Elon Musk's official role at Trump's DOGE ends, but his political impact lingers ahead of midterms
However, the president, in a social media post on Thursday night announcing that he and Musk would team up for a 1:30 p.m. ET White House news conference on Friday, teased that Musk would continue to help the Trump administration.
"This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way. Elon is terrific!" he wrote.
Musk's political impact on national politics and on next year's midterm elections — for better or for worse — is far from over and is likely to live on well past his official departure from the Trump administration.
What's Next For Doge After Elon Musk's Departure
Trump, after winning back the White House in last November's election, created DOGE with marching orders to overhaul and downsize the federal government. Trump named Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and Trump's biggest political donor in the 2024 election, to steer the organization.
Read On The Fox News App
"Elon Musk made the most serious attempt at reducing the size and scope of government in modern political history. It was at times chaotic but impactful," veteran GOP strategist Ryan Williams told Fox News.
Williams predicted that Musk's "efforts will continue to linger as a political football, but also a guide for Republicans if they're serious about limiting the growth of the federal government."
After returning to the White House in January, Musk and DOGE quickly swept through federal agencies, rooting out what the new administration argued was billions in wasteful federal spending. Additionally, they took a meat cleaver to the federal workforce, resulting in a massive downsizing of employees.
Nothing symbolized Musk's controversial moves more than his brandishing of a chainsaw during a February appearance at the MAGA-dominated Conservative Political Action Conference, where he touted "how easy" it was to "save billions of dollars sometimes in… an hour."
The moves by DOGE grabbed tons of national attention and triggered a slew of lawsuits in response. Many of DOGE's cuts in government staffing were stymied or reversed by federal court orders.
While DOGE was originally tasked with slashing $2 trillion from the federal government's budget, the DOGE website earlier this week said that its efforts to date had led to roughly $175 billion in savings due to asset sales, contract cancellations, fraud payment cuts, in addition to other steps to eliminate costs.
Musk Criticism Of Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' Frustrates Some Republicans
Musk's arrival in the nation's capital came with a bang.
Thanks to a direct pipeline to the president and his powerful mouthpiece on the social media site X, Musk instantly and repeatedly made headlines with his provocative moves and the targeting of people he did not like, often to the chagrin of Trump administration officials and Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Trump repeatedly praised Musk and DOGE's efforts.
"The vast majority of people in this country really respect and appreciate you, and this whole room can say that very strongly; you have really been a tremendous help," the president said during a Cabinet meeting four weeks ago, when Musk announced that he would be cutting back on his time spent with DOGE and the Trump administration.
However, behind the scenes, there was a lot less harmony.
"People got really sick of him really quickly," a veteran Republican strategist with ties to the administration and Capitol Hill who asked to remain anonymous to speak more freely told Fox News.
"He was fun to begin with," the strategist noted, before adding that "people inside and around the administration and people outside" were tired of Musk "by the end, when he's sitting in a meeting wearing multiple hats on his head."
Additionally, Musk's recent criticism of Trump's sweeping "big beautiful bill," which passed a major congressional hurdle, did not help matters.
While a slew of public opinion polls, including national surveys from Fox News, indicated that Americans like the idea of downsizing the federal government, those same surveys highlighted that the public was far from thrilled with how Musk and DOGE carried out cuts to the federal bureaucracy.
White House Reveals Next Steps For Doge After Musk Departure
Musk, who spent nearly $300 million in support of Trump's 2024 White House victory, quickly became a lightning rod in the handful of off-year and special elections held early this year.
Through aligned political groups, Musk dished out roughly $20 million in battleground Wisconsin's high-profile state Supreme Court race, in support of Trump-backed judge Brad Schimel, the conservative-leaning candidate in the election.
Musk, in a controversial move, handed out $1 million checks at a rally in Green Bay two nights ahead of the election to two Wisconsin voters who had already cast ballots in the contest and had signed a petition to stop "activist judges."
Musk, at the rally, donned a cheesehead hat — a foam wedge which resembles a chunk of cheese — that is traditionally worn by devout Green Bay Packers football fans in Wisconsin and across the country.
However, Schimel ended up losing by 10 points to the Democratic-aligned candidate in what was supposed to be a close contest. Musk ended up getting tagged with plenty of blame in a race that partially turned into a referendum on his efforts at DOGE.
