The great American guessing game: who runs the country, Trump or Musk?

The cover of TIME magazine’s latest issue features Elon Musk sitting behind the fabled Resolute Desk in the Oval Office of the White House. The picture has no text or caption. It is a public reminder of a question asked increasingly frequently as Donald Trump’s second presidential term unfolds.

The question: who is really in charge of the government of the United States? The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, whose electoral campaign benefitted from contributions totalling $288 million from Musk.

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Critics soon dubbed Musk co-president. Social media memes and cartoons proliferated, with one of the most viewed showing Musk as a puppeteer pulling the strings of Trump.

This is why the TIME cover needed no explanation. It irked Trump, whose unsmiling response to a press conference question about the depiction of Musk in the Oval Office was, “Is TIME magazine still in business? I didn’t know that.”

If that was meant as an attempt at light-hearted repartee, it fell flat asreporters soon found Trump’s reaction to TIME naming him Person of the Year in December. “It’s an honour, it’s a great honour.”

Still, TIME, first published in 1923, reports a circulation of 1.2 million.

To return to DOGE and the controversies and achievements of Trump’s first few weeks, the words “unprecedented” and “American Exