05/29/2025

DOGE should continue on even after Mr. Musk leaves. He has worked round the clock and with no paycheck and Americans, even the left, should be thankful this event happened as noted in the following content. Even former President Biden pointed out how much FRAUD was evident in the government. Up until now, no one wanted to attack this problem, except President Trump. Millions of thanks to a gentleman, Mr. Musk, who answered the call and succeeded to solve the problem.

All of you Democrats, who are against Doge, just cool your heals and be thankful all of you are not arrested for fraud.

Democrats cannot have it both ways. They are either against waste and fraud sucking up taxpayer dollars, or they are for it.

And their relentless attacks on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency make it clear which side they’re on.

Spoiler alert: It’s not the side of the taxpayer. 

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/05/29/elon-musk-is-more-unpopular-as-he-leaves-trump-administration-polls-show/

ttps://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/05/29/elon-musk-is-more-unpopular-as-he-leaves-trump-administration-polls-show/

Breaking

Business

Elon Musk Is More Unpopular As He Leaves Trump Administration, Polls Show

BySara Dorn,

 Forbes Staff. Sara Dorn is a Forbes news reporter who covers politics.Follow Author

May 29, 2025, 11:12am EDTShareSaveComment1

Topline

Elon Musk has become significantly less popular since he joined President Donald Trump’s administration, according to polls, as he exits his government role after a tenure marked by some fumbled attempts to gut government agencies.

Key Facts

The amount of people who like Musk hasn’t changed much since he endorsed Trump on July 13, the day he was shot in Pennsylvania, but the number of people who view him unfavorably has increased significantly, according to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin.

Musk’s favorability rating has gone from 41% in mid-July to 39% as of Thursday, a day after he announced he was formally leaving his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency, according to the polling average.

His unfavorability rating has increased 14 points, from 40% to 54%.

One of the most recent reputable polls on Musk, conducted May 23-25 by Morning Consult, found 40% have a very or somewhat favorable opinion and 52% have a very or somewhat unfavorable opinion.

A CNN poll conducted in March, at the height of Musk’s work at DOGE, found the majority of respondents believed Musk has neither the experience nor judgement to carry out Trump’s changes to the federal government and found they were worried the cuts would go too far, though results were largely split along party lines.

New Peg

Musk announced Wednesday in a post on X he was formally exiting his role at DOGE, predicting “the DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.” Musk made the announcement less than a month after he said he would significantly scale back political spending and just days after he publicly criticized Trump’s signature policy legislation for adding to the federal deficit.

Forbes Valuation

We estimate Musk is worth $430.9 billion.

What We Don’t Know

It’s unclear who will lead the Department of Government Efficiency in Musk’s absence. While Musk was the de facto head of department, the Trump administration said that former health care executive, Amy Gleason, was technically the acting administrator of DOGE. Gleason did not have a public-facing role and the extent of her involvement in DOGE’s activities is unclear, however.

Key Background

Musk took a heavy-handed approach to cutting government spending during his time in the Trump administration, gutting some agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, entirely, and laying off tens of thousands of employees across the federal government. He admittedly fell far short of his goal to make $1 trillion in cuts, however, and many of the terminations were reversed by the courts or acknowledgements that they were made in error. Musk became a fixture at Trump’s side after he endorsed him in July and subsequently donated $250 million to Trump’s campaign, joining him on international trips and weekends at Mar-a-Lago and sometimes spending the night at the White House. Trump’s affinity for Musk did not extend to the broader Republican party, however, as many GOP lawmakers publicly expressed doubts about the cuts Musk made.

****

Democrats’ attacks on DOGE expose their weakness on government inefficiency

ttps://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5143032-democrats-musk-doge/

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Opinion>Congress Blog

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

Democrats rage against DOGE — but shouldn’t everyone be against waste? 

by Liz Peek, Opinion Contributor – 02/14/25 8:00 AM ET

Democrats cannot have it both ways. They are either against waste and fraud sucking up taxpayer dollars, or they are for it.

And their relentless attacks on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency make it clear which side they’re on. Spoiler alert: It’s not the side of the taxpayer. 

