Today marks the putative final day of Elon Musk, special advisor or some such thing and definitely not in charge of the thing he’s entirely in charge of, DOGE, the acronym named after his crypto currency that was one of his least consequential efforts to enrich himself in an administration that valued self-enrichment as a virtue. But at least he cut $2 trillion in fraud, waste and abuse from the federal budget, right?

Few would contend that there wasn’t fraud, waste and abuse in the federal budget, but contrary to the simpletons who mindlessly supported any cutting for this reason, understanding how government works, why things happened and where the fraud, waste and abuse could be found, required a level of attention and effort that neither Musk nor his Muskrats could muster. So what did he accomplish?

Musk’s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing “waste, fraud and abuse” has been a failure. DOGE claims it’s saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE’s attacks on government personnel — its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.

That MAGA faithful, like the woke faithful before them, have an excuse for everything. It’s the deep state. It’s the infiltration of DEI ideology throughout the federal government, so embedded and intertwined that the only way to get rid of it is to feed it into the wood chipper.

There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

It would have taken forever to actually spend the time to figure out which programs served good purposes and which did not. It never would have gotten done without just indiscriminately trashing it all, and later figuring out what, if anything, should be saved. It had to be done because that was the only way to stem the ever-increasing cost of government, the budget deficit, the taxpayer’s money being flushed down the toilet.

Yet even as he prides himself on dispassionate rigor, Musk has proved remarkably uninterested in figuring out how the government that he sought to transform really works. Samantha Power, head of U.S.A.I.D. under Biden, told me she tried to speak with members of the new administration, hoping to convince them there were elements of U.S.A.I.D.’s work that they could leverage for their own agenda. But aside from one meeting with a transition official, her outreach was ignored.

Instead, Musk seemed to derive his view of the agency from conspiracy theorists on X. There, he called U.S.A.I.D. a “radical-left political psy op” and amplified a post from the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos smearing it as “the most gigantic global terror organization in history.”

Calling everything that doesn’t serve your cause “radical left” has proven to be easy enough to convince the drones of the right that it must be good. If newspapers explain otherwise, they can be ignored because they’re just “fake news.” Even when Trump-appointed judges rule against him, they were just radical left undercover RINOS who are using laws and the Constitution to prevent Trump from doing whatever he wants to do, which is what he was elected to do, ignoring the fact that there was never enough MAGA faithful to elect him, and he was elected by people holding their nose as they couldn’t vote for Kamala.

The absurd $2 trillion dropped to one, then $150 billion, which is highly suspect as a number and conceptually wrong as “savings.” It’s only “savings” when you don’t receive value for the money. It will never be clear whether there was any savings at all, since no one bothered to figure out whether the money spent served a good function or was “waste, fraud and abuse.” Thinking is hard, and the Muskrats were wholly unfamiliar with how to do it.

But what of the hundreds of thousand of federal employees fired? What of the people whose lives relied on the support we promised to provide? What of the services expected by the American people of their government? What of the medical research into diseases that could be cured?

Putting aside, for the moment, the massive budget deficit that may come from the massive, omnibus, reconciliation Big Beautiful Bill, which takes from curing cancer to multiply the budget of Homeland Security many times over so that we can sweep thousands a day into rendition, most of whom may be illegal aliens with only a smattering of legal aliens and American citizens (oopsie) with Hispanic names and accents, what has Musk saved us?

Like his patron, he behaved like a child. Like his patron, he accomplished only needless damage and pain. And still the simpletons will make excuses to pretend it wasn’t a disaster and served some purpose to clean the swamp. At least if Musk should be found to have committed a crime along the way, he can easily afford to pay for his pardon with a mere $1 million as the going rate.