Published at Open the Books Substack

Elon Musk has officially stepped back from his day-to-day engagement with DOGE, but he took time last week to offer a useful reality check about DOGE’s progress and the challenges ahead. While speaking to the Qatar Economic Forum, he made his office’s limitations clear to Bloomberg reporter Mishal Husain: “DOGE is an advisory group; we are doing the best we can as an advisory group.”

 

“We do not make the laws, nor do we control the judiciary, nor do we control the Executive Branch,” Musk elaborated. “We are simply advisors. In that context, we are doing very well. We cannot take action beyond that because we are not some sort of imperial dictator of the government. There are three branches of government that are, to some degree, opposed to that level of cost savings.”

 

The Trump administration has claimed DOGE has saved taxpayers $160 billion so far. Critics, including some on the right, said DOGE hasn’t achieved that level of savings. So, who is right? And how can the average person see the data and decide for themselves?

 

At Open the Books we take these questions seriously and have tried to bring some transparency to the question in the analysis below. We’ve also tried to develop an intellectually honest approach using two common sense standards.

 

READ THE FULL STORY.

 

 

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