Back at SpaceX, Musk says in interview DOGE became D.C.'s ‘whipping boy'

Washington Post

27-05-2025

STARBASE, Tex. — He's back in his natural habitat, far from the searing glare of Trump's Washington, again lording over this remote spit of marsh under the sweltering South Texas sun that SpaceX transformed into the world's most unlikely launch site.
This is Elon Musk's true domain, a place removed from the controversy of the D.C. Beltway, where his attempts to reshape the federal bureaucracy ran into fierce institutional resistance and spawned lawsuits, backlash from voters and consumers, derision from Democrats, and the ignominious realization that politics can be just as difficult as rocket science — perhaps even more so.
Eager to demonstrate that his attention is now rededicated to his companies, Musk returned here ahead of the next test flight of Starship, the world's most powerful rocket and a key part of NASA's plan to return to the moon and Musk's quest to send people to Mars.
In an interview overlooking the sprawling factory floor, he said: 'I'm physically here. This is the focus, and especially around launch. Everything comes together at the moment of launch.'
Gone was the Dark MAGA cap, the black blazer, the belligerence toward his perceived foes in Congress and the Washington press corps. For now, there will be no more Cabinet meetings or unsuccessful forays into political races. The most meaningful political race in this corner of South Texas was the one held by residents who voted overwhelmingly this month to incorporate Starbase as a city with elected municipal officials, though the real leader of this factory town, everyone knows, is the richest man in the world.
Projecting the intensity of a wartime general and wearing an 'Occupy Mars' T-shirt, Musk said he had a 'maniacal sense of urgency. I'm just wired that way, and that's the kind of mindset that I've kind of instilled in the people at SpaceX. You have got to drive hard, and not everyone is cut out for that. Like, people want to have the chill vibes, and SpaceX is sort of ultra hardcore. But if we're not ultra hardcore, how are we going to get to Mars? You're not going to get to Mars in 40 hours a week.'
Even so, he vowed that his work with the U.S. DOGE Service was not done. He said he plans to focus DOGE's efforts on improving the federal bureaucracy's computer systems, a less-controversial goal than taking a chainsaw to the workforce.
'There's, like, so many situations where the computers are so broken,' he said, 'even in the intelligence world,' where in order to transfer 'data from one computer to another, you have to print it out and then type it into the next computer. And this is just literally a thing that was brought to my attention.'
'The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,' he said. 'I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.'
He said repercussions over DOGE cuts had been severe. 'DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,' he said. 'So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.'
He lamented the hit his companies took: 'People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That's really uncool.'
The effort will now be focused 'a bit more like tackling projects with the highest gain for the pain, which still means a lot of good things in terms of reducing waste and fraud.'
Still, Musk's claims about finding massive savings and slashing waste in government have been shown to be exaggerated. As he scales back his presence in Washington, it is clear he did not achieve as much as he wanted.
And after several months grappling with Congress, Democrats and entrenched interests in the capital, he was eager, he said, to return to his many other ventures — especially SpaceX, since the last two Starship test flights ended up with the spacecraft exploding.
SpaceX's quest since its founding was to get people to Mars and build a city on the Red Planet to make humanity a 'multi-planet species,' as Musk has said. In 2016, he vowed to send the first crew to Mars by 2024. In 2017 he called for the development of a moon base.
Neither has happened. But SpaceX has pulled off one triumphant feat after another. As a start-up with little chance of succeeding — indeed, it nearly failed before ever taking off — SpaceX upended an industry that for decades had been dominated by large defense contractors with few incentives to innovate.
SpaceX proved that rockets could be reused and fly again, almost like airplanes, a development that has dramatically lowered the cost of spaceflight. It single-handedly replaced the space shuttle, which retired in 2011, first flying cargo missions to the International Space Station for NASA, then becoming NASA's only way to fly humans there. It launches national security payloads for the Pentagon and intelligence community, and satellites for commercial companies. And it out-launches every competitor, even China, by a wide margin.
But now the company is at an inflection point. NASA is eager to return astronauts to the moon under its Artemis program. Musk, ever impatient, wants to fulfill his quest to send people to Mars. Starship is the key to both — and to the future of SpaceX.
'I think the primary goal should be Mars,' Musk said, repeating his desire to make humanity 'a multi-planetary' species. 'We could perhaps go back to the moon along the way. But the primary goal should be Mars, because that's really the next great leap beyond Apollo.'
NASA's 'current Artemis program is kind of like a remake of a great movie from the '60s,' he said. 'It's just never as good as the original. You want to go for something that's far beyond that.'
But first, he said, he was hoping for a test flight launch 'where hopefully things don't explode. The last few times it exploded. This is a very real concern. Big rockets, don't explode: Goal. I mean, there's so much energy in the rocket, it desperately wants to explode at any given point in time.'