Musk and His Mess

by Martina Agunoy

The U.S. pays Elon Musk $8 million per day. That’s $2.92 billion per year. Not one dollar of that was slashed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Then Elon Musk awarded himself a $400 million contract to sell his Cybertrucks to the State Department. That makes his revenue from the U.S. Treasury $3.320 billion.

Now Trump’s budget bill includes $25 billion to start his Golden Dome project, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX as a lead bidder.

Elon Musk didn’t cut a single dollar from his own profiteering from the U.S. Treasury.

The self-promoter who takes over $3 billion of our tax dollars literally held a chainsaw and told the U.S. they don’t need all the federal services that government employees provide, all the soft power the U.S. wields in the world through its USAID program, or all the grants and funds that support universities and schools and other services in our country.

U.S. farmers grow more food than we can eat as a nation, and the USAID program pays the farmers for this, then sends the food to starving countries to promote goodwill.

When Musk stopped the aid (via Marco Rubio), China stepped in and acquired soft power in regions that used to feel goodwill toward the U.S.

By the end of February 2025 alone, Elon Musk – an unelected campaign contributor, with his team of coders – fired about 222,000 federal workers:

– Postal Service, 10,000 jobs
– Treasury, 76 jobs
– National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration – the weather people, more than 1,000 additional after the initial cuts
– Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, around 200
– Half of the Department of Education
– 20% of NASA
– Up to half of the IRS
– 1,000 of the National Park Service
– 300 from the Environmental Protection Agency
– Over 1,300 Veterans Affairs workers
– Up to half of the Department of Housing and Development, about 4,000
– Department of Agriculture, thousands
– Less than 700 Department of Energy

Now there’s the massive harm caused by 1 in 25 persons losing their health insurance under the Trump-Musk budget.

One in 25. That’s Medicare for you seniors, Obamacare for the middle class, and Medicaid for the poorest.

All so one greedy Tesla man can be paid over $3 billion a year from our tax dollars.

The Republicans can deny all they want that senior citizens’ Medicare isn’t in the bill, but it is.

Medicare by name is not in Trump’s deficit exploding bill, but by the safety formulas inherent in the federal budget, his billionaires’ tax cuts will trigger cuts to Medicare.

Health insurance pays for healthcare in hospitals and nursing homes. About 70% of nursing home care is paid by Medicaid.

For all Hawaii’s caregivers out there who take care of patients and are paid by Medicaid, what does that mean?

That patients have to go back to being cared for at home by one adult child who is working and will be overwhelmed by or unable to handle the responsibility?

For hospitals that rely on Medicaid to pay for services rendered to the poor or on the ACA for services provided to the middle class, does that mean more emergency room visits because patients can’t pay for less urgent care?

Then there’s a matter of life and death boarding an airplane. Elon Musk and his coders fired 400 FAA maintenance workers, the staff responsible for keeping the air traffic safety equipment running.

Since April 2025, at least four outages, two of them lasting for 90 seconds, occurred at the busy Newark, New Jersey Airport, leaving air traffic controllers unable to see or communicate with airplanes.

The situation is so dangerous that United Airlines cut 35 daily round-trip flights, about 10% of its operations at Newark. United accounts for 75% of Newark’s traffic.

Around 36 crashes and near-collisions have happened since January 29, 2025.

Around Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk demanded that Michael Whitaker, the head of the FAA, resign after the FAA proposed $633,009 in fines for safety violations against Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Trump replaced Whitaker with Sean Duffy, the husband of one of Trump’s favorite Fox News hosts, who has no aviation or transportation experience at all, a guy who was once a contestant on “The Real World”.

The Constitution gives Congress the responsibility for the budget, not an unelected campaign donor.

It’s up to Congress to listen to the recommendations of the U.S. Government Accountability Office and prepare a budget that can shave off inefficiencies.

Each year, this federal agency makes more than 1,000 recommendations to help the federal government save money, address issues on its High Risk List, and significantly improve government operations.

It’s not up to a foreigner who is a naturalized citizen, unelected, unvetted, with no security clearance, who has massive conflicts of interest, and has zero understanding of our government except how to profit from it, to make those cuts.