How far will it go?
I initially thought when Musk was tasked with finding $2 trillion in federal spending cuts that three outcomes were possible -- (1) he would find cutting spending was not as easy as he thought and would lose interest (2) he would scrape together $200 billion in cuts (possible if not easy) and call it $2 trillion over ten years, or (3) he would actually propose $2 trillion in cuts, which would be completely politically unsustainable.
It did not occur to me that he would hijack the treasury and start making cuts unilaterally. But now that he has done that, the same possibilities remain. Will he find cutting is harder than he thought and lose interest, fall back to the usual ten year gimmick, or actually make cuts on the scale he proposes. There are probably other possibilities as well. But I am now confident that he will not make cuts anywhere approaching $2 trillion or even $1 trillion.
Why am I convinced?
Simple. Musk deleted USAID. USAID is a $60 billion agency with precious little constituency in the US. He deleted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It has a budget of less than $1 billion and a longstanding conservative bugaboo, without a really strong constituency.
Then he zeroed in on the Department of Education, which right wingers, including Trump, have long vowed to eliminate. In fact, he actually claims to have eliminated it. A little budgetary background is in order here. As of 2024, the Department of Education had a budget of about $268 billion, or about 4% of the total federal budget, and a workforce of 4,100 employees. Its budget made up about 21% of education spending in the US. Of the $268 billion, approximately $160 went to college student loans and grants, $83 billion to elementary and secondary schools, $20 billion to special education, and everything else was pocket change.
Needless to say, shutting all this down would provoke an immense outcry. It would largely cut off student loans for higher education and mean serious budget cuts to elementary and secondary schools across the country. When Donald Trump says he wants to eliminate the Department of Education, he has never made clear what he means by that. Does he want to eliminate it as a department and fold its functions into some other part of government?* Or does he want to shut down its programs altogether? Needless to say, a mere administrative shuffle would cause some minor disruption at the top but not serious problem, but not a lot of savings, either. Shutting down all the Department's functions would be a different matter altogether and provoke a serious outcry.
Well, Musk shed no light on what Trump had in mind, because confronted with "shutting down" the Department of Education, he choked. He cut somewhat less that $1 billion -- less than one half of a percent of the total budget. The cuts appear to have been mostly cancelling contracts with the Institute of Education Science -- the office that studies and evaluates student performance.
Also significant -- Musk has set his hypothetical goal at $2 trillion and a more realistic goal of $1 trillion. Well, he has put out a list alleging savings of $55 billion, "a very good start," but nowhere near the goal. Upon closer inspection, the amounts are much less -- closer to $8 billion.
This suggests that even Musk is not immune to political pressure. He knows there are limits to how far he can go before the outcry becomes so strong that he will be forced to stop.
The method to Musk's madness
This also suggests to me that there is some method to Musk's madness. He seems to have three main targets -- longstanding targets of conservative wrath (see USAID, CFPB), government employees, and offices that track and manage statistics.
As for specified agencies -- well, he is carrying out a longstanding far right fantasy.
Much the same probably applies to government employees. It is right wing dogma that they are worthless moochers. It is also Musk's longstanding approach to labor force to fire massive numbers of people and then hire back the ones who turn out to be necessary. He is in the process of learning the hard way that that approach has drawbacks when the people being fired are in charge of, say, safeguarding our nuclear stockpile, or testing for bird flu in the middle of a serious outbreak. Musk probably also thinks that most federal employees can and should be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Again, he is learning the hard way which ones cannot.
Finally, Musk's reasons for hating government statistics gathering is obvious. He sees it as trespassing on the domain of tech companies -- especially his tech companies. He also has been firing many rival contractors for government statistics work.
I don't know how long this "move fast and break things" approach will continue, but sooner or later a critical mass of people are going to figure out that Musk's damage to savings ratio would never be tolerated in the private sector, and the moving fast and breaking things will end.
The question is how? I have no idea, but my next post will offer several suggestions.
*Before 1980 it was part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
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