What's next for Musk, the destructive doyen of Doge?

Tesla CEO will put decimating the US government on the back burner to concentrate on his tanking company, but the cost-cutting group is going nowhere. Alex Woodward reports

- Alex Woodward

Stepping on the stage at Madison Square Garden, nine days before Donald Trump was declared president for a second time, Elon Musk told a crowd of screaming fans that their “money is being wasted”.

Mr Musk – dressed in all black, topped with a black “Maga” hat in blackletter type – vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending, a figure he apparently came up with on the spot. He pledged to put his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) to work getting the “government off your back and out of your pocketbook”.

Nearly six months later, after pumping tens of millions of dollars into the president’s campaign and deploying an army of loyalists across the government to fire workers and slash budgets, the wealthiest person on the planet announced plans to “significantly” withdraw from the White House to focus on his company, Tesla. One week before Mr Trump’s 100th day in office, the billionaire said he plans to spend less time in Washington DC, cutting back to only a “day or two per week”.

Mr Musk’s position as a “special government employee” is limited to 130 days within the year. But the White House says those working hours don’t fall neatly within the calendar – Mr Musk will remain a fixture within the administration, whether it’s at the White House or Mar-a-Lago. Doge’s cost-cutting crusade isn’t going anywhere, officials told The Independent. Mr Musk’s critics say his tenure within Mr Trump’s White House thus far has been as pointless as it has been destructive, which was probably the point all along.

“Elon Musk in government is completely unprecedented, but there has never been a single person, certainly not a single nonpresidential person, who has been as utterly and pointlessly destructive as Elon Musk,” Robert Weissman, co-executive director of Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights advocacy group, told