Donald Trump warned Elon Musk that DOGE could come for him too. So far, there has only been a single instance of Musk being on the receiving end of a funding “cut.”
And the government didn’t actually recoup any money from the terminated contract.
In early June, the DOGE website updated to include 171 newly axed government contracts. One of those terminations represented a first: it was for a federal contract awarded to Musk’s SpaceX.
NASA had awarded SpaceX the relatively small amount of $19,038.40 for a contract called “Aspire Public-Private Talent Program, SpaceX Immersion.” It was based out of Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California, where the company’s West Coast launch site is located, and categorized as an “Education/Training personnel” contract on a federal spending website. The contract is now listed among the “waste” on DOGE’s site.
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But the previously unreported termination wasn’t exactly a “cut” per se. After the contract began on Oct. 2, 2024, all the funds were immediately disbursed to the company, federal records show. The contract was marked as terminated on April 8 and listed on DOGE’s website on June 3. But, as DOGE’s site says, the actual “savings” are $0. SpaceX never lost out on any money.
That’s not uncommon for DOGE; Over 3,600 contracts and over 2,600 grants listed on its “savings” page have an estimated savings value of $0. But it’s notable that Musk’s companies have gone completely unscathed as the cost-cutting effort he once led tears through government awards.
Musk has his hands in a half-dozen companies, two of which are worth over $100 billion. There’s SpaceX; Tesla, the electric car giant; X, formerly Twitter; xAI, the artificial intelligence venture; Neuralink, the neurotechnology developer; and The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company.
In several instances, companies that directly or indirectly compete with Musk’s have lost out on millions of dollars because of his cost-cutting effort.
NOTUS reviewed the 27,245 grants and contracts currently listed on DOGE’s site and found there was not one instance of any of Musk’s six companies losing out on a single dollar awarded by the federal government. That’s not for a lack of federal funds flowing to Musk’s enterprises.
Taken together, the companies have benefited from a combined minimum of $38 billion in federal funding, a Washington Post investigation found. That doesn’t count classified federal awards that companies like SpaceX have received. Musk’s companies are set to benefit from billions of dollars in already approved awards in the coming years.
Starlink, the growing internet service provider under SpaceX that has partnered with T-Mobile, directly competes with companies like AT&T, which lost out on a $4.8 million contract. (DOGE lists the savings as $14.3 million despite federal records showing it was worth less.) Comcast, another internet service provider, also saw a contract cut, as did Verizon.
Aurora Innovations, a self-driving automobile company, saw two cut contracts listed on DOGE’s site. Beam Global, a company focused on electric vehicle chargers, also lost a contract. Tesla, which specializes in electric cars with self-driving technology, also has a solar panel division. Other solar competitors, like REC Solar, lost out on multiple government contracts. Solar provider Ameresco lost tens of millions in federal funds. And while there is no private space company that comes close to matching SpaceX’s dominance of the sector, several smaller aerospace firms lost their federal awards to DOGE.
After a tentative four-week truce, Musk on Tuesday renewed his attacks on President Donald Trump’s signature piece of legislation as it made its way through the Senate. Lawmakers who voted for the bill, Musk wrote on X, ought to all be primaried.
Trump didn’t take the criticism in stride.
“I think what is going to happen is DOGE is going to look at Musk, and if DOGE looks at Musk, we are going to save a fortune,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “I don’t think he should be playing that game with me.”
On the one hand, the threat represents Trump’s latest attempt to wield the might of the federal government to punish those who speak against him. On the other, Trump suggested something similar four weeks ago, but when the DOGE website updated in June for the first time since the Trump-Musk split and over 1,000 new awards were added, none of Musk’s companies were among those affected.
Despite the site’s claim that its “Wall of Receipts” page — where DOGE lists what it cuts — “will initially be updated weekly,” four weeks passed between the most recent update and the last. DOGE has also claimed for months that eventually “the website will improve and the updates will converge to real-time,” although there is no sign of progress on that front.
(DOGE’s June update also continued the trend of every single other update since the website’s launch of steadily walking back its vastly overstated real estate cuts. The number of leases DOGE claimed credit for cutting had already fallen from 748 to 563. In the most recent update, that total fell again to 418. In that single update, DOGE shed 27% percent of its previously claimed savings from cutting federal leases, revising down its estimate by $57 million, NOTUS found.)
If Trump is serious about cutting Musk’s contracts, as he first floated a month ago, DOGE’s site suggests there’s been no momentum in that direction.
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