Top Five Wildest Moments Of Musk's Doge Tenure
Democrats repeatedly made Musk the bogeyman in their messaging in Wisconsin's election and in other contests, and they pledged to continue to target him heading into next year's midterm elections, when Republicans will be defending their razor-thin House majority and their modest Senate majority.
"Top of mind for voters are the pocketbook issues. Democrats are going to win by highlighting the fact that Republicans are failing at lowering costs because they are too busy pushing tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations, while making the rest of us pay for them," Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee national press secretary Viet Shelton told Fox News.
Shelton emphasized that "Elon is, and forever will be, an instantly-recognizable manifestation of the fact that House Republicans don't work for the American people, they work for the billionaires."
So, were Musk's potential political risks to Republicans behind his departure from the nation's capitol?
A GOP strategist close to GOP lawmakers, when asked if Musk's welcome was wearing out among congressional Republicans, said "yes to a point."
"But I think the larger question about whether Musk and DOGE are liabilities in the midterms, I would say emphatically no," added the strategist, who asked for anonymity to speak more freely.
The strategist noted that GOP lawmakers "who have talked about waste, fraud, and abuse, and have talked about the savings generated by DOGE, they've done quite well. It's the folks who don't want to message on it and have not put Democrats on defense, who are tired of Musk."
Additionally, veteran Republican strategist Matt Gorman disagrees with the Democrats' argument about Musk's lasting impact on the campaign trail.
"I don't think that in any way Elon Musk will be a factor one way or another in the year-plus that we have until Election Day 2026," Gorman, a veteran of numerous presidential and statewide campaigns, told Fox News.Original article source: Elon Musk's official role at Trump's DOGE ends, but his political impact lingers ahead of midterms
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Why a Fed rate cut could lead to bad news for Big Tech stocks
Investors are looking for an interest rate cut — but the market may not respond as expected when it comes. "I think that the market's going to have to come to grips with the Fed is going to cut rates, and is it going to be the right move for the Fed to make now?" Jim Bianco of Bianco Research said on Opening Bid. July's Consumer Price Index (CPI) report showed core inflation rose 0.3%, the largest increase in six months. "Last year they cut rates, and the market decided it wasn't the right move," Bianco added. "And it shot yields on the 10 [year Treasury] and the 30-year up over 100 basis points." Bianco said the real inflationary pressure is building due to Trump's tariffs, and the impact could be significant. While some of the costs may be eaten by exporters or corporations, others will be passed on via price hikes. "There's about an extra $250 to $300 billion of tariffs that are going to be collected over the next year ... tariffs were running around $8 billion a month. Now they're running nearly $30 billion a month," he noted. Bianco expects Fed Chair Jerome Powell to provide some clarity at the Fed's annual Jackson Hole Economic Symposium later this month. And if Powell signals a September cut isn't coming, the backlash could be intense — including renewed political pressure from President Trump, who has previously floated the idea of firing the Fed chair. "If he says he's not going to cut rates, I would then put Trump firing him back into the play," Bianco said. The Fed's decision could also have an outsized impact on megacap tech stocks. The largest 10% of US companies now account for 76% of total market capitalization, the highest concentration on record, according to market data platform Barchart. The concentration makes the entire market vulnerable to shifts in interest rates. As yields go higher, money could move out of stocks and into bonds. Bianco warned that if 10-year Treasury yields hit 5%, it could trigger profit-taking in Big Tech stocks. Bianco advised investors to stay cautious when chasing the market's most popular names. "If you want to play some of these Mag 7s, you have to be prepared for big gains and big losses," he said. "Some think it's all a one-way street ... until it isn't." Francisco Velasquez is a Reporter at Yahoo Finance. He can be reached on LinkedIn and X, or via email at Click here for in-depth analysis of the latest stock market news and events moving stock prices
CNN
21 minutes ago
- CNN
Capitol Crime Busters - Inside Politics with Dana Bash and Manu Raju - Podcast on CNN Podcasts
CNN Inside Politics 40 mins First: President Trump says his unprecedented takeover of the Washington, DC police could extend to other cities across the country. But is the new White House push. about public protection or political posturing? Or maybe both? Plus: The Texas House just failed to meet a quorum for the fifth time in a row as the Republican governor warns redistricting is inevitable. And: The president picks a MAGA loyalist to run the nation's most important economic statistics agency, leaving Wall Street questioning whether crucial data can still be taken at face value.
