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Just before the election last fall, Elon Musk predicted that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. By early January, a couple of weeks before President Donald Trump returned to the White House and appointed Musk head of the newly created not-quite-department dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, he was calling $2 trillion “the best-case outcome” and saying “we’ve got a good shot” at getting $1 trillion in cuts. In late March, he said DOGE would deliver $1 trillion in deficit reduction by the end of May. By April 10, that was down to savings of $150 billion. Draw a trendline through Musk’s pronouncements so far, and it shows the DOGE savings number going negative on May 21 and becoming a deficit increase of more than $2 trillion on Dec. 1.

This is not meant as a serious forecast. But with Musk’s time as a “special government employee” due to end this month, and the Partnership for Public Service estimating that the cost in lost productivity, rehiring of fired workers and other side effects of his chaotic approach will top $135 billion this year, it does seem fair to conclude that the direct annual savings from DOGE’s efforts will be less than $150 billion, which amounts to about 2% of federal spending.

Its minimal impact on spending notwithstanding, DOGE has had a huge impact in Washington, with its actions disrupting the federal government in ways that few would have imagined possible before it set to work. What, then, have Musk and DOGE really been trying to do?

Read the whole thing.

How a School in a Tiny New York Town Beat ICE — Francis Wilkinson

Buffett’s Successor Has an Oxy-Sized Hole to Dig Out Of — Liam Denning

India and Pakistan Can’t Let Conflict Spill Into the Sea — James Stavridis

Trump’s Economic Message Sounds a Lot Like Biden’s — Robert Brownstein

A Caste Census Will Reveal India’s Worst-Kept Secret — Andy Mukherjee

Buffett’s Astonishing Track Record in Five Charts — Nir Kaissar

Saudi Arabia Goes Whistling Past the Kazakh Oil Graveyard — Javier Blas

Addicted To ChatGPT? Here’s How to Reclaim Your Brain — Parmy Olson

Trump Wants ‘Beautiful’ Architecture. You Decide What That Is. — Tobin Harshaw

• The firing of Kohl’s CEO Ashley Buchanan raises a question: Can CEOs really have private lives? Beth Kowitt breaks it down.
• Is Pope Leo XIV the climate champion we need? Let’s see if he turns his own words into real action, Mark Gongloff says.
• Ale Lampietti shows us what tomatoes can teach us about free trade.

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