These days, Morgantown—driven by the university in general and by what they now call the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center, in particular—is a sprawling small city, with townhouses and shopping centers and office buildings having swallowed the acres of woods where my friends and I used to play. But in 1970, it was kind of a big deal when a spanking new building like that was conjured into being; this one was of particular interest because it was something different: a federal government building, bringing a little slice of Washington to town.
Until Elon Musk.
As Musk steps back from DOGE, we’re getting a number of assessments of his “accomplishments.” They’re generally harsh. He vowed to slash $2 trillion in “wasteful” federal spending (the federal government spends just under $7 trillion a year). He recently acknowledged it’ll be more like $150 billion. However, his “cuts” will also cost American taxpayers $135 billion, according to one estimate, because it turns out that some of these bloodsucking deep staters save taxpayers money. But even $150 billion is a grotesque lie. Jessica Reidl of the Manhattan Institute—yes, the staunchly conservative and generally pro-Trump think tank—recently told The New York Times’ David French: “So right now I would say DOGE has saved $2 billion, which, to put it in context, is one-thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the federal budget, otherwise known as budget dust.”
Thursday night, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle and Jacob Soboroff hosted a fantastic special from Washington, in which they gathered some 50 federal workers from around the country to talk about what they did, why they loved their jobs, and how this will hurt people. One person, Scott Laney, was a Morgantown-based epidemiologist who spoke eloquently about the dedication of the people he worked with. Keri Murphy of the Commerce Department was working to implement the CHIPS and Science Act—that is, bringing jobs back to America in just the way Donald Trump says he wants. “That’s why I thought I was safe,” Murphy told Soboroff. Tamara Maze of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said: “All federal workers I’ve ever known are in it because we want to serve the country.”
Be that as it may: Musk is a poisonous human being. He may be good at making money (with the help of government subsidies), but he is planet Earth’s greatest walking proof that that skill does not automatically confer other skills, despite how much our culture (and especially right-wing media) lionizes the super-rich. Musk is stupid about a great many things, and especially about government administration and public service. He is incompetent. He is cruel. And he is sinister.
Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee to describe the details. You see, the databases of most executive branch agencies are siloed off from one another. There is a reason for this—so the CIA can’t get your Social Security information. The DOGE team, with its usual combination of evil intent and clumsy ineptitude, is trying to break down these walls so that the Trump White House can have a thorough file on each of us just a couple clicks away. One whistleblower “alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data.”
Tesla’s board says it supports Musk as CEO and that The Wall Street Journal’s report that he’s being shoved out is false. Fine. Tesla, which he did not found and which he’s now running into the ground, can have him. Let panels fly off those hideous Cybertrucks. Just please give this destroyer of worlds a smaller world to destroy.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
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