Los Angeles Times
22 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Tariff ‘Mission Accomplished' hype is just that
On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush announced, 'Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.' He was standing below a giant banner that read, 'Mission Accomplished.' At the risk of inviting charges of understatement, subsequent events didn't cooperate. But it took a while for that to be widely accepted. We're in a similar place when it comes to President Trump's experiment with a new global trading order. 'Tariffs are making our country Strong and Rich!!!' proclaims Trump, making him not only the first Republican president in living memory to brag about raising taxes on Americans, but also the first to insist that raising taxes on Americans makes us richer. MAGA's mission-accomplished groupthink relies primarily on three arguments. The first is that Trump has successfully concluded a slew of beneficial trade deals. The truth is that some of those deals are simply 'frameworks' that will take a long time to be ironed out. But Trump got the headlines he wanted. The second argument is a kind of populism-infused sleight of hand. The 'experts' — their scare quotes, not mine — are wrong once again. The White House social media account crows, 'In April, 'experts' called tariffs 'the biggest policy mistake in 95 years.' By July, they generated OVER $100 BILLION in revenue. Facts expose the haters: tariffs WORK. Trust in Trump.' But the high-fivers are leaving things out. The most-dire predictions of economic catastrophe were based on the scheme Trump announced on April 2, a.k.a. 'Liberation Day.' Trump quickly backed off that plan ('chickened out' in Wall Street parlance) in response to a bond and stock market implosion. Saying the experts were wrong under those circumstances is like saying experts opposed to defenestration were wrong when they successfully convinced a man not to jump out a window. The third argument, made by the White House and many others — that tariffs are working because they're raising money — is a response to a claim no one made. To my knowledge, no expert claimed tariffs wouldn't raise money. The estimates of these revenues from Trump world are stratospheric. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick expects somewhere between $700 billion and $1 trillion per year. Last month, the government collected $29 billion. It's likely this number will significantly increase as more tariffs come online and businesses run down the inventory they stockpiled earlier this year in anticipation of more tariffs to come. Normally, Republicans don't exult over massive revenues from tax hikes. But Trump's defenders get around this problem by insisting that money is 'pouring' and 'flowing' into America from someplace else. It's true that tariff revenue is pouring into the Treasury, but that money is coming out of American bank accounts, because American importers pay the tariff. Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cannot deny this when pressed. So yes, tariffs are 'working' the way they're supposed to; the problem is Trump thinks tariffs work differently than they do. It's possible some foreign exporters might lower prices to maintain market share, and some American businesses might absorb the costs — for now — to avoid sticker shock for inflation-beleaguered consumers, but what revenue is generated still comes from Americans. Ultimately it means higher prices paid here, reduced profits for businesses here or reduced U.S. trade overall. Sometimes, when pressed, defenders of the administration will concede the true source of the revenues, but then they say the pain is necessary to force manufacturers and other businesses to build and produce in the United States. It's backdoor industrial policy masquerading as trade policy. That, too, might 'work.' But all of this will take time, no matter what. And, if it works, that will have costs, too. Manufacturing in America is more expensive — that's why we manufacture so much stuff abroad in the first place. If this 'reshoring' happens, our goods will be more expensive, and less money will 'pour in' from tariffs. It's difficult to exaggerate how well-understood all of this was on the American right until very recently. But the need to grab any argument available to declare Trump's experiment a success has a lot of people not only abandoning their previous dogma but leaping to the conclusion that the dogma was wrong all along. Maybe it was, though I don't think so. The evidence so far suggests that problems are looming. The dollar is weakening. Prices continue to rise. The job market is reeling. The stock market (an unreliable metric, according to MAGA, when it plummeted after Liberation Day) is holding on, thanks to tech stocks. The truth is we won't have real evidence for a while. It's worth remembering that Americans don't live by headlines and press releases and they don't live in the macro economy either. Declaring 'Mission Accomplished' for the macro economy won't convince people they're better off in their own micro-economies when they're not. @JonahDispatch
