In a social media post on his platform X, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Starlink, Tesla Tesla, X and xAI thanked President Trump for the chance to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
‘As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,’ Musk wrote on X.
‘The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.’
According to the BBC, the White House began removing Musk from his temporary government role on Wednesday [28 June 2025].
As a ‘special government employee,’ he was allowed to work up to 130 days a year. With Trump’s term starting on January 20, Musk was close to reaching that limit.
However, his exit comes just one day after Musk criticised Trump’s main budget bill, which includes large tax cuts and more military spending.
In an interview with CBS, Musk said the ‘big, beautiful bill,’ as Trump calls it, would raise the federal deficit.
He said: ‘I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful, but I don’t know if it could be both.’ However, he also said the bill ‘undermines the work’ of DOGE,
Additionally, Musk had reportedly clashed with some Trump officials and had changed his budget cut goals several times, from $2 trillion down to $150 billion.
The DOGE plan led to about 260,000 job cuts or resignations out of 2.3 million federal workers. Some firings were blocked by judges and some employees were ordered back to work.
At the time of appointment, Musk said DOGE will work to “drain the swamps. There are so many swamps.” Described by Trump as “potentially the Manhattan Project of our time,” the transition team said in a statement that DOGE will support the White House to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies essential to the ‘Save America’ movement.”
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