Elon Musk’s failure in government
His legacy will be to make reform even harder
WHEN DONALD TRUMP announced last November that Elon Musk would be heading a government-efficiency initiative, many of his fellow magnates were delighted. The idea, wrote Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture-capital firm, was “one of the greatest things I’ve ever read”. Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, wrote his own three-step guide to how the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE”, could influence government policy. Even Bernie Sanders, a left-wing senator, tweeted hedged support, saying that Mr Musk was “right”, pointing to waste and fraud in the defence budget.
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This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “DOGE bites man”
United States
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From the June 7th 2025 edition
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