Move fast and destroy things: 100 chaotic days of Elon Musk in the White House
One hundred days after Elon Musk entered the White House as Donald Trump’s senior adviser and the de facto leader of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), the Tesla CEO has left little of the federal government unscathed. Over the course of just a few months, he has gutted agencies and public services that took decades to build while accumulating immense political power.Musk’s role in the Trump administration is without modern precedent. Never before has the world’s richest person been deputized by the US president to cull the very agencies that oversee his businesses. Musk’s attempts to radically dismantle government bureaus have won him sprawling influence. His team has embedded its members in key roles across federal agencies, gained access to personal data on millions of Americans and fired tens of thousands of workers. SpaceX, where he is CEO, is now poised to take over potential government contracts worth billions. He has left a trail of chaos while seeding the government with his allies, who will likely help him profit and preserve his newfound power.The billionaire’s newfound sway has not come without pushback and a cost. Doge’s blitz through the government has sparked furious nationwide backlash, as well as dozens of lawsuits challenging Musk’s mass firings and accusing his task force of violating numerous laws. Musk’s personal popularity has sunk to record lows, and Tesla’s profits have tanked.A look back at the first 100 days of the Trump administration shows the extent to which Musk’s efforts have changed the US government. It also shows that what Musk framed as a cost-cutting task initiative is failing to meet its ostensible goal of finding $1tn in fraud or waste, but it is succeeding in reshaping federal agencies along ideological grounds, paving the way for private companies to fill the resulting vacuum of public services.Musk has recently stopped physically working from the White House and stated he plans to pivot away from his government position soon, but has entrenched himself as one of the world’s most divisive political figures and gives no sign he is willing to fully give up his influence. Instead, the first 100 days of Doge shows that the scope of Musk’s ambition extends to remaking how the government deals with everything from humanitarian aid to the rule of law.Doge sweeps through agenciesOn the same day Trump was sworn into office, the president issued an executive order that created Musk’s “department of government efficiency” by renaming the US Digital Service agency, which previously handled governmental tech issues. Trump’s order included only a vague mandate to modernize government technology and increase efficiency, but within days it would become clear that Musk and his team had far more expansive aims.In the months leading up to the executive order, Musk had been hiring a team of staffers that included a mix of young engineers, tech world executives and longtime lieutenants from his private companies. Running the day-to-day operations was Steve Davis, who had worked with Musk at various companies, including SpaceX and the Boring Company, for more than 20 years. Davis was known as an exacting boss – Musk once compared him to chemotherapy. Others had far less experience, including 19-year-old Edward Coristine, who had worked for several months at Musk’s Neuralink company. The teenager had been fired from a previous internship for leaking information and went by the username “big balls” in online profiles.Doge’s early days made headlines for targeting masses of government workers with layoffs and pushing others to resign, with more than 2 million employees receiving an email on 28 January titled “Fork in the road” that encouraged staffers to take a buyout. The emails, which asked: “What did you accomplish this week?” would become a signature of Musk and his new bureau, sent again and again whenever staff began to prey on a new herd of government employees.Shortly after Trump’s executive order created Doge, Musk’s team quickly began popping up in the offices of numerous agencies. One of the first was the General Services Administration, which oversees digital technology and government buildings. Doge staffers appeared on Zoom calls with no introduction and hidden last names, questioning federal employees about what they did for work and refusing to answer questions. They also began to show up in person, taking over conference rooms and moving Ikea beds on to the sixth floor of the GSA to sleep overnight. Perplexed government workers at numerous agencies described Doge’s actions as a hostile takeover, where a goon squad would appear and demand rapid changes to systems they knew little about.“They’ve only fired people and turned things off,” said a current federal employee, who agreed to speak anonymously for fear of retribution.Simultaneously, Doge staffers were aggressively gaining access to key data systems that controlled the flow of payments to federal workers and funding for government contracts. In one striking incident, Doge team members clashed with the highest ranking career official at the treasury department over access to a payment system that controls $6tn in annual funds. The fight ended with the official, David Lebryk, being put on administrative leave before he ultimately resigned. Doge staff obtained the access they wanted.Pushback against Doge from other officials resulted in similar punishments. As Doge staffers stormed into the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in early February, they found themselves in a heated standoff with security officials who tried to bar them from accessing a secure room which held sensitive and confidential data. The confrontation ended with USAID’s top security official being put on administrative leave, while Doge gained access to its systems. With no one to stop them, Doge staffers then began the process of hollowing out the agency that had once been the world’s largest single supplier of humanitarian aid. More than 5,600 USAID workers around the world would be fired in the ensuing weeks.