Throughout their history, Americans have taken pride in developing more efficient ways to tackle public issues than other nations. They have often attributed this success to their federalist state structure and the belief that decentralization enhances efficiency at local and state levels.

As a result, until President Donald Trump’s second term, neither Congress nor the White House had established a federal institution like DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).

While past presidents, from Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, and even Vice President Al Gore, launched projects or commissions to improve federal government performance, none were as ambitious as Musk’s DOGE initiative.

After nearly 250 years of US history, DOGE finally came to life—thanks to Elon Musk, the South African–born tech magnate. But just four months into its creation, DOGE’s founding father stepped down from leadership.

Musk announced on social media that he is stepping down from his role in the Trump administration—a move the White House confirmed was underway as of Wednesday evening.

“As my term as a Special Government Employee comes to a close, I want to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending,” the billionaire posted on X, the platform he owns.

Does Musk’s early departure feel incongruous with his ambitious agenda?

“The DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government,” Musk said on X, announcing his resignation. But if DOGE is truly destined to become integral to American governance, why did Musk not pilot it to better skies?

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, Musk suggested things were not progressing as he envisioned. “DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he said, expressing dissatisfaction with his own brainchild due to various pressures coming from the Trump administration. 

In another interview with CBS, he was more direct expressing his dismay and disappointment toward Trump saying that his new “big beautiful” tax bill “increases the budget deficit” and “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.” A tax bill can not be both big and beautiful, he said. Progressives also criticise Trump’s bill for its cuts to social programs like Medicaid. 

Let’s see what Musk pledged and what he delivered since the DOGE’s emergence. 

Federal budget savings

At the outset, Musk promised that he would save "at least $2 trillion" from the federal government budget, which spent about $6.8 trillion in the fiscal year of 2024. This means Musk would cut nearly one third of the US federal spending this year. 

In the early days, Musk played a key role in the departure of an estimated 260,000 federal employees by either firing or forcing resignations, which correspond to nearly one tenth of the total federal workforce. Musk became the subject of bureaucratic wrath, pulling much criticism from progressive political quarters and media alike. 

As Tesla and SpaceX shares suffered due to Musk’s close association with Trump, he soon realized that his ambitious goals were unattainable within the structures of federal bureaucracy and the clashing interests of different political and social groups, which rein in the direction of both the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress. 

“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realised,” he said during the Washington Post interview. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.” 

Facing many uphill battles in Washington, a centre of many political intrigues, Musk reduced his projected federal savings to first $1 trillion and then to $500 billion, which was still too high for the federal government. According to DOGE’s recent estimates, Musk’s institution may have saved around $160 billion, which might still be an overstatement, experts say. 

DOGE “has grossly overstated its financial savings accomplishments,” wrote David Walker, a former US Comptroller General, in a recent article, criticising Musk for his “over promised” and “under delivered” policies.  

“It also has not employed a clearly defined, consistently applied and transparent process during its efforts,” which reduced the public’s confidence in the US government, increasing the partisan infighting in Washington, according to Walker. 

Any bright spots?

Despite his critiques of DOGE’s conduct, Walker concedes that there was also a bright side to some of Musk’s initiatives which discovered “significant waste in the federal government”, revealing its old-fashioned operational capabilities in regard to information systems and auditing in the age of AI. 

But he added that most of these problems were already pointed out by federal agencies like the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and other monitoring groups. 

Beside showing the federal government’s waste and its outdated mechanisms, DOGE also demonstrated to government bureaucracy and its top leaders how to use AI techniques to innovate its operations with better accountability, according to Walker. 

AI also proved to be a sore point for Musk. He publicly expressed his frustration toward Trump’s pick of Sam Altman, Chief Executive of OpenAI, a leading American AI company, for the government-backed Stargate deal in January. 

Musk’s disappointment only grew as Altman was made a key figure in Trump’s recent economic delegation to the Gulf region, where lucrative trade deals were sealed with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, much to Musk’s dismay, during Trump’s Gulf tour, Altman’s OpenAI led a group of technology firms to win a strategic deal “to build one of the world’s largest artificial-intelligence data centres” in UAE’s capital Abu Dhabi.   

“Elon Musk worked hard to try to derail the deal if it didn’t include his own AI startup, according to people familiar with the matter,” the WSJ reported.