In recent weeks, the Trump White House has been desperate to point to a real-world example of Elon Musk and the poorly named Department of Government Efficiency uncovering wasteful spending. To that end, Republicans have pointed to $50 million that the United States, they claim, sent to Gaza for condoms.
The problem, of course, is that the claim is a discredited lie. Asked about this obvious deception at an Oval Office event, Musk, Donald Trump’s biggest campaign donor, told reporters, “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect.”
The powerful billionaire, however, shouldn’t sell himself short: It’s not just some of his assertions that will be incorrect; all kinds of Musk’s claims will be wrong. In fact, as Election Day 2024 neared, The New York Times took a closer look at the kind of online content he published by way of the social media platform. The newspaper found that nearly a third of the things Musk posted “were false, misleading or missing vital context.”
At the same Oval Office event in which Musk acknowledged the occasional error, he continued to mislead the public about matters large and small.
Of course, the billionaire megadonor’s dishonesty is just part of a vastly larger problem involving Musk’s authority within the Trump administration, his conflicts of interests, his controversial surrogates, his broad unpopularity with the American public, and his DOGE operation allegedly far exceeding its vague legal authority.
It was against this backdrop that the Republican president apparently had an idea: give Musk and the DOGE initiative even more power. NBC News reported: President Donald Trump said Tuesday he was signing an executive order to give tech billionaire Elon Musk more power over the federal workforce, adding to Musk’s swift and sweeping consolidation of political influence. With Musk standing to his right in the Oval Office, Trump praised the work of his office, known as the Department of Government Efficiency Service (DOGE). And Trump said he wanted Musk to now do more, even as DOGE faces multiple lawsuits from labor unions and Democratic state attorneys general over whether it is acting within the law.
As part of Trump’s new directive, every federal agency in the federal government is now supposed to “coordinate and consult” with DOGE about cutting spending and curtailing hiring. Or put another way, Musk’s so-called department was already at the center of an intensifying controversy, and instead of limiting the megadonor’s influence, the White House thought it would make sense to do the opposite.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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