“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted days later on X, his social media platform.Musk moves to gut the governmentDoge’s targeting of USAID turned out to be a blueprint for how Musk and company would go after other parts of the government. In early February, Musk’s team had established a presence across federal agencies and placed itself at the fulcrum of government employment systems. The next step was mass layoffs.“We do need to delete entire agencies,” Musk told attendees at a World Governments Summit in Dubai on 13 February. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”The same day as Musk’s remarks, the Trump administration ordered agencies to fire thousands of probationary workers – a designation that applies to employees who have been at their jobs for less than a year, including those who may have been recently promoted. Other workers soon received an email from Doge that demanded they list five things that they did last week or face termination, a chaotic request that also turned out to be an empty threat. Cabinet officials privately deemed it nonsensical.Amid the widespread cuts, Musk began reveling in his new powers both on X and in public appearances. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on 23 February he stood on stage in a black Maga hat, sunglasses and gold chain, gleefully wielding a chainsaw that was gifted to him by Javier Milei, the rightwing populist Argentinian president.“This chainsaw is for bureaucracy!” he said. “I am become meme.”While Musk celebrated his first cuts, Doge began going after entire offices and agencies it viewed as politically progressive or opposed to its goals. The GSA’s 18F office, which helped build software projects such as the IRS’s free tax filing service, was one of the first targets. On 3 February, Musk told a rightwing influencer on X that the office was “deleted” in response to an inaccurate post accusing the group of being radical leftists. Employees at the 18F office asked their new Musk-allied leadership what “deleted” meant, former workers said, but received no further clarification. The employees continued working for weeks under a cloud of confusion and tension with their new leaders, until the middle of the night on Saturday 1 March, when they received an email saying they were going to be laid off en masse.“We were living proof that the talking points of this administration were false. Government services can be efficient,” Lindsay Young, the former executive director of 18F, said in a post on LinkedIn. “This made us a target.”Doge’s influence soon extended beyond government tech offices into major agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services, which announced in March that it was cutting 10,000 jobs to align with Trump’s executive order on Doge. In a display of the chaos that Doge had inspired, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr weeks later admitted that around 2,000 of those workers were fired in error and would need to be reinstated.Musk fights the judicial systemAs soon as Trump issued the executive order to create Doge, watchdog and labor groups filed lawsuits challenging its legality. More lawsuits piled on as Doge accessed sensitive data systems, fired workers and refused to respond to public records requests. Altogether, there have now been more than two dozen cases targeting the agency.At first, Doge and Musk seemed to move faster than the judicial system could respond as they slashed and burned government agencies. Around the start of March, however, many of the court cases began to produce rulings that curtailed Doge’s layoffs and temporarily blocked its staff’s access to data. Judges ruled that the Trump administration needed to reinstate probationary workers that they fired, limited some Doge access to databases at agencies such as the Social Security Administration and ordered Musk’s team to turn over internal records it had been seeking to keep private.Musk’s reaction was a constant stream of attacks against the judicial system on X, which included demands that lawmakers “impeach the judges” and claims that there was a “judicial coup” under way against Trump. Musk repeatedly amplified far-right influencers saying that the US should emulate El Salvador’s strongman president, Nayib Bukele, whose party ousted supreme court judges in 2021 in a slide toward authoritarianism.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Musk campaigned against federal judges that were increasing oversight and forcing more transparency on Doge, he also began plowing money into a Wisconsin supreme court race that would have tipped the state’s judicial body conservative. The billionaire and the groups he funded put more than $20m toward electing a conservative judge, which he claimed was crucial to “the future of civilization”.The attempt to influence the Wisconsin vote followed his blueprint from the presidential race. His Super Pac offered $100 to voters willing to sign a petition stating their opposition to “activist judges”, and he held a campaign rally where he gave out $1m dollar checks on stage. Musk’s effort failed to convince voters, with his preferred candidate losing by 10 percentage points.The outcome of the Wisconsin supreme court race proved to be the first in a series of setbacks that tested the limits of Musk’s political influence and the toxicity of his personal brand. As the billionaire embraced his new role as a Republican mega-donor and placed himself often literally at center stage, it became clear that his routine did not always play well outside of the insulated bubbles of Maga rallies and Tesla product launches. While people saw more and more of Musk, polls showed that the public liked him less and less.Protests boom against Musk and TeslaAs Musk’s association with Trump and the international far right became too prominent to ignore over the past year, there has been a rising social stigma against associating with his products. The most tangible symbol of Musk’s empire, Tesla, has become the focus of an international protest movement since the creation of Doge. SpaceX, the second-largest source of Musk’s wealth, has seemed insulated from the vicissitudes of