Summary
$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his DOGE team are “expecting” to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts.
To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15% of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash.
In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden.
“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”
It’s probable that it’s way less than that, and that’s not factoring in whatever it’ll cost to unfuck everything he’s done. Not that that’s likely to happen anytime soon.
Also not counting in the brain-drain that is already happening.
I hope it’ll be better for all you normal human beings in the US at some point in the future, I really do, but fuck me if this shit isn’t scary all the way on the side of the Atlantic, and that’s coming from someone living right next door to Russia. I’m way more scared of what’ll happen when the US goes full 4th Reich.
I guess one could argue you’re already there to be fair, but I still hope it went too far too fast and a backlash is incoming.