National Review Columnist Dunks on Elon Musk Fans for Insisting DOGE Was Success

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

National Review senior political correspondent Jim Geraghty fired back at defenders of Elon Musk’s work with DOGE in a column Monday, highlighting the stark mathematical reality that whatever savings may have been found, they were “small potatoes” when so many trillions of dollars were being added to the national debt.

In Monday’s post, Geraghty responded to critics of his article from the most recent print edition of National Review, which was headlined “DOGE Takes a Nibble Out of Big Government” and dug into the internal strife, inflated and unrealized promises by Musk, layoffs and rehiring, lawsuits, and other chaos that marked DOGE’s several months on the job.

Geraghty took a skeptical eye to some of the claims of DOGE’s critics but acknowledged “there’s no denying that the tumult generated by DOGE is at least partially offsetting the savings it generates,” because “firing people, offering buyouts, rehiring people, and fighting all those lawsuits costs money.”

“Eliminating a wasteful program is worthwhile on its own merits,” he concluded. “But DOGE’s recommended cuts are a drop in the bucket — perhaps $200 billion in cuts, when the deficit for fiscal 2025 is projected to be $1.9 trillion. The perception of DOGE’s effectiveness is largely driven by innumeracy.”

This critique was viewed by his readers as “allegedly too pessimistic and critical,” wrote Geraghty on Monday as he noted Musk’s own sharp criticism directed at the Trump administration and congressional Republicans regarding the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” Act, which passed last week. The bill attracted loudly vocal naysayers on both the left and the right, and sparked a now-reigniting feud between Trump and Musk.

“Finding $190 billion in savings is not nothing,” argued Geraghty. “But in the scope of the nearly $5 trillion the government has spent so far this fiscal year, it’s small potatoes, and it was absurd for President Trump to ever be talking up the idea that DOGE was going to save so much money that the savings would be returned to taxpayers in the form of ‘DOGE checks.'”

Now Musk himself was sharing tweets that asked “what’s the point of DOGE” if the federal government was going to “add $5 trillion more in debt,” Geraghty noted.

“If even Elon Musk believes that the work of DOGE is more than nullified by the spending in the Big Beautiful Bill and is questioning the point of all of his work there,” he concluded, “there’s no need for his fans to insist that DOGE was an unmitigated, roaring success.”