On his way out the door, Politico couldn’t resist kicking Elon Musk one more time. Last night they posted a piece with this celebratory headline: “How Washington broke Elon Musk.”
Incredibly, Politico says Musk “sowed the seeds of his own demise on Inauguration Day. Musk, speaking at a Trump rally about his excitement for the next four years, gleefully made a straight-arm salute — a split-second gesture immortalized in the press and on social media. Critics called it a Nazi salute, a comparison bolstered by his ardent support for Germany’s far-right AfD political party.”
What a cheap shot and disgraceful effort to malign the world’s greatest entrepreneur, who volunteered to clean up some of the mess that is our federal bureaucracy…for free, taking no salary. A man known to be awkward, and who was trying to communicate his love of the crowd.
That “straight-armed salute” is a gesture used by any number of Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; a montage of such meaningless gestures was posed by Libs of Tik Tok soon after the Musk fracas and gathered over 150 million views; people were incensed.
Politico also described his DOGE team as “secretive” even though they posted daily about their activities on X and did a full-blown interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier to introduce the public to the very consequential people updating the nation’s technologies and rooting out obviously wasteful spending.
While Politico gleefully accuses DOGE of lying about Social Security checks being sent to dead people, they have no trouble with Democrat accusations that the group was “slashing benefits to the most vulnerable Americans” which is not substantiated because it is not true.
The writer, a 2024 graduate of Columbia University, also dings Musk’s success, reporting that “DOGE now says it has cut about $175 billion — less than 10 percent of Musk’s initial expectation.” Please point me to anyone else who has come close to reducing federal spending by $175 billion; it is a victory over the entrenched bureaucracy, self-serving legislators and – for sure – liberal echo-chamber outlets like Politico.
Today, DOGE posted that they have de-activated 523,000 credit cards issued by the federal government; they note “as a reminder, at the start of the audit, there were ~4.6M active cards/accounts – we are now expanding the program to more agencies, as there is much more work to do.”
At the Department of Defense, working with Pete Hegseth, DOGE reports DOD had become “over-reliant on management consultants and contractors,” and they have strategically canceled ~$5B in contracts, “converting consultants into combat power.”
Another DOGE post today: “There are currently 47 distinct financial management systems across the 24 CFO Act agencies, with instances of disparate systems occurring even intra-agency (e.g. Homeland Security has 6 separate systems, Treasury has 5, etc.)! Sometimes, to transfer data between systems, paper is printed from one and manually entered into another. A large consolidation effort has begun, which will lead to cost savings and operational simplicity. So far, 3 agencies have consolidated their procurement functionality, and so much more work to do.”
The good news for American taxpayers is that DOGE’s work will continue. The update to U.S. bureaucracy and technology is long overdue; thank you for Elon Musk for having taken on such incredibly important work.
As for Politico and its sneering writer: nothing you will ever do will be as consequential as what Elon Musk has already accomplished.
