131 days of Musk's political career—from a novice to a veteran: less than 20% of the $1 trillion goal has been achieved

TradingKey - On Wednesday evening, Musk, head of the U.S. Government Efficiency Department, posted on his social media platform that he would end his status as a special government employee. Trump also said on Thursday that May 30 would be Musk's last day at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Musk officially announced that he has ended all his work in the government and will return to car manufacturing and the Mars program. Starting from January 20, Musk has worked as a consultant for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for a total of 131 days.

From fully funding Trump's victory in the election at the beginning and becoming Trump's closest comrade-in-arms after he took office, to now leaving in disgrace and returning to his main business, Musk's political ambitions have not been realized as expected, and the government efficiency department is far from the original plan.

There are two main reasons for Musk's resignation: 

First, Musk was extremely dissatisfied with Trump's tariff policy, which led to frequent conflicts and quarrels between him and Bessant in the White House, and even a fight. China is an absolutely indispensable market for Tesla from design, production and manufacturing to product sales.The tariff policy is bound to lead to a significant reduction in profits from automobile production. Trump's "protectionist" governing strategy and Tesla's global layout have created huge differences in interests. 

Second, Musk is also dissatisfied with Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill". As the first person in charge of the "Department of Government Efficiency", the original intention of establishing this department was to significantly reduce the US fiscal deficit. Before Trump took office as president, Musk had publicly announced that he would use this department to cut an estimated $1 trillion in government spending. In fact, according to the DOGE official website, as of May 30, only an estimated $175 billion was saved, less than 20% of the target, and about 20,000 government jobs (about 1% of the federal workforce) were cut.

Source：Department of Government Efficiency Website

Musk was frustrated by his ideals and reality, but the "tax cut bill" was the heaviest strike to Musk. Although "raising tariffs on imports while cutting taxes domestically" has always been the core governing strategy promised by Trump during his campaign, Musk seems to realize that Trump's original intention of setting up the Government Efficiency Department was not to solve the growing debt and government deficit problems in the United States, but to form a constraint on the Democratic establishment and get more chips to promote his own "spending" plan.

The "Big Beautiful" bill is generally described by the Democratic Party as a typical "robbing the poor to help the rich". Once passed, it will help the United States raise its debt ceiling by nearly 4 trillion. The total tax cuts alone will be about 3.8 trillion US dollars. At the same time, defense spending will continue to increase. The United States will officially enter the era of trillion defense spending in 2025. The bill also marks that the Trump administration is about to enter a new era of "loose fiscal" and the bill deficit will bring about an incremental interest expenditure of about 550 billion US dollars. 

During Musk's tenure as the main person in charge of DOGE, he helped the government save $200 billion in expenditures through various means, even at the cost of Tesla's brand image and market value collapse, but in return, the new bill completely offset it.

After this battle, all efforts were in vain in an instant.