Elon Musk and Donald Trump made grandiose promises on the campaign trail about by how much they would cut the federal budget. After starting with the preposterous figure of two trillion dollars, they later reduced it to a smaller but still preposterous figure of one trillion, a figure that Susan Glasser writes that no one who had spent a day in Washington gave any credence to. In fact, these DOGE cuts may end up costing the government more money.

Musk is leaving government (so he says) and people are looking at the wreckage he leaves behind.

The reviews of Musk’s rampage through Washington have been, deservedly, vicious: Who, during the past few crazy months, could have possibly failed to take note of his toxic combination of entitlement and ignorance, his vastly overstated claims, and his move-fast-and-break-things ethos that has resulted in wreckage that will take years to fully assess?
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In a round of exit interviews this week, Musk has sounded all the predictable notes of a naïve billionaire businessman mugged by Washington’s political reality.
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In an interview on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” he started the messy work of separating himself from the President. “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk admitted, given that Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor will add trillions of dollars to the budget deficit. Stating the obvious, which, these days, counts as an act of lèse-majesté among the Republican sycophants who surround Trump, Musk added that the measure “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”

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For all of Musk’s breathless early claims of “revolution,” the final tally of his efforts appears to have been somewhere around a hundred and fifty billion dollars. And even that is unlikely to stand. Many of the savings that Musk bragged about on the doge website proved to be nonexistent; numerous agencies and departments he attacked are now suing to block the wave of firings and cuts that he set in motion. In the end, his reckless approach to cutting, with little or no thought to the consequences, may cost the government as much as a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars this fiscal year alone, according to recent estimates from the Partnership for Public Service. Turns out it’s not cheap to place tens of thousands of workers on paid leave and to rehire mistakenly fired employees, never mind dealing with the lost productivity of a traumatized and uncertain workforce. Who’d have thought?

Musk’s failure to follow through on his boasts, though, should not detract from a clear-eyed assessment of the extraordinary amount of damage he succeeded in wreaking. The wise men are laughing Musk out of town, and I get it. His “performative vandalism,” as Jonah Goldberg put it on CNN, was in some respects just a pernicious, highly dangerous new variant of a Washington perennial: the pol who makes promises he cannot keep. But it is hard to think of any other unelected official who has done so much harm to the U.S. government in such a short period of time. The fact that the deficit may get even bigger at the end of the day only worsens the injury.
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Musk’s casualties are not only in Washington but all over the world, in refugee camps and scientific labs whose funding was abruptly cut off, in national parks you can’t get into this summer, and in communities across the country where polluters will no longer be prosecuted. All of this upheaval “is going to affect the functioning of the government in ways we can’t even anticipate,” Boyle told me. She is right. We have been warned.

And now come reports that Musk may have been higher than a kite while doing all these things, which makes kind of sense because he did seem to give the impression of someone who was manic.

Elon Musk engaged in extensive drug consumption while serving as one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, taking ketamine so frequently it caused bladder problems and traveling with a daily supply of approximately 20 pills, according to claims made to the New York Times.

The world’s richest man regularly consumed ketamine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms during his rise to political prominence, anonymous sources familiar with his activities told the Times. His drug use reportedly intensified as he donated $275m to Trump’s presidential campaign and later wielded significant power through his role spearheading the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge.
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While ketamine can be legally prescribed as a Schedule III substance, recreational use or mixing it with other drugs would probably violate federal workplace policies.

The Doge leader developed what those sources described to the Times as a serious ketamine habit, consuming the powerful anesthetic sometimes daily rather than the “small amount” taken “about once every two weeks” he claimed in interviews. “If you’ve used too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done, and I have a lot of work,” Musk previously told journalist Don Lemon in March 2024, downplaying his consumption.

However, by spring last year, the Times reports that Musk was telling associates his ketamine use was affecting his bladder – a known consequence of chronic abuse of the drug, which has psychedelic properties and can cause dissociation from reality, according to the DEA.

His regular medication box contained pills bearing Adderall markings alongside other substances, according to sources with the Times who have seen photographs of the container.

As I write this, I marvel that the US has come to this, having an ignorant, greedy, vicious, lying, narcissistic conman in Trump, aided by a drug-addled sociopath in the person of Musk, at the helm of government.