What’s in This Week’s Issue…

Good morning. When President Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the promise was radical:

Save the American taxpayer $2 trillion by eliminating waste, slashing red tape, and applying Elon Musk’s Silicon Valley playbook to the federal government.

But today, that promise is quietly lost.

And what looked like the biggest tech-government experiment in U.S. history is already falling apart.

So this week…

• 🏆 The Big Play: What really happened inside DOGE, and why Elon Musk’s plan to fix the government may already be over

• 💪 The Power Move: Why speed is powerful, but only if you survive the blowback

• 💵 Follow the Money: India vs Pakistan: Are two nuclear-armed rivals going to war?

-GEN

🏆 The Big Play

The biggest money power story of the week.

How Elon Musk’s DOGE Lost Its $2 Trillion Promise

The pitch for DOGE was simple: cut down bloated federal operations and save $2 trillion from the federal budget.

Elon Musk, the de facto head of DOGE, made it a mission to identify the waste inside the government and cut it.

The setup looked perfect, as DOGE wasn’t another DC department. It was like a product team:

• DOGE’s core team consisted of several dozen staff, many from Musk’s companies (Tesla, X, The Boring Company)

• A series of executive orders empowered DOGE to push for rapid reforms in its first months.

• Targets included the IRS, Veterans Affairs, Education, and Environment departments.

The playbook was also pure Silicon Valley: small teams, rapid iteration, and direct executive access.

And for a moment, it looked like it might work. So what really happened?

1. The $2 Trillion Dream: Why DOGE Was Set Up to Win

DOGE’s creation looked like a startup launch with presidential backing.

Its opening pitch was clear:

• Audit every agency for overlapping functions, unnecessary contractors, and duplicative IT systems

• Use AI, automation, and private-sector tech to modernize operations

• Bring transparency to the federal government’s procurement process through technology

And for a moment, it seemed to work.

Musk brought in technologists from his companies to develop internal tools and dashboards for federal agencies.

DOGE even began publicly publishing performance on X and its website. And claimed early wins like:

• An estimated savings of $55 billion from slashing federal budgets to various programs

• Billions in unused IT assets retired

• Pilot programs using predictive analytics for fraud detection were launched

It looked like the Silicon Valley miracle was real. But this wasn’t just about tech. It was about power.

And when it is about power, the pushback comes real fast.

2. The Blowback: Why DOGE Was Doomed to Meet Reality

What Musk called “efficiency,” D.C. called “chaos.

The traditional federal agencies pushed back hard:

• More than 200 lawsuits from federal unions and advocacy groups challenging DOGE’s cost-cutting measures.

• Whistleblowers accused DOGE of violating civil service protections through data tracking.

• Congress refused to provide any legal backing to DOGE’s spending cuts

DOGE was also bad at one thing Elon never needed to worry about before: optics.

• Some DOGE cost-cutting measures led to staff reductions at federal agencies, sparking backlash and protests.

• DOGE’s AI-driven audits flagged several federal programs as “non-essential”.

The Musk playbook of “build fast, break rules, own the narrative” wasn’t built for a system that didn’t move.

And then came the biggest blow:

• Last month, Musk announced a change to his target in a cabinet meeting with President Trump.

• The original $2 trillion goal was now scaled down to $150 billion, a mere 2% of the federal budget.

The party was over.

And with it, the illusion that tech alone could reform government.

3. The Real Outcome: When Tech Meets the D.C. Elites

DOGE continues to exist. But it looks more like a performance dashboard than a revolutionary force.

Its current wins are:

• Cancelling DEI grants from various departments

• Cleaning up vendor payments and contracts

• Publishing dashboards on government performance

These are surely useful. But transformative, as they were promised? Not really.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk would not operate as an “unpaid special government employee”.

In the end, DOGE wasn’t just about making the government efficient. It was a political experiment to see if Silicon Valley logic could be force-fed into public systems.

And it revealed something powerful.

💪 The Power Moves

Playbook for understanding the game of power.

Why Speed Alone Doesn’t Work in Bureaucracy

Elon Musk’s DOGE experiment revealed a brutal truth:

You can move fast, but if the system isn’t designed to scale with you, it breaks or you do.

It’s easy to think that what works in startups can fix the government.

But what gets you speed in one world can cost you legitimacy in the other.

The lesson?

Power isn’t just about moving fast. It’s about knowing when to push and when to institutionalize.

The Takeaway

So if you're building something to change the system, don’t just optimize for speed.

Optimize for survivability.

Because if your system dies with you, it never had leverage in the first place, and you would no longer be there to make any change.

💵 Following the Money

Three of the wildest financial and corruption stories from around the world.

#1 - India launches an attack on Pakistan in Kashmir in response to last month’s deadly shootings of tourists

#2 - How Chinese companies ‘wash’ products in third countries to avoid Trump’s tariffs

#3 - How the FBI found an online global child predator network ‘764‘

✨ Poll time!

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