How Musk could gut the government under Trump

Alex Woodward, The Independent

The wealthiest man on the planet is pumping tens of millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s campaign. He owns an influential social media company where he embraces right-wing influencers and conspiracy theories now dominating the platform. He has business interests with China and Russia’s Vladimir Putin’s regime while his companies receive billions of dollars in US government contracts. And if Trump is elected, he might steer how the American government spends its money. Elon Musk wields enormous, unprecedented influence in the 2024 presidential election. He has a powerful megaphone to his 203 million followers on X, earns priceless media coverage and is backing a Republican nominee who promises to put him in charge of gutting federal agencies and cutting trillions of dollars from the federal budget. Musk — a man with a net worth of more than $200 billion who wants to accelerate the human population of other planets — has predicted and welcomed economic “hardship” and a market crash if Trump wins.

Global economists and think tanks across the ideological spectrum have warned that Trump’s economic agenda will explode inflation, the deficit and the costs of everyday goods. Deep cuts to the nation’s budget on top of that — money that Musk says is being “wasted” in the trillions — could grind the economy to a halt. It’s not just the budget. Musk could take an ax to the workforce. “He’s going to just get rid of people who are not working, or don’t have a job, or not doing a job well, just like he did on Twitter,” his mother Maye Musk told Fox News on November 2. “He can do it for the government, too.” What Musk “did on Twitter” was buy the company for $44 billion, fire thousands of employees and get content moderation off the platform. Advertisers fled, and its worth plummeted by 80 percent within the two years. Trump’s ally Vivek Ramaswamy told The New York Times that Trump’s first step in office should be “firing a lot” of employees.

“If you look at the efficiency commission that we’re talking about right now, is the goal of that to rehire a bunch of those bureaucrats?” he said. “That’s not the character of, certainly, what Elon did at Twitter, and I don’t think it’s going to be the character of what the most important part of that project actually looks like, which is shaving down and thinning down the bureaucracy.”

“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted, $6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget?” asked Howard Lutnick, the billionaire chief executive of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, who is advising Trump’s campaign. “I think we can do at least $2 trillion,” Musk said. “Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that,” he added. “We’re going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.” Earlier this year, Trump said Musk would lead “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” with “recommendations for drastic reforms.” In that role, Musk would be in a uniquely powerful position to recommend cuts to federal agencies and regulations that govern his business interests.

If Trump wins, “we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once-in-a-lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government,” Musk said in September. The US spent more than $6.7 trillion in its 2024 fiscal year on a range of domestic programmes and national defence, from Social Security and healthcare to education, support for military veterans and transportation projects. Government watchdogs say that actual waste amounts to less than $300 billion a year. Last year, House Republicans fought off severe austerity budget proposals from their far-right flank, and Trump failed to make deep cuts to domestic programs during his administration after his signature sweeping tax cuts that largely benefited corporations and high earners. Trump now wants to make those cuts permanent.

Writing off one-third of domestic spending as “wasteful” would not only be devastating across the board; economists say it would be practically impossible to implement. “There’s a long history of the fantasy that one smart businessman will just identify trillions in waste, but that’s just not how it works,” Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the center-right Manhattan Institute thinktank, told The Washington Post. Musk, however, has repeatedly taken aim at federal agencies that have oversight of contracts with his companies, signaling where he would start with his Trump-approved scalpel to government budgets. After the Federal Communications Commission determined that SpaceX was not eligible for $900 million in government subsidies for its Starlink internet program, Musk slammed the decision as “contemptible political lawfare.” He has accused the Federal Aviation Authority of scrutinizing SpaceX for “petty matters that have nothing to do with safety, while neglecting real safety issues at Boeing,” and has called on its chair to resign.

“It takes longer to get a permit to launch than to build a giant rocket. It’ll eventually become illegal to do any large project and we won’t be able to get to Mars,” he said. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also investigating Musk’s Tesla and its self-driving systems, while Musk has been embroiled in legal battles with the National Labor Relations Board over allegations of stifling union organising efforts at Tesla and SpaceX. Meanwhile, SpaceX and Tesla have received at least $15.4 billion in government contracts over the past decade, according to an analysis from The New York Times. Musk and his Trump-supporting political action committee, America PAC, have also promoted the baseless idea that the US is facing imminent “bankruptcy.”

“Because the other thing besides the regulations, America is also going bankrupt extremely quickly,” Musk said during a panel discussion in September. “Everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one.” That idea is driving his support for steep cuts. A Trump presidency “necessarily involves some temporary hardship” for “long-term prosperity,” Musk stated on X last month. Musk agreed that deep cuts — coupled with what Trump has called the largest deportation operation in American history with plans to expel millions of immigrants, evaporating billions in tax dollars — will likely cause global markets to “tumble.” Using the full force of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to identify, detain and deport millions of people living in the US without legal permission could cost more than $967 billion over 10 years, according to the American Immigration Council.

Undocumented immigrants pay nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local taxes each year, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Undocumented immigrants paid federal, state, and local taxes of $8,889 per person in 2022, the group found. For every 1 million undocumented immigrants, public services receive $8.9 billion in tax revenue. Immigration and voter fraud — often together — are Musk’s favorite topics on X, according to Bloomberg’s analysis of his posts. He has repeatedly amplified a conspiracy theory that Democratic officials are encouraging illegal immigration to flood elections with unlawfully cast votes, while Trump and Republican officials have baselessly alleged widespread noncitizen voting is manipulating election outcomes. Musk’s false and misleading claims about elections have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year, according to an analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. His false claims that Democrats are “importing” voters have amassed 1.3 billion views.