Name: How Elon Musk Took Over the US Government
Uploaded: 2025-03-11T13:28:09.000Z
Duration: 11 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Donald Trump always said he wanted to drain the swamp.

We're going to clean out the Washington swamp.

It's a catchphrase to describe what he claims afflicts Washington.

But unlike the beginning of his first term, this time, he has taken swift action.

The Trump administration is allowing a private citizen to kind of have the keys and to do all this while Congress is basically letting it happen and the judiciary is struggling to keep up.

To do this, Elon Musk and members of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have been embedding themselves across the United States government.

Department of Education, Department of Energy, USAID, Department of the Treasury, Department of Defense.

Musk has kind of been approaching all this with a lot of glee.

He's joked about being the Bobs from office space.

The idea of cutting the federal budget, I think, is something that a lot of people, left or right, can get on board with.

The people voted for major government reform.

But there's a lot of question about whether Elon actually knows the ins and outs of these agencies enough to make these cuts, or if he's simply going in with a chainsaw.

I actually just call myself a humble tech support here.

This feels a lot like private equity going into a new company.

You look at the books, you sell distressed assets.

This is how Elon Musk runs his companies.

But the federal government is going to run and operate in a very different way than a rocket ship company.

So what are the consequences, intended or otherwise, of trying to turn the federal government into a startup?

And is that what Trump and Musk really want?

The word DOGE comes from this internet meme that Elon Musk is quite fond of.

And so when he proposed this idea for a government cost-cutting agency, he created DOGE as a backronym for Department of Government Efficiency.

DOGE has effectively replaced an agency called the U.S.

Digital Service, set up by President Barack Obama to modernize how the government uses technology.

Now, Elon Musk says he wants to do that and a whole lot more.

Musk's whole theory is that we have inflation and high interest rates because the government overspent and we're in a deficit.

So if they can really rein in spending and drop interest rates, that will help American consumers.

If we don't do this, America will go bankrupt.

They're looking for examples of what they call waste, fraud and abuse.

Musk promised when he was on the campaign $2 trillion in budget cuts, at least.

He later backtracked to say, we've got a good shot at getting $1 trillion in cuts.

While the national debt has been rising for years, interest payments on U.S. debt have now climbed to its highest level since the 1990s.

Treasury Department spent $882 billion on net interest payments, roughly $2.4 billion a day.

So far, Doge's cuts don't hold a candle to those kinds of numbers.

When you look at what he's actually cutting, it is not much.

Doge started to put online a list of canceled contracts, canceled leases that they say ended up somewhere in the neighborhood of $55 billion.

But it didn't take long for people to really look at the details of what they said were cut and find duplicate cuts, typos, miscalculations.

In one line item, Doge mistakenly reported an $8 billion savings from a canceled contract, which turned out to be an $8 million, not billion dollar contract.

With Musk at the top, he has mainly young men with tech backgrounds under him.

But there are also some longtime Musk loyalists, like Steve Davis.

Their approach has been to disregard norms, and in some cases, allegedly laws, about how federal agencies operate, especially regarding personnel and data.

Doge came in without really a very clear understanding of who works for the federal government, where, and what they do.

Both Trump and Musk have cited false allegations of fraud and waste to justify mass firings across federal agencies.

Some hasty moves have already led to embarrassing and potentially dangerous reversals.

Doge helped to fire or lay off roughly 350 people at the National Nuclear Security Administration.

A lot of those people have very important jobs safeguarding the nation's nuclear weapons, and now some of them are being hired back.

We will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.

So far, tens of thousands of federal employees have either been fired, resigned, or taken Musk's buyout offer since Trump's inauguration, a number that's expected to keep climbing in the weeks and months ahead.

Elon Musk has a playbook for starting and turning around companies, and that playbook involves massive layoffs and essentially just sowing chaos within the workforce.

In Silicon Valley, you always hear, like, move fast and break things, and sometimes things do break.

In his companies, Musk has often made decisions and then had to overcorrect.

Elon has this tendency to take what he thinks worked in one corner of his world or universe and try to replicate that other places.

He immediately wanted to run it like a pure engineering company in much the same way he maybe runs Tesla or SpaceX.

After he had already laid off about 50% of staff, he sent this email to employees with the subject line, fork in the road.

He basically gave employees a little more than 24 hours to decide, like, do they want to be part of this new Twitter or not?

And about more than a thousand people ultimately said, this isn't for me, and they opted out.

Very early in the Trump administration, he sent out this email, subject line, a fork in the road, and it was basically asking people to sort of commit to this new way of doing things or get out.

The consequences for how he handled the Twitter takeover are still happening.

He laid off thousands of employees who are still suing him.

He ultimately fired people that they had to try to hire back.

Musk's experience in the private sector is, if he lays off too many people, he can just hire a few back.

That might be a little bit harder to do in the federal government.

And there's a valid fear that the rash, quick, fast decisions he's making at the U.S. government could similarly lead to a lot of consequences down the line.

Meanwhile, Congress, which has the power of the purse under the U.S.

And that's because Republicans control both houses of Congress.

You've seen a lot of lawsuits on behalf of federal workers filed by unions and other advocacy groups.

Despite the judiciary's slow-moving nature, some cuts have already been challenged as illegal, unconstitutional, or a breach of contract.

The government has agreed to spend money.

With the Supreme Court already involved in some cases, legal observers contend that Trump's ultimate goal here is to give the Republican-appointed supermajority a chance to further expand executive power in his favor.

In fact, Trump's current director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vogt, is an author of Project 2025, a plan to expand executive power slash federal budgets and weaken regulatory oversight.

I'm not sure that Elon Musk has read Project 2025, but nevertheless, a lot of parts of Project 2025 are coming to fruition through Doge.

Russ Vogt and the OMB and Project 2025 and then Doge, they're sort of running on parallel tracks, but I think they have similar missions.

The overall goal here with the Doge team is to help address the enormous deficit.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How Elon Musk Took Over the US Government

ultimately

sort

potential

scenario