The savings claimed by tech billionaire Elon Musk eked out by his Department of Government Efficiency are worth negligible “pennies,” a Wall Street Journal reporter mocked in a CNN interview Thursday.
The Journal's senior political correspondent Molly Ball was reacting to Musk and Trump’s consideration of some kind of DOGE “dividends” purported to be worth thousands of dollars to Americans with the money they’re claiming to have snatched back shutting down foreign aid and via the salaries of fired thousands of federal workers.
But Musk’s savings are a minute fraction of not only the federal budget but its burgeoning debt and the massive $4.5 trillion tax cut being cooked up by Donald Trump and the Republicans,
“The amounts that Elon Musk is getting out of this DOGE, they are pennies compared to the federal budget," Ball told CNN anchor Jim Sciutto. "They're not enough to send thousands of dollars to every American,” she added.
She characterized the dividends idea as a scheme to boost Trump’s approval ratings, which apparently isn’t working.
Two new polls released Thursday reveal a majority of Americans believe Trump has overstepped his presidential authority — and hasn’t done enough to lower prices.
A Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that a substantial 58 percent of those surveyed oppose firing large numbers of federal workers, while 62 percent in a CNN/SSRS said that Trump hasn’t done enough to lower prices for everyday goods.
The polls reflect "this idea that [Trump is] focused on the wrong things because, look, a lot of Americans bought the idea during the election that the reason you're suffering, the reason you're struggling is because we're spending all this money on foreign countries, foreign aid, giving away the store, being played for suckers, sending it all to Ukraine,” said Ball.
“What I think people are seeing now is that the idea that by tearing down this foreign aid structure or by taking away the money we were sending from Ukraine, the idea that that would make everybody's lives better doesn't seem to be happening, doesn't seem to be bearing fruit,” she noted.
Prices for Americans remain high and are bound to increase, Sciutto pointed out, as consumers get hit with higher prices paying for Trump’s tariffs on imports.
Musk insisted Tuesday that DOGE had already saved $55 billion, but the documents he provided only revealed $16.6 billion, Bloomberg reported.
In addition to that error, an $18 billion contract savings was actually an $18 million savings. And two agencies Musk took credit for shutting down were closed during the Biden administration.
