Elon Musk's time as a "special government employee" is officially over, but he's not leaving the White House without a send-off. In a Truth Social post Thursday, President Trump said he would hold a media event with Musk in the Oval Office at 1:30pm Eastern on Friday, NBC News reports. "This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way," Trump wrote. "Elon is terrific!" On Tuesday, the day before his departure was announced, Musk criticized the "big beautiful" tax cut and spending bill Trump supports, saying it "undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing" by adding to the deficit.
In a Tuesday interview with the Washington Post, Musk complained that DOGE is "becoming the whipping boy for everything"—but said his work with DOGE wasn't finished. He said he planned to shift DOGE's efforts toward improving federal computer systems, which he said would be "a bit more like tackling projects with the highest gain for the pain, which still means a lot of good things in terms of reducing waste and fraud." The cuts made while Musk was at DOGE came nowhere near the $2 trillion he cited on the campaign trail, or the later $1 trillion target.
"The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized," he told the Post. "I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least." Republican strategist Chris Johnson tells the Hill that Musk probably became frustrated after running into the same obstacles that conservatives have encountered for years. "He's running into the realities that we've been trying to cut government for decades and trying to cut spending, and it's been incredibly difficult," he says. Johnson says there are only limited cuts that can be made without "big, bold" action from Congress. (More Elon Musk stories.)
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