Go back to main point about Musk: 'His job was to do an audit of what we're spending on.' It's hard to imagine a more important task for a special government employee like Musk.

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Polls have repeatedly shown that majorities of voters support the work President Trump's Department of Government Efficiency is doing to cut waste and fraud in federal spending. A recent poll by CBS News found that 51% of those surveyed believe there is a lot of wasteful spending in federal government agencies, while an additional 36% believe there is some wasteful spending, for a total of 87% who believe there is waste in government. 

Given that, it is not a surprise that 54% said they believe that DOGE leader Elon Musk and his team should have some, or in some cases a lot, of influence over the spending and operations of U.S. government agencies. 

All that makes sense. Of course there is waste in a $7 trillion federal budget. Of course somebody should try to find it and stop it. So why is the DOGE project so controversial? For four reasons: 1) Democrats and their allies in the media want Musk to fail because they want President Trump to fail. 2) A large part of the federal bureaucracy wants Musk and Trump to fail because it has an interest in an ever-expanding and costly bureaucracy. 3) With a tech-guy, move-fast-fail-then-fix approach to problem-solving, the DOGE ethos is appropriate for some federal government functions but not for others. And 4) Elon Musk can't stop talking.

Some of the factors are simply built into the process. Others would be difficult to change. So this will be about the simplest way DOGE could reduce the friction it encounters as it searches for waste and fraud in federal spending: Have its leader talk less. To take a recent example:

Sen. Mark Kelly, a politically ambitious Democrat from Arizona, recently visited Ukraine. After leaving the country, Kelly wrote a series of posts on Musk's X platform tearing into Trump's strategy to end the war. The president is "trying to weaken Ukraine's hand" and is pursuing a "ridiculous 'screw you, go it alone' foreign policy," Kelly wrote, adding that the United States will not succeed "by being bullies like Putin."

That is pretty much Democratic boilerplate when it comes to Ukraine. So Kelly reasonably opened himself up for criticism and debate. But that is not what Musk did. Instead, he immediately responded to Kelly: "You are a traitor."

The problem was not just that Kelly is a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot who flew combat missions in the Gulf War, and later a NASA astronaut who flew four missions in the space shuttle. The problem was about general principles: Why reflexively call someone a traitor? What good does that do? Why go nuclear off the bat? 

"I think it reflects badly on the White House," a member of the House, Nebraska Republican Rep. Don Bacon, said of Musk's comment to Kelly. And then Bacon made perhaps the most important observation of the whole affair: "His [Musk's] job was to do an audit of what we're spending on." 

Bacon was also irritated by a spat Musk got into with the foreign minister of Poland. When Musk tweeted, "My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off." – when Musk did that, the foreign minister responded that Poland pays about $50 million per year for the service. Then he added, "The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider, we will be forced to look for other suppliers." To which Musk responded, "Be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink." In reaction, Rep. Bacon said, "going after the foreign minister of Poland – I don't think that's right, either."

Go back to main point about Musk: "His job was to do an audit of what we're spending on." It's hard to imagine a more important task for a special government employee like Musk. So why is he inserting himself into the Ukraine peace process? Maybe he should leave that to the president.

About a month ago, this column wrote that "One problem that besets some billionaires is that they think they can do anything they want because they mostly can." That is certainly true for Musk when he is running Tesla and SpaceX, the companies he created and led to such extraordinary success. But government and world affairs just aren't the same thing.

Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.

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