consumer sentiment and increased its role in US space operations.Protests at Tesla dealerships, as well as vandalism against individual cars, started small in the weeks after inauguration, with gatherings of a few dozen people in cities including New York City and San Francisco. Some Tesla owners sold their cars due to the association with Musk or placed “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy” bumper stickers on their vehicles. The demonstrations quickly escalated to more cities, though, organizing under the banner of “Tesla Takedown” protests that targeted showrooms around the country.By mid-March, a fully fledged international protest movement against Tesla and Musk had formed and brought about mass protests. Thousands of people gathered at showrooms from Sydney to San Francisco on 30 March in a day of action, with organizers stating that “hurting Tesla is stopping Musk”. Vandalism against Tesla dealerships, charging stations and cars also intensified around the world, including multiple molotov cocktail attacks and incidents of arson. Trump and Musk called the attacks domestic terrorism, while Pam Bondi, the attorney general, vowed to crack down on anyone targeting Tesla.The pressure on Tesla represented a real threat to the company, which was already dealing with an overall sluggish market for electric vehicles and increased competition from Chinese automakers. As protests spread, Musk leaned on his status in Maga world to attempt to revitalize the brand. Trump appeared on the White House driveway in front of several parked Teslas, telling reporters that he was going to buy one of them and praising Musk as a “patriot”. Others in Trump’s orbit, including Fox News host Sean Hannity, also posted sales pitches for the automaker.Despite praise from Trump and Musk’s assurances to workers and investors that they should not sell Tesla stock, analysts reported that the protests along with other economic issues were nevertheless taking a toll. A stock selloff has resulted in Tesla’s share price falling around 25% since the start of the year, wiping billions of dollars from Musk’s net worth. A first-quarter earnings call on 22 April revealed Tesla’s performance was even worse than expectations, with a 71% drop in profits and 9% drop in revenue year over year.Musk announced on the call that he would spend significantly less time working on Doge starting sometime in May.Musk eyes an exit, but Doge remainsMusk’s declaration that he would pare back his time with Doge to one or two days a week gave a more definitive sense of his exit after weeks of speculation about when and how he would leave the White House. Although Trump has remained adamant that Musk is doing a good job and remains welcome in the administration, a growing chorus of top officials have either openly feuded with him or privately griped about his presence throughout his first 100 days.Musk has had intense clashes with secretary of state Marco Rubio, transportation secretary Sean Duffy and several other top Trump staffers. He reportedly got into a near-physical shouting match with treasury secretary Scott Bessent in recent weeks, and has publicly called chief trade adviser Peter Navarro, the architect of Trump’s tariff policies, “dumber than a sack of bricks”.The power struggles between Musk and administration officials leave it unclear how much say Doge will have without Musk constantly placed at the right hand of the president, but his allies are still spread throughout the government and actively working on carrying out his mission. Doge has continued to target agencies throughout April, gutting smaller groups such as an agency that coordinates government policy on homelessness, and eyeing others including the Peace Corps for mass layoffs.Some of Doge’s cuts have directly targeted agencies that oversee Musk’s companies, including at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that regulates and investigates the risks of self-driving cars. Shifts in priorities and leadership at agencies such as Nasa and the Pentagon also put SpaceX in a position to potentially make billions off of new contracts, while former government employees say it is likely Doge already has access to confidential business data on SpaceX’s competitors.While part of the Doge team is still finding workers to fire, other members have begun accessing even more data systems and are starting to put them to work. One target has been immigration, where Doge staff have accessed personal information that includes therapy records for unaccompanied migrant children, housing information and biometric data. The goal, multiple outlets have reported, is to create a master database that could be used to enforce the Trump administration’s deportations and other anti-immigration maneuvers.Mission accomplished?As Doge’s purpose has become more amorphous over its first three months, its initially advertised goal of cutting $1-2tn from the budget has moved further from view. Musk has instead shifted the goal posts, saying that he expects to find $150bn in savings this year – a fraction of his original goal and a small dent in the overall federal budget. That number may also be an illusion, as Doge’s tally of its savings has been filled with constant errors and miscalculations. Much of Doge’s savings could also be erased by the costs of defending itself in court and losses associated with its mass layoffs.The real effects of Doge’s first 100 days are still playing out. Dismantling USAID is projected to cause around 176,000 excess deaths, more than half of them children, according to a Boston University tracking project. Cuts to agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and Federal Emergency Management Agency could imperil natural disaster forecasting and relief. Agencies such as Veterans Affairs that provide public services may deteriorate, while cuts to research and education programs may be felt for decades to come.“The amazing thing is that they haven’t actually done anything constructive whatsoever. Literally all they’ve done is destroy things,” a current federal employee said of Doge. “People are going to miss the federal government that they had.” More
