ON THE MATTER OF ACCOUNTABILITY

APRIL 24, 2024 – Among the mounting demerits and liabilities incurred by the Trump Administration, the most egregious—apart from the other most egregious—is the utter lack of accountability for the reckless behavior of Elon Musk, the self-appointed Darth Vader against government “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The president, of course, should be held to account for all the wreckage, but I’ll bet a billion bucks that missing from the pyrite-filled Oval Office is Harry Truman’s famous desktop sign, “The Buck Stops Here.” Ultimately, however, I think the 77 million voters who voted for Trump—aided and abetted by voters who voted for third party candidates and non-voters who sat out the November 2024 election altogether—bear responsibility here.

Out of the chute, the brazen Mr. Musk boasted that by swinging a chain saw, he could slash $2 trillion from federal expenditures. With far less fanfare, he amended that figure to $1 trillion. Now that reality has set in, his figure is down to $150 billion. According to Eric’s Maxim, you always need at least two figures to evaluate one. In the present context, what this means is that to take the measure of $150 billion, you need to know the figure that represents the total annual federal expenditure amount, which was approximately $6.75 trillion in FY 2024. If you do the simple math, Musk’s pared-down savings figure comes in at 2.2% (about 11.4% of the federal budget deficit).

If the main goal here was to reduce government spending to reduce the federal deficit—a laudable goal—so as to lower the interest paid to holders of U.S. Treasurys, there’s still a very steep mountain to climb, especially if the Republicans remain hell-bent on making the 2017 tax cuts permanent (to say nothing of other contemplated tax cuts) and increasing defense spending by $150 billion.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back to the $150 billion of purported savings from DOGE cuts . . . We have been provided with no details, no verifiable data by which to determine whether that figure is grounded in fact or manufactured out of thin air; strike that—out of hot air . . . or pulled out of a Tesla tailpipe (bearing in mind that Tesla is an EV). Moreover, as reported by Elizabeth Williamson of The New York Times, whatever the alleged savings might actually be, the figure does not take into account the cost of the highly mismanaged affair of laying off tens of thousands of federal workers and defending over 110 lawsuits triggered by DOGE cuts.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, estimates that when all the layoffs, re-hiring, paid leaves and lost productivity are taken into account, the total cost of such will approach $135 billion, thus wiping out for this year anyway, the purported savings-by-chain-saw. This cost must be combined with (annual) lost tax collections resulting from fewer tax audits because of huge cuts in IRS staff.

Also missing from the downside of the cuts are the inestimable costs imposed on the American economy from lost productivity because of closed federal offices, longer wait times, and organizational disruptions. Of far greater concern is the total long-term cost of upending critical medical research at the NIH (not to mention research universities funded by the federal government), now that the chain-saw has ripped through that agency.

Who can’t see that the DOGE approach to cutting government “waste, fraud, and abuse” is itself the cause of so much additional waste—without accounting for the potential or actual fraud and abuse associated with giving a bunch of DOGE kids with laptops in their backpacks unfettered access to reams of highly private personal and financial data?

Yet, Republicans in House and Senate turn a blind eye, silenced by the total control that Trump holds over their political fortunes. And their supporters at home? I hear no groundswell among them calling for an accounting—or even expressing curiosity about the state of the tree after three months of the DOGE chain-saw. What, pray tell, is the net benefit? Or more likely, what is the net cost of all the slashing and burning, cutting and thrashing?

Perhaps a modicum of amusement can be drawn from the irony that while Musk has been preoccupied with cutting governmental “waste, fraud, and abuse,” Tesla’s Q1 earnings tanked by 71%.

It’s about time that we called a spade a spade: Musk’s war against government “waste, fraud, and abuse” is a colossal case of . . . waste, fraud, and abuse. DOGE should be terminated before it winds up costing Americans even more than it already has.

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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson