What did Musk achieve and was there anything in it for him?

Channel 4

29-05-2025

This is the time of the year that, in centuries gone by, politicians used to get out of town to escape the unpleasant humid conditions. Perhaps unsurprising, then, that Elon Musk, the world's richest man, is escaping the White House.
The president has never made a secret of his disdain for the current state of Washington DC and those who dwell there. In his
winning election campaign
, he pledged to 'dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption, once and for all!' The people he holds responsible for that corruption? Not just political opponents, but federal workers – the 'bureaucrats'.
Just days into the presidency, it was a message Mr Musk – clad in a baseball hat and with young son in tow – reiterated in the Oval Office, standing beside a seated president.
'We have this unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy. Which has, in a lot of ways, currently, more power than any elected representative. It's just something we gotta, we gotta fix.'
It is talk like that which has conservatives like Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, excited. For him, letting DOGE loose on federal bureaucracy is a correction nine decades in the making.
'All this noise that Mr Trump is generating… there is something happening under that noise.'
Now, rather than elected politicians, he believes, it is unelected bureaucrats who exercise power.
'That's not the way the system set up by the founders was supposed to work. There's a huge democratic deficit that should worry all of us.'
Of course, the side-effect of
Mr Musk's chainsaw
has been to make the many thousands of federal workers who live and work in Washington worried again. Civil servants are facing a reckoning with political power. For Mr Gonzalez, it's overdue:
'I can feel bad for the people who are being, in some cases, unceremoniously fired, who thought they were going to be there for life, who all of a sudden have to find another job. But as an American and a taxpayer and somebody who wants the country to succeed, I can be definitely very happy that we're finally doing something about this.'
And Elon Musk has been clear: 'The people voted for major government reform.'
If you're wondering why so many Americans voted for Trump's promise to unleash Elon Musk on the federal government, Haywood Talcove has some thoughts. He's a former law enforcement official, now involved in tackling fraud and waste as chief executive officer for the government division of LexisNexis Risk Solutions.
Like Mr Gonzalez, he's worried about the US government's massive deficit – well over a trillion dollars.
'When your own government agency, the Government Accounting Office, is saying to you that you have $521 billion in improper payments, you've got a problem and there's an opportunity to get better. Some people argue they don't like his tactics. On the other hand, we are facing a financial issue unlike anything that we've ever seen. Like, you can't continue to borrow a trillion dollars every 100 days.'
'The fraud rate in the private sector in the United States is around 3%. The fraud rate in the public sector in the U.S. is at 20%.'
'What DOGE is trying to do is stop the criminals from stealing, right?'
Of course, the Department of Government Efficiency isn't the first attempt at tackling waste and bureaucracy in the federal government. Some in Washington DC noted the irony in developing a department with 'efficiency' in the title when many of the functions DOGE is supposed to be carrying out were already being carried out by other federal workers.
Robert Storch was one of those federal workers. Until recently, he was inspector general at the US Department of Defense.
'One of the things we developed following the Watergate scandal and some other corruption scandals in the 1970s were a series of measures to ensure integrity in government,' he explains.
Inspectors general were introduced in all government departments and agencies, with powers to inspect and audit.
'I believe the total amount saved by inspectors general exceeds a hundred billion dollars every year. I think the return on investment for the American taxpayer is approximately 26 dollars for every dollar that's spent on IGs.'
Mr Storch's counterpart at the Department of the Interior, Mark Greenblatt, a man twice appointed by President Trump, greeted news of Mr Musk's arrival in Washington with some relish.
'When the president first started talking about the Department of Government Efficiency, which we call DOGE here, Elon Musk was being bandied about and there was all this sort of hubbub. I was actually excited.'
'I said, well, these are going to be good allies for us in the fight against waste, fraud and abuse. This is a good thing for us and for America. But their mission has turned out to be very, very different.'
Different because, despite saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money, President Trump fired Rob Storch, Mark Greenblatt, and at least 15 of their counterparts at other agencies.
'It seems like for DOGE it's not improving government efficiency,' says Mr Greenblatt in the sunshine outside his old office. 'It's just cutting government, which is a different goal'
A number of those fired by Mr Trump, including Mr Storch, are now taking legal action against the government, concerned their removal was illegal.
Whether DOGE has improved efficiency or not, the act of cutting government seems to have been hard enough for Elon Musk.
His claims about the amount of money that can be saved have changed over time. In October 2024, he told voters at Madison Square Garden that 'we can do at least two trillion'.
By February this year, at cabinet, he told the room 'we can actually find a trillion dollars in savings'.
By 30th April, with his exit from the White House nearing, he said so far US$160 billion of savings had been identified.
Mr Musk has always maintained that DOGE's progress is clear for taxpayers to see. 'All of our actions are maximally transparent,' he said in the Oval Office in April. 'I don't know of a case where an organisation has been as transparent as the DOGE organisation.'
Not everyone in Trumpworld agrees.
In an interview with Semafor, the former Trump confidant Steve Bannon called for a forensic accounting of the savings: 'We need to know exactly what he found because we went from $2 trillion a year to $1 trillion a year to $150 billion next year with nothing this year. None of this makes sense…'
Kedric Payne, of the Washington-based government watchdog group, the Campaign Legal Center, says that with Mr Musk's government role, 'there seems to be a long list of financial conflicts of interest, but no mechanism that is working right now to stop that problem'.
'The legal system that we have in place to govern against conflicts was one of the many ethical reforms that took place in the wake of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s,' explains Don Fox, the former acting head of the US Office of Government Ethics.
'Is the system itself adequate to deal with potential conflicts of interest and prevent them? I think it is. But it takes effort on the part of the government officials involved, and it takes a certain amount of goodwill and norms of behaviour, which the Trump administration, in both its first iteration and in the first 90 plus days of this administration, tends to ignore. So my confidence level that the system is working in the case of Mr Musk and his associates is quite low.'
Mike Gonzalez, of the Heritage Foundation, speaking before Mr Musk announced his departure, expressed confidence that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO was acting to mitigate potential conflicts of interest: 'There was a meeting to discuss China. And because Elon Musk does have some manufacturing in China, he did not attend the meeting. And I think that's fine.'
But with such privileged access and power, could the world's richest man really disentangle his business interests? Musk's supporters say he's a patriot not a profiteer. After all, despite money-can't-buy advertising from his boss, the performance of his car maker Tesla has its shareholders worried.
But for Don Fox, the dual role as government cost-cutter-in-chief and corporate CEO was always deeply problematic: 'If he were honouring both the letter and the spirit of the law, then he would recuse himself from any official activities that in any way could benefit his professional interests, whether it's Starlink, whether it's Tesla, or whether it's SpaceX. So while he's serving, that's a tremendous concern.'
One of those concerned is Evan Feinman. Until recently he ran a multi-billion dollar project to provide broadband to some of America's most rural communities, including places where people voted in their droves for the president.
The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment programme, he explains, 'is the largest broadband infrastructure programme ever created by the federal government. It was set up to deliver an affordable, reliable, high-speed internet connection to every single American home and business.'
It was mandated by law to 'to get fibre connections to as many homes and businesses as possible'.
The Trump administration expressed concern about the speed of the programme's rollout, so Mr Feinman had a plan ready to adapt it to make it more to the liking of his new boss. He was surprised by what happened next.
'After the confirmation of Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, we received instruction that we were to rewrite the programme rules, which rewrite is still occurring, to increase the amount of satellite usage and decrease the amount of fibreoptic connectivity.
'There isn't enough capacity in satellite networks to connect every American who needs a connection today… You decrease the availability of those satellites for the places that truly rely on satellite, for whom there is no other option.
'A fibre optic network costs more upfront, but then costs very little to operate and delivers extraordinarily high speeds, both download and upload speeds, well in excess of what households need today, but likely able to accommodate what future needs those locations are going to have… satellites by and large offer just above the minimum standards for what is a broadband connection today.'
The Trump administration decided to replace Evan Feinman, but his departing email to staff was highly critical of Secretary Lutnick's action.
'The practical outcome of the changes that the new administration has pushed forward will be that more people will get worse connections and more money will be pushed toward Elon Musk's Starlink programme.'
'I will leave it to the government ethics experts to say whether or not something illegal has happened or something officially improper has happened. The standard I've always used in my professional conduct is the appearance of impropriety. And this certainly appears improper.'
Channel 4 News approached the US Department of Commerce for comment, but did not receive a response.
Democrats have been raising concerns about Musk's team's involvement in another department.
The fatal crash of
American Airlines Flight 5342
has put the Federal Aviation Administration under pressure like never before and focused attention on the United States' ageing air traffic control infrastructure.
DOGE wrongly fired 132 staff despite a shortage of air traffic controllers, and they've recently been forced to reinstate them.
But Elon Musk wasn't just interested in personnel. He criticised FAA contracts with the company Verizon to overhaul air traffic control systems. On his X social media platform he espoused his Starlink system as a potential replacement for the existing, elderly system.
Kedric Payne, of the Campaign Legal Center, is one of those with concerns: 'It appears that Elon Musk has improperly been involved in the business transactions between the Federal Aviation Administration and his company Starlink,' he alleges.
Starlink staff are already testing kit on FAA property, to the alarm of some air traffic controllers and concern of ethics campaigners. Though the FAA told Channel 4 News the tests are at non-safety-critical sites.
Mr Payne says: 'Those types of comments followed by the immediate change in the policy with the FAA to use Starlink suggest that he was involved in that decision to profit his own company.'
Channel 4 News approached Elon Musk, Starlink and the White House for comment, but did not receive a response.
When Tesla's profits slumped 71% in the first three months of the year, it was clear Elon Musk would have to choose between government or business. He promised investors in the electric car firm that the amount of time he would spend with DOGE would 'drop significantly'.
And while he dismissed reports he could leave the White House altogether as 'fake news', he now appears to have confirmed them.
Elon Musk's feed on X has played down suggestions of a rift with the president. But, when asked by reporters about Mr Musk's criticism of the Republicans' 'big, beautiful' tax and spending Bill on Wednesday 28th March, the president defended the bill and failed to mention Musk by name.
America voted for change in Washington. And it's clear there is waste, fraud and abuse waiting to be tackled. Elon Musk is optimistic DOGE will 'strengthen and continue' as 'way of life throughout the government'. But with its figurehead now gone, billions short of his initial savings target, supporters will wonder: if the world's richest man can't fix Washington, who can?
Producer:
Matthew Cundall
Picture Editor:
Manos Koutsavakis
Cameras:
Ben Martin, Dickon Mager
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