As the dust settles on the end of the 2025 fiscal year, the U.S. government finds itself mired in questions about transparency, executive power, and the shifting allegiances of Silicon Valley’s most influential leaders. Elon Musk’s much-vaunted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), once heralded as the engine for a $1 trillion budget slash, has left behind a trail of confusion, contested numbers, and a deeper debate about the true balance of power in Washington.
Musk’s ambitious pledge, made with characteristic bravado, was to find $1 trillion in federal savings by September 30, 2025. But as The New York Times reports, that deadline has come and gone, and neither Congress nor the public has a clear answer on what DOGE actually achieved—or what happened to the money it claimed to save. “The fact that Congress, who constitutionally has the power of the purse, can’t figure out what’s been going on is a deep, deep, deep constitutional issue,” Zach Moller of the center-left think tank Third Way told the Times.
DOGE’s own accounting put the savings at $214 billion, but its math was riddled with errors: inflated contract savings, double counting, and a failure to account for the costs and legal battles triggered by abrupt program shutdowns. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s drive to reduce the federal workforce saw thousands laid off, with the Office of Personnel Management projecting up to 300,000 departures by year’s end. Yet, as The New York Times notes, there’s no reliable data on whether these cuts actually saved the government money, especially since some layoffs are tied up in court and others have already been reversed.
One critical fact looms over all of this: DOGE, created by executive order, never had the legal authority to cut spending on its own. “When push comes to shove, the savings number is in the rescissions,” said Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute, referring to the only legal means of clawing back appropriated funds—Congressional action. During the 2025 fiscal year, the White House submitted just two rescission requests, totaling around $14 billion, a far cry from Musk’s trillion-dollar promise. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have tracked as much as $410 billion in spending they believe was canceled or frozen, with some funds potentially expiring at the fiscal year’s close, never reaching their intended recipients.
The confusion is compounded by the role of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), led by Russell Vought. OMB removed a legally required public database of spending records, only restoring it after a court order in August 2025. Even then, the logs revealed OMB exerting unusual control over agency spending, often using documents hidden from public view. Vought himself has challenged the constitutionality of the 1974 law that forbids the executive branch from impounding funds appropriated by Congress, signaling a willingness to test the limits of executive power in court.
This tug-of-war has profound implications for the separation of powers. Congressional Democrats have protested what they see as a deliberate effort to obscure spending and undermine legislative authority. “This administration has flagrantly broken our spending laws, cut off funding owed to communities nationwide, and then systematically worked to obscure what it’s doing from the public—and Congress’s—view,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democratic appropriator, said in a statement cited by The New York Times.
But the drama over budget cuts and executive overreach is just one part of a larger transformation in the relationship between government and the technology industry. As POLITICO Magazine’s Calder McHugh reports, Silicon Valley’s top figures—once closely aligned with Barack Obama and later benefiting from increased cooperation under Joe Biden—have now thrown their support behind Donald Trump. The reasons, according to Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, are as much cultural as they are financial.
“What they probably didn’t like were these mild acts of enforcement,” Silverman told POLITICO Magazine, referring to Biden-era regulatory efforts on crypto and AI. But under Trump, tech leaders like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks have found a government more willing to accommodate their wishes. “They are getting pretty much everything they want. … I think [the alliance] is deeply reflective of the culture and politics and attitudes among the tech leadership itself,” Silverman said.
This new alliance is characterized by a desire to sidestep social justice debates and focus squarely on business interests. “There’s kind of an exhaustion with woke politics and social justice issues. They don’t want to have to have opinions on those kinds of things anymore,” Silverman observed. The shift is evident in the increasing cooperation between tech companies and the U.S. military. Firms like Palantir and Anduril are now at the forefront of defense tech, a far cry from the industry’s earlier reluctance to work with the state or build weapons. “At least part of this new generation is very excited to make stuff for the state—it’s kind of more like a ‘Call of Duty’ type attitude,” Silverman noted.
This enthusiasm for government contracts and defense partnerships is not just limited to startups. Major tech giants, once wary of military intelligence work, have largely embraced it. The relationship intensified under Obama and continued through Trump, reflecting a mutual interest in data sharing and product development for national security. “Anywhere the Biden administration was on the national security front lines, tech companies were often involved,” Silverman pointed out, even as cultural and regulatory tensions simmered beneath the surface.
Despite the lucrative partnerships, the tech industry’s relationship with government is not without friction. Some leaders, like Andreessen, bristled at Biden’s proposals to tax unrealized capital gains or regulate AI—moves that, in their view, threatened their autonomy. Yet, as Silverman argues, these grievances often mask the reality that the industry has flourished under both administrations, finding new revenue streams and deepening its influence in Washington.
As the executive branch flexes its muscles—sometimes at the expense of Congressional oversight—the tech elite’s embrace of Trump reflects a broader skepticism toward democracy and traditional governance. Figures like Peter Thiel have long questioned the value of democracy, and their efforts to create charter cities or private communities signal a desire to carve out new forms of sovereignty, sometimes literally. “They seem to have become rather anti-social and almost xenophobic; they don’t really want to be among the rest of us,” Silverman remarked, highlighting the growing divide between Silicon Valley’s leaders and the broader public.
In the end, the 2025 budget saga is about more than numbers. It’s a story of shifting power, contested authority, and the uneasy alliance between tech titans and the halls of government—a dynamic that shows no signs of settling anytime soon.