Rufo: How Washington Beat Musk

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has achieved some great feats, including dismantling USAID and modernizing the federal retirement system. But as a whole, it has fallen short, Christopher Rufo writes. Yes, Washington is more efficient thanks to DOGE’s efforts, but the waste it’s cutting will be closer to $100 billion than the promised $2 trillion.

The issue, Rufo notes, is that Washington’s problems are political. DOGE didn’t fundamentally change the budget because it still requires congressional approval. But DOGE made it easy for congressmen to shift the burden—and ultimately the blame—onto Musk for their ongoing failure to control spending.

Now, with Musk taking a step back from DOGE to focus on Tesla, Republicans will likely revert to their old habits: “promising to balance the budget during campaign season and blowing it up as soon as the legislature convenes,” Rufo writes. “The end of Musk’s tenure at DOGE reminds us that Washington can get the best even of great men.”

It’s a common refrain on the left: drug prohibition is racist, rooted in a history of white supremacy, and based on fear.  

But minorities themselves don’t even seem to agree with this thinking, Adam Zivo points out. His nonprofit recently conducted a poll that found that just 26 percent of nonwhite respondents agreed (either strongly or weakly) that drug criminalization is racist, suggesting that activists “are not listening to the communities they profess to care about,” he writes.

New York State has the most lavishly funded public school system in America, spending more than $36,000 per student, but learning outcomes remain middling, and families are leaving the system in droves. Charter school enrollment has doubled in a decade, and homeschooling is up 170 percent.

Danyela Souza Egorov argues that it’s time for the school choice movement—fresh off its recent success in Texas—to take the fight to blue states like New York. With political winds shifting and dissatisfaction in public education rising, a campaign built on a simple message—“So Much Money, So Little Learning”—could rally moderates across party lines and unlock educational freedom for all.

President Trump’s tariffs are more likely to bring economic instability than industrial revival, writes Tyler Turman. The U.S. has already seen plummeting consumer confidence, sky-high inflation projections, and an up-and-down stock market.

This volatility poses major problems, Turman points out. Building a new manufacturing plant in response to a tariff can take years. “No manufacturing or tech firm CEO in his right mind would risk sinking billions of dollars and years of labor to reorient supply chains in response to tariffs that can be revoked by the next president, or even by Trump himself,” he writes.

Read his take here on why tariffs aren’t the way to usher in a manufacturing renaissance.

“I feel sorry for the minority of rational people living in NYC. You can say they elect the representatives they deserve but unfortunately not everyone is crazy and they get the poor leaders selected by people who keep voting themselves what they think is either free money or virtue. They will get neither.”

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