Tesla CEO Elon Musk swept into Washington, DC earlier this year on a golden chariot with his trusty chainsaw at his side and a widely reported pledge to shave $1 trillion in “waste and fraud” off the federal budget as head of President Trump’s “DOGE” office. Or was that $2 trillion? Whelp, it doesn’t matter now. The dust has settled and Musk has skedaddled back to Tesla HQ with a pocket full of achievements, though not the ones he promised.
DOGE In Action: There Goes $21.7 Billion, Down The Drain
Though Musk failed to achieve a notable record on rooting out “waste and fraud,” he did generate an estimated $21.7 billion in waste, according to a new Minority staff report from the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) titled, “The $21.7 Billion Blunder: Analyzing the Waste Generated by DOGE.”
The new report comes under the “Minority” umbrella because Republican Senators hold the majority on the 11-seat subcommittee and in the Senate at large, as well as the House of Representatives, too. Perhaps we’ll hear from the Majority later on, but don’t hold your breath. Only the Minority seem interested in holding Musk and DOGE to account for squandering billions in taxpayer funds.
The Ranking Member of PSI, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), released the findings on July 31, and he did not hold back. “At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars,” Senator Blumenthal said (note: “Ranking Member” is the title of the leader of the minority party on Congressional committees and the full House and Senate).
Timing Is Everything
The new report drops at a particularly inconvenient time for President Trump, who continues to grapple unsuccessfully with the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and Republicans in Congress who are also caught in the riptide of outrage over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, as well as Elon Musk and his Tesla EV business, which has become a rolling textbook case of brand reputation in crisis all on its own.
Adding even more fuel to Tesla’s reputational bonfire, the report comes just days after Republican members of Congress voted to claw back billions in federal spending that had previously been voted through. Yes, there are takesie-backsies in Congress. It’s called a rescission. This particular rescissions package was supposedly aimed at memorializing the “savings” achieved by DOGE.
Except not, as Blumenthal’s office pointed out in a press statement:
Ironically, the $21.7 billion in DOGE-generated waste could have fully covered President Trump’s misguided rescissions package twice over with $2.9 billion to spare despite the package being promoted as codifying DOGE’s purported savings over the next several years.
As noted by Blumenthal’s office, the amount wasted by DOGE would have easily covered necessaries clawed back by Trump and the Republicans, such as food assistance and Medicaid.
“DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money,” Blumenthal added for good measure.
Calling All Sherlocks
Politics aside, a Senate subcommittee has limited resources to conduct investigations. The PSI estimate of $21.7 billion is a lowball figure, based on above-the-rocks findings. Turn over those rocks, and more waste is all but certain to crawl out. Blumenthal’s office lists “substantial administrative and legal expenses, undermining public safety and natural disaster response, and human costs and health threats” among other areas the bear further investigation.
Blumenthal also held out hope for a more comprehensive review supported by the investigative resources of inspectors general at 27 federal agencies.
“I urge Inspectors General to take up our investigation’s findings and initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s careless actions,” Blumenthal concluded.
Careless Or Calculated?
If you caught that thing about “careless,” that was Senator Blumenthal being a Senator. Many other people have come up with many more colorful ways of describing Musk’s short-lived tenure as a public servant in Washington, DC.
For that matter, wasting taxpayer dollars is just one of Musk’s achievements as head of DOGE. According to a 44-page PSI memo issued in April, Musk and his DOGE chainsaw hacked away at 11 different federal agencies with dozens of legal matters pending on his business interests. PSI assessed only 40 out of 65 known instances and calculated that Musk and his companies faced at least $2.37 billion in legal liability, including these highlights:
Up to $1.59 million in civil and criminal penalties for Neuralink’s alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act, and $281 million in potential liability from Neuralink’s alleged false or misleading statements about its product risks
$1.19 billion in potential liability as a result of Tesla’s allegedly false or misleading statements about its autopilot and full self-driving features
$633,009 in fines from SpaceX’s multiple failures to follow rocket launch requirements in 2023
A total of $713,114 in fines from 29 citations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) against SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company
“The through line connecting many of Mr. Musk’s decisions appears to be self-enrichment and avoiding what he perceives as obstacles to advancing his interests. Mr. Musk’s position may allow him to evade oversight, derail investigations, and make litigation disappear whenever he so chooses,” the PSI report advised.
The Tesla Sales Nosedive Continues
That memo was issued back in April, and a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. That includes the side drama of the Epstein case. In a possible attempt to separate himself and the Tesla brand from Trump, early in June Musk added his voice to the rising clamor over the Epstein files, all but guaranteeing that it will be a long, hot summer for President Trump and the Republican Party.
It’s Mission Accomplished as far as juicing the scandal goes, but that hasn’t helped Tesla recover its EV sales mojo, at least not yet. Adding insult to injury, earlier this week Tesla’s former home state of California reported that non-Tesla EV sales held up in Q2, while Tesla continued to drop.
The news from Europe is just as gloomy for Tesla. As reported by Reuters earlier today, Tesla sales have fallen by more than 33% across Europe since the beginning of the year. The year-on-year stats for July are particularly alarming. “The brand’s registrations — a close proxy of sales — fell 86% year-on-year in July to 163 cars in Sweden, 52% to 336 cars in Denmark, 27% to 1,307 in France and 62% to 443 in the Netherlands,” Reuters reported (check out CleanTechnica’s EV sales archive here).
One of the few bright spots is Norway, where Tesla sales have blown through the roof in recent months. The strong showing is attributed to the new Model Y makeover. However, Norway is a relatively small market, and the red flags have already popped up. In May, Christina Bu, secretary general of the Norwegian EV Association, noted that the Tesla glass is only half full in Norway. Citing the organization’s recent survey of 15,000 drivers, Bu told CNBC that “the majority of respondents said that politics does influence their choice of car brand.”
“As many as 43 percent stated that they would not buy a Tesla for political reasons. We can therefore only speculate how much Tesla would have sold without Musk’s support for the MAGA movement and the Trump administration,” Bu told CNBC.
Photo: Via CleanTechnica archive.
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