Elon Musk's now shuttered Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has left a grim legacy with millions of deaths expected by 2030 and more than 200,000 jobs slashed, analysis shows.
DOGE's purge "has ended its reign of terror eight months earlier than mandated" after Musk took a wrecking ball to medical research, international aid and other life-saving programs, Salon's Heather Digby Parton wrote in an opinion piece published Tuesday.
Musk's "pet project" hired a "collection of young nerds Musk imported from his other companies, led by a couple of trusted aides, and the first thing they did was dig into data the government collects on companies and individuals. (Why that access was so vital has never been fully explained)," Digby Parton wrote.
Some have suspected that Musk used this material to help build Grok, his artificial intelligence project, she added.
The cuts have had a cruel global impact.
"Foreign aid was of particular interest to Musk, who is originally from South Africa, so he immediately targeted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and programs that were keeping people alive around the world. They were abruptly halted," she wrote.
A Lancet study published in July projects that DOGE cuts could result in 14 million deaths by 2030 — four million of those deaths are expected to be children.
These cuts were proven have "negligible" benefit for American taxpayers. DOGE had claimed it would bring savings, but an August Politico analysis found it to be less than 5% of what it had promised.
"The story of the department’s dissolution is a testament to how dysfunctional it was — and how Musk’s supposed business genius is clearly overrated," she wrote.
The dramatic relationship between President Donald Trump and Musk has shifted from "bromance" to a dramatic falling out and now a "rapprochement."
"Like so many wealthy men — including Donald Trump and most of his Cabinet — he was convinced that because he had been successful at running a company and making money, he was a genius who could do anything. And like so many who erroneously believe that government should be run like a business, Musk failed to understand that it is a completely different animal, requiring political skills, coalition building and finding consensus," she wrote.
"Like most people who spend too much time on X, Musk has become more radical than ever," Digby Parton wrote. "His AI experiments get more bizarre by the day, and his SpaceX projects, which include driverless cybercabs, have been repeatedly delayed. Tesla shareholders just agreed to pay him a trillion dollars, but considering the stock price, maybe they should have taken a page from DOGE and cut their losses like Trump did."