Musk is Out of Trump’s Washington

Elon Musk is officially leaving his role as a top advisor in President Donald Trump’s administration after more than 114 days.

Musk was one of the most prominent figures in Trump’s White House as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, where he led a ruthless and often reckless campaign to cut government waste by slashing the federal workforce, ending federal grants and cutting programs with little notice, sowing anxiety and discord among federal civil servants.

The richest man in the world confirmed the news in a Wednesday post on X, the social media platform he owns.

“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk wrote. “The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”

Musk had called himself the president’s “first buddy” early in his relationship with Trump, in part because he was the biggest known political spender in the 2024 election, kicking in more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s re-election campaign alone. In February, he made waves wielding a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference vowing to cut trillions from the federal budget.

His exit comes as his relationship with Trump is reportedly deteriorating and his sway in the administration waning, according to reporting by The New York Times. The day before his announcement, Musk told CBS News that he was “disappointed” by the “massive spending bill” that House Republicans passed last week. 

That budget would enact sweeping tax cuts on wealthy Americans by cutting support services and programs for poor families while growing the deficit by an estimated $2.3 trillion over the next decade, according to reporting by NBC News. 

It “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk complained.

Other frustrations had been fermenting, anonymous sources told The Times. Earlier this month, Trump unveiled a deal to help build a sprawling campus for artificial intelligence servers in the United Arab Emirates. Musk pushed to have his own AI company, xAI, included in that deal, but it was not. Instead, rival tech company OpenAI is reportedly negotiating on the details of that Abu Dhabi partnership.

Musk disagreed with Trump’s blunt package of tariffs and had felt burned after dropping $25 million on an unsuccessful judicial candidate in Wisconsin earlier this year, which sources for The Times said fueled his disillusionment with national politics.

And despite bragging that DOGE saved hundreds of billions of dollars of government waste — claims that he and his team sometimes inflated or misrepresented — Musk felt stymied by the difficulty of actually enacting those cuts, compounded by his reported lack of interest in learning more about the bureaucracy he was acting upon, according to The Times. 

As for the legacy of his agency, the House is expected to codify DOGE’s cuts legislatively via a rescission bill, according to NBC. 

And several of DOGE’s senior deputies have established footholds for themselves in other parts of the administration, according to The Times, watching the General Services Administration and attempting to identify instances of foreign nationals voting illegally.