After Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sensationalized fall out on X in the beginning of June, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., have called on the president to address $2 trillion in “wasteful government spending,” including a plan to eliminate incessant marijuana arrests.
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In a letter the pair sent to Trump, they mince no words about Musk’s shortcomings in his role at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The former Tesla boss and current owner of X “promised to eliminate $2 trillion of the $7 trillion federal budget” at the beginning of his stint in the government. Instead, he eventually lowered his goal to $150 billion, less than 8 percent of the original figure.
Warren and Stansbury assert that in his time in the government, Musk costed Americans more than he saved them in the form of “cut[ting] food safety inspectors, nuclear experts, and staff at the Social Security Administration, the Education Department, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” and many more essential agencies.
The letter referenced a damning article in The New York Times claiming DOGE’s claims of saving $55 billion through layoffs and more were fraudulent: some contracts listed in the “wall of receipts” were double- and even triple-counted, some weren’t even cancelled by Musk, and others’ values were increased by a factor of 1,000.
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Warren and Stansbury provided Trump with six recommendations to cut Musk’s promised $2 trillion in government spending over the next decade, the last of which was to reduce waste in “unnecessary federal arrests and detention programs.” The two highlight the fact that recreational marijuana has been legalized for people over the age of 21 in 24 states around the country, and still, a quarter of all drug-related arrests are for possession of the plant. Within this suggestion, the two also point to incarcerating elderly and terminally ill patients and people who’ve committed minor technical violations of probation and parole, all groups who “pose little risk to public safety.”
Warren sent a similar letter to Musk in January, condemning the Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs and Border Patrol’s raids of legal marijuana businesses, claiming that they waste federal resources. She pushed for DOGE to recommend that the government save resources by deprioritizing the policing of marijuana in states in which it’s legal.
The Democrats claim that their “recommendations would save the U.S. government more than $2 trillion over the next decade,” and that Trump’s proposed “tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy would cost U.S. taxpayers $4 trillion over the same period.”
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Apparently, Trump asked aides, “Was it all bullsh**?” in the aftermath of his spat with Musk, and Warren and Stansbury make it clear that they believe it was (according to a New Yorker article, it seems those with insight into DOGE’s inner workings feel similarly). The men are certainly less than friendly now, but the president is ultimately the one being tasked with cleaning up the richest man in the world’s mess—and rightfully so.
As the aforementioned New Yorker article says, “the relationship between the two men, always transactional, had turned into a bad deal for both of them.” Maybe, though, it’ll prove a good deal for the rest of us: Who knew an internet feud had the power to potentially lead to positive cannabis legislation?