Here’s what purports to be the big story out of the White House today: “Elon’s really not leaving. He’s gonna be back and forth.” It’s tempting to treat that statement, which was made by President Donald Trump at a press conference intended to mark Elon Musk’s departure from government, as news. It certainly flies in the face of several news reports about the tech billionaire stepping away from the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”—his pet cost-cutting and people-killing project—as some kind of retreat. Musk had, after all, come to Washington, D.C., on a mission to remake the federal government in his own image.
So, after slashing the foreign aid that helps ensure that children around the world aren’t born with HIV and firing thousands of federal workers—and destroying his own public image, likely permanently—Musk had come to the end of the road. He could only do so much, after all. His companies needed him, don’t you know. And so, he decided to pack his bags (which were apparently full of drugs) and return to doing whatever it was he did before he spent his days hopping around like an idiot and posting online about “white genocide.” (Those same drugs, I’m guessing.)
It’s convenient framing for everyone. For the press, it tells a story about Musk, who did a lot of consequential things but ultimately failed to come remotely close to his stated goal of cutting $1 trillion from the budget by August. (The actual number is debatable, but it’s unquestionably much, much lower.) For Republicans, it’s an opportunity for a victory lap, celebrating Musk as a visionary who really did change the shape of the government (in that he helped destroy it; Russell Vought will now likely take the baton), while quietly ridding themselves of an albatross. For Democrats, it’s an opportunity to claim a scalp and draw attention to a fissure in Trump’s coalition. There’s only one tiny problem with the emerging narrative: It’s bunk. Elon’s really not leaving. Trump himself said so.
It isn’t just Trump, though. Vice President JD Vance has said more or less the same thing. So has Musk. The real reason that he’s “leaving” (or “quiet quitting”) is that he has spent the last four months as a “special government employee,” a distinction with a 130-day time limit. Were he to continue working in the same capacity, he would be required by federal law to fill out certain financial and ethical disclosures that he is currently exempted from as an SGE. Given his vast fortune (and lack of ethics), Musk does not want to do this and therefore has no choice but to “step back.” It’s undoubtedly true that he has taken more of a backseat in recent weeks, particularly as his popularity has plummeted, but there’s no reason to believe that he’s cutting all ties with Trump. DOGE, meanwhile, is very much still ticking. Musk is, as Trump said, just “gonna be back and forth.”
What’s the worst thing that the Trump administration has done in the last four months? One could reasonably point to immigration, where masked ICE officers are ambushing people at immigration hearings, foreign students are threatened with deportation for expressing reasonable opinions, and migrants—many of whom have committed no crimes—are being disappeared to foreign gulags. To accomplish this, the administration is all but openly defying several court orders and is barreling toward a confrontation with the Supreme Court, and from there, an inevitable constitutional crisis. At the same time, Donald Trump is openly using the presidency to enrich himself and his family—his net worth has doubled—and is now unquestionably the most corrupt politician in American history.
The decimation of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is up there, though. People around the world are starving now because of Musk’s cuts. They are dying of disease because of Musk’s cuts. They are being born with diseases they will carry with them for the rest of their lives because of Musk’s cuts. Brown University professor Brooke Nichols has estimated that Musk’s destruction of USAID has already led to 300,000 deaths, the majority of which are children. As The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper noted in his excellent piece on Musk’s legacy, “Roughly 1,500 babies have been born HIV-positive every day since January 21, because Musk cut off their mothers’ medication.”
On a more local level, Musk’s legacy is of extraconstitutional destruction, an irreversible government brain drain, and a spree of massive corruption the scale of which is still unknown: We do not know, for instance, just how much data Musk’s gang of pimple-faced coders stole while they were ransacking federal departments or how much of that data related to Musk’s businesses. The full scale of his cuts to, say, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service are still not fully clear, but they will register every time there is a tornado, a hurricane, or extreme weather of any kind.
So the idea that Musk’s time in Washington is over is an obvious farce. To promulgate this notion is to be either ignorant or nefarious: That narrative goes a long way toward letting Musk and Trump off the hook for a multitude of casualties—those already in the ledger and those to be counted later. It suggests that his reign of terror was actually ineffectual when, in fact, it was massively successful; Trump and Musk destroyed that which they’d planned to all along. Most crucially, it suggests that reign of terror has ended. It hasn’t. The destruction that Musk set in motion remains running in the background as an ambient menace to our safety and livelihoods. Musk’s legacy is still being written, and his culpability is still accumulating. He will do more damage soon, perhaps tomorrow, even though he’s already done more than enough.
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