prevention,” Musk said with a smirk. “So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately and there was no interruption.” Nobody’s perfect, Musk reminded his colleagues.

Democrats, as per usual, aren’t buying Musk’s shtick. “An average person who did something as incompetent as ‘accidentally cancelling Ebola prevention’ wouldn’t be applauded, they’d be fired,” Representative Don Beyer wrote on X. “Musk is failing up in this administration because he didn’t earn his job, he bought it. It’s corrupt, and risks Americans’ health and safety.”

But Musk doubled down on DOGE’s move-fast-and-break-things approach to achieving a trillion-dollar deficit reduction by 2026.

“We do need to move quickly,” Musk told the Cabinet. “But we can do it, and we will do it.”

Donald Trump is preparing for “large-scale” mass layoffs for the federal workforce.

The Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management sent out notices on Wednesday to federal agencies telling them to prepare for staff reductions. Close to 30,000 federal employees have already lost their jobs since Trump took office last month, and these coming layoffs could dwarf that number.

The administration is ordering agencies to submit “Phase 1” reductions in force and reorganization plans by March 13, detailing the number of full-time employees that can be cut and how much money that would save over the next three years. The plans should also include “a significant reduction” in full-time employees, according to the memo, first obtained by Axios.

The notices follow Trump’s executive order strengthening Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency more than two weeks ago, which allowed agencies to only rehire one worker for every four people who leave the workforce. It seems that after last week’s federal court ruling allowing Trump’s federal employee purge to continue, Trump is about to ramp up the firings.

Over the weekend, Musk issued an ultimatum to federal workers through an OPM email and his X account asking them to provide five accomplishments or lose their jobs, which was heavily mocked before the White House backtracked and deemed it optional. Soon, it seems that no ultimatums will be necessary for large numbers of federal employees to lose their jobs. In fact, the layoffs may even be automated.

Vice President JD Vance’s hometown paper is not impressed by his first few weeks in a “nondescript role as an appendage in the Trump-Musk administration,” the Ohio Capital Journal wrote in a seething op-ed Tuesday, tearing Vance apart as a “lapdog vice-president.”

Clearly infuriated by her fellow statesmen, reporter Marilou Johanek listed Vance’s notable accolades as vice president so far, among them being rebuked by the pope and outraging NATO allies.

“The last thing the world needs now is a U.S. vice-president trashing eighty years of foreign policy with America’s closest and most enduring friends,” Johanek wrote, referring to Vance’s meeting with the leader of Germany’s far-right nationalist AfD Party, which German courts have ruled is a threat to democracy.

The Ohio native then slammed European leaders for “hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’” in a tone-deaf speech that will likely further strain U.S.-Europe relations.

“Vance, the shameless election denier in service to an authoritarian regime lawlessly dismantling a democratic republic, had the towering audacity and historical blindness to lecture his European audience on democracy,” Johanek wrote.

The author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about growing up poor in Appalachia, Vance credits much of his identity—both political and personal—to his Rust Belt roots. He ran on the promise of bringing jobs and prosperity back to Middle America but clearly hasn’t made the region very proud. Vance was one of the least popular vice presidential picks in history, according to polls.

“Vance has been doing us proud by attacking friends, embracing enemies, insulting humanitarians, drawing papal ire, and pontificating laughably on what makes a man a man. Seriously, what is wrong with J.D.?” Johanek concluded, asking what most of the country is wondering too.

Read the full op-ed here.

Up until yesterday, seemingly no one knew that Amy Gleason, a low-profile first-term Trump official with experience in health care tech, was the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency. As of two weeks ago, attorneys for the Justice Department didn’t know, and as of Monday, DOGE staffers didn’t know.

But by Tuesday afternoon, when Gleason’s appointment was first publicly announced, the Trump administration was busy cooking up a flimsy explanation as to how she had actually been fronting the organization for weeks.

“Amy Gleason has been the DOGE administrator for quite some time, I believe several weeks, maybe a month, I’m not actually sure of the specific timeline,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a press conference Wednesday morning. “She’s a career official. She’s doing her job as the administrator of this organization.

“I know everybody is very interested in her name and who she is and what she does. There’s a lot of people who work for the federal government, they’re just trying to do their jobs and that’s what she’s doing,” she said.

But Leavitt couldn’t provide any clarity for why DOGE staffers were equally surprised to hear that Gleason—and not Elon Musk, the very high-profile DOGE chair who was appointed by Donald Trump to serve as a special government employee—had been tapped to run the group.

“You’d have to ask them. They’re clearly unaware. I don’t know,” Leavitt said, also seemingly unaware herself.

Leavitt then falsely claimed that Gleason’s appointment had been common knowledge for weeks and that the Trump administration had been completely “transparent” about her appointment. (As of Wednesday, Gleason’s LinkedIn had still not been updated to reflect her new role.)

“Everybody knew, and we said who she was to all of you because you are hounds in the media who are so obsessed with this for some reason,” Leavitt told reporters in response to a question regarding whether Gleason’s appointment had even been announced to DOGE employees. “There are so many bigger things in the world than who the DOGE administrator is.”

But knowing who runs DOGE is important. So far, Musk’s team has gained access to and gutted portions of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; the Education, Commerce, Defense, and Energy Departments, the EPA; FEMA; NOAA; USAID; and, among other agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration, even as the nation experiences an unprecedented uptick in critical aviation crashes.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, owes much of his wealth to government funding, even as he pledges to slash billions with his Department of Government Efficiency initiative.  

A new Washington Post report found that the tech mogul/fascism enthusiast built his fortune from $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits going back more than 20 years. Musk’s companies received at least $6.3 billion in commitments from state and local governments in 2024 alone, and this is likely an undercount. 

The total amount of government funding that Musk has received is likely much higher, given that federal funding related to defense and intelligence projects is often classified. For example, Musk’s company SpaceX has a contract to build spy satellites from the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence agency tasked with building satellites for national defense. That contract is reportedly worth $1.8 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

According to the Post, Musk’s companies have close to a dozen other local grants, tax credits, and reimbursements whose costs are not publicly known. Musk also has 52 ongoing contracts with seven government agencies—including the Department of Defense, the General Services Administration, and NASA—that could pay his companies $11.8 billion in the next few years.  

Tesla has been a major beneficiary of federal and state government funding, receiving $11.4 billion in regulatory credits meant to boost electric cars. Tesla sales have been helped by a $7,500 tax credit for buyers of electric vehicles too. 

The electric car company may not have even survived without government help: When Musk took over as CEO of Tesla in 2008, he pressed the Department of Energy for a low-interest loan for the company, which was then cash-poor. A $465 million loan would arrive two years later, allowing Tesla to build its first luxury electric sedan and buy a factory in California. 

“Tesla would not have survived without the loan,” said one former high-level Tesla employee, who spoke to the Post anonymously. “It was a critical loan at a critical time.”

As Musk rails against government fraud and waste (and gets it wrong), he would do well to remember how much he has benefited from taxpayer funds. Or he might appreciate it all too well, and his DOGE efforts may be focused on getting as much money as possible from the government while gutting pesky regulations and investigations into himself and his companies. He’s either a hypocrite, a fool, or both, living the life of a greedy welfare billionaire.