LANCASTER, Ohio -- Many voters casting their ballots for Donald Trump last November didn’t realize they were voting for Elon Musk, too. As Investopedia reports, “Musk leveraged over $280 million in campaign donations and vocal support for Donald Trump during the 2024 election into a significant position as (unofficial) head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he now wields unprecedented sway over federal policy and spending.”
Musk is supposedly in search of waste, fraud and abuse. But Trump fired the nonpartisan inspectors general who had been doing that job. Instead, Musk loyalists who are generally not trained auditors or accountants, lack understanding of how government works or a clear picture of what it does now have control of administration-wide decision-making.
Allowing the richest man in the world and his underlings to define what is necessary and worthwhile is reckless on the best of days. Nowhere is that more evident than the Trump administration’s cuts to the IRS workforce, including a team that specialized in ensuring that the super-rich and big corporations pay their taxes. ProPublica notes that a 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office pointed to IRS savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that ’would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling.‘”
Now, there are fewer people keeping watch for what a former IRS commissioner called “a tax cut for tax cheats.” Consequently, as The Washington Post reports, officials expect a “sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service.” The Post added that officials “are predicting” a drop of more 10% “in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024 … [amounting] to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue.”
But the human cost of DOGE’s misplaced priorities is more egregious. Its attack on the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Mental Health Services led to chaos and threatens to undermine services for traumatized veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, potentially costing lives.
“Clinicians warn that the changes will degrade mental health treatment at the V.A., which already has severe staffing shortages,” The New York Times reports. “Some expect to see a mass exodus of sought-after specialists, like psychiatrists and psychologists. They expect wait times to increase, and veterans to eventually seek treatment outside the agency.”
DOGE has also put our national security at risk by making cuts that benefit China. Radio Free Asia has been America’s voice for 58 million listeners each week, The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial critical of slashed funding for RFA and its sister broadcasters – calling it “a retreat in the global war of ideas.” Meanwhile, the Pentagon has eliminated its Office of Net Assessment, a unit that assesses challenges we would face in coming decades from China and elsewhere.
Chuck Ardo is a retired political consultant.
With Musk having borrowed at least $1.4 billion from banks controlled by the Chinese government to help build Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory, Musk himself is a security risk, as retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré warned in a December op-ed in The New York Times. “China does not tend to give things away,” Honoré added. “The country’s laws stipulate that the Communist Party can demand intelligence from any company doing business in China, in exchange for participating in the country’s markets.”
Yet, trusting Musk wasn’t on the November ballot.
Chuck Ardo is a retired political consultant in Lancaster, Ohio. He previously served as press secretary to former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.
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