Resistance to DOGE is coming from many quarters. Loopy Democrats like Maxine Waters, who is vowing to “fight!” (what exactly?); ambitious radicals like Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is irate that her pet project, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, may be gutted. It is ironic that Warren is howling about Musk being “unaccountable” when her main achievement in the Senate was the creation of a bureau that answers to no one. 

The ever-helpful leftist media also opposes Musk’s investigations, of course. The New York Times reported on a recent Oval Office event with President Trump and the multibillionaire, deploying this hilarious propaganda headline: “Appearing with Trump, Musk makes broad Claims of Federal Fraud Without Proof.” To be clear, an abundance of proof exists, even if Musk did not haul out spreadsheets chronicling all the monies purloined from the federal government. Democrats and their media allies just don’t want to look for all the fraud and waste — and they certainly don’t want you to see it.

After all, it was the non-partisan Government Accountability Office that reviewed several years’ data and estimated last April, while Joe Biden was still both the president and a candidate for president, that “the federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.”

You might think that after receiving such a drastic report, suggesting that up to half a trillion of taxpayer money was being stolen every year by fraudsters, the government would have issued an all-hands-on-deck to track down the losses. The GAO at least tried, writing, “Given the scope of this problem, a government-wide approach is required to address it.” GAO laid out various recommendations, including that “Treasury should identify methods to expand government-wide estimates of fraud — prioritizing higher-risk program areas.” 

What did the Biden White House — and, specifically, his Treasury Department — do? Nothing. So forgive us if we contempt for the opinions of Janet Yellen, Biden’s Treasury secretary. She never once raised her voice Biden’s out-of-control, reckless spending, even as our national debt topped $36 trillion and inflation jumped to decades-high levels. And now, along with four other former Democrat-appointed Treasury secretaries, she has dared to publish a piece recently claiming that Musk was threatening our democracy by giving his DOGE allies access to the Treasury payments system is an outrage.

If anything threatens our democracy, it is an unaccountable bureaucracy and a federal budget that grows without check and with very little oversight. My question to those preening critics: Why didn’t these former Treasury secretaries use the payments system to track down fraud and waste? Where were they during their terms in office?

After his meeting with Musk, Trump signed an executive order titled: “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” The order is meant to “restore accountability to the American public,” something most Americans cheer. The president directs DOGE to “reduce the size of the federal government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition.” It especially targets “All offices that perform functions not mandated by statute or other law.”  

In other words, if Congress did not pass a law setting up an agency, it is on the chopping block.

It may well turn out that the inertia and dysfunction of the federal government will be enormously useful to Trump and Musk. Last year, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported that “$516 billion in appropriations for 2024 was associated with 491 expired authorizations of appropriations.” In addition, CBO wrote, “Nearly two-thirds ($320 billion) of that $516 billion was provided for activities whose authorizations expired more than a decade ago.”

That a great deal of money went to activities not currently authorized by Congress does not mean that legislators did not intend the funds to be spent. Rather, they were simply too careless to re-up the laws that authorized the spending. In some cases, the programs intended for funding had expired. For DOGE, those monies are now presumably fair game. 

Trump’s order charges Musk’s team with reviewing federal agencies; it will take a while. According to the Federal Register, there are 441 agencies, many of which most people have never heard of. What, for example, does the Administrative Conference of the United States do? 

When did the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board last meet, or the Emergency Steel Guaranty Loan Board? Do we really need The Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, whose board evidently last met in 2008? Or how about the Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries, established in 1974, which last published a report in 2011?

You get the point. The federal bureaucracy begs for scrutiny, but the left is up in arms. The Times piece mentioned above claims that “Musk’s team is operating in deep secrecy, surprising federal employees by descending upon agencies and gaining access to sensitive data systems.” Musk disagrees, saying, “I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.”

Maybe the Times reporters should take a break from their hard-hitting anti-Trump agenda, pay a visit to X and check out the @DOGE account there, which has 3.9 million followers. Almost every day, the group reports on findings that validate its existence.

A recent post: “Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.”  

This is the kind of inefficiency and waste Democrats want to protect. Talk about political suicide.

Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim and Company.   

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