When Donald Trump took office for the second time he had a big agenda, although it’s never been entirely clear if he knew it. He wanted to enact his precious tariffs and get revenge on his perceived political enemies, but his commitment to anything else was always debatable. Certainly, at the time of his election, nobody knew they were actually voting for Elon Musk to gather a handful of young technology bros to rampage through every government agency and fire as many people as they could under spurious rationales.
Employees at the Department of Government Efficiency were tasked with shutting down programs and even entire agencies to meet Musk’s pledge to save the country $2 trillion, a promise that was revised down to $1 trillion and later determined to have not even met the final goal of $150 billion. While the tech billionaire is long gone after a brief falling out with the president, the consequences of DOGE’s cuts are still being felt.
