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After almost two weeks of economic chaos, White House insiders who surround Donald Trump reportedly have no idea what his tariff endgame will be.

That is according to Politico White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns who appeared on CNN's "Inside Politics" on Sunday.

"Dasha, you cover the White House," host Manu Raju prompted his guest. "Where does the president see this going on tariffs? Or is it just sort of every day is another adventure?"

"Well, he said this week it's all about his instinct, right?' she replied. "Look, remember how much we were reporting at the outset of this administration that chaos is the strategy? That's how he's going about what he's doing with DOGE. That's how he's going about so many aspects of his agenda."

"He's doing that with tariffs as well," she elaborated. "He wants to keep everyone off balance, he wants people to come to the table and negotiate and wonder, you know, how they're going to do this with the White House."

"The problem is that uncertainty and chaos is not good for markets," she explained. "It's not good for consumers and it's certainly not good for the global economic order and the question of what the endgame is. I think a lot of people around Trump are asking themselves the same thing right now."

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With billionaire Elon Musk admitting to Donald Trump's Cabinet that the $1 trillion in government savings he had promised will be closer to $150 billion, an 85 percent reduction, fans of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are quickly losing faith.

According to a report from the New York Times, an analysis shows that even the $150 billion promise may be a pie-in-the-sky boast.

And that has led to skepticism from conservatives who were thrilled with the idea of government cost-cutting and now are pointing out that more than a few successes that Musk's people have promoted turned out to not save any money at all.

As the Times' David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine wrote, "...when Mr. Musk’s group tallies up its savings so far, it inflates its progress by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year — and by making guesses about spending that might not happen at all."

That led to Romina Boccia of the libertarian Cato Institute to complain, "They’re just spinning their wheels, citing in many cases overstated or fake savings. What’s most frustrating is that we agree with their goals. But we’re watching them flail at achieving them.”

RELATED: Untested new software installed by DOGE employees crashing Social Security servers: report

Nat Malkus of the conservative American Enterprise Institute agreed and said the bogus claims have become de rigueur from DOGE.

“It’s like if your kid drops out of college, and you tell your wife, ‘Whoa, we saved money on medical school!’ Well, that doesn’t make any sense, but that’s the same idea. How do you call it savings?”

The Times report added DOGE officials also announced canceling a contract that did not, in fact, even exist.

"The Office of Personnel Management declined to release the request, or say what it had planned to spend on the contract, nor would the office say when it planned to choose a contractor," the report states. "Despite that uncertainty, Mr. Musk’s calculated the savings involved in that cancellation down to the cent. (It later rounded the claim to an even dollar: $318,310,328.)"

That led Steven L. Schooner, a professor who studies federal contracting at George Washington University, to label the boast "garbage."

The Times report added, "H [Schooner] said it was far too early to know for sure what the government was going to spend — especially in the year that Mr. Musk had targeted. What if the bidders competed to drive the price lower? What if a losing bidder protested, and then the whole thing got canceled?"

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The co-hosts of MSNBC's "The Weekend' as well as their guests were brought to laughter after watching a clip of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt breathlessly boasting about Donald Trump's tariffs as part of brilliant negotiating.

With the president walking back his sweeping tariff plan with the exception of China before the weekend, he then backed off tariffs on Chinese electronics late Friday night in an apparent nod to his supporters in Silicon Valley.

After noting the "climbdown," co-host Michael Steele pointed out that the White House spokesperson was leaning on the ghost-written Trump book "Art of the Deal" as an administration talking point.

Speaking to reporters outside the briefing room, the 27-year-old Leavitt chastised them with, "Many of you in the. media clearly missed the art of. the deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here. You you tried to say that the rest of the world would be moved closer to China, when in fact, we've seen the opposite effect. The entire world is calling the United States of America and not China, because they need our markets."

After watching the clip, co-host Steele blurted, "What the hell is she talking about?"

"I mean, does she not know that China and Japan and other nations are creating their own little economic axis without the us right now?" he added before turning to guest Basil Smikle to explain, "That somehow this art of the deal is working."

"There is no evidence that it's working. You can't govern with stream of consciousness," Smikle replied to laughter before dryly adding, "That doesn't work."

Turning serious he added, "You know, I heard Bill Clinton say this a number of years ago, that the United States is 4 to 5 percent of the world's population so we have to play nice with our partners around around the globe. And as you said, and we talked about this before, what China has been doing internationally has been, you know, when you.look at it, you know, building ports in places in Africa and in the Caribbean, they've expanded their economy significantly."

"So this sort of protectionist approach that the president is thinking or trying to promote that he has, I definitely think, you know, hurts American workers," he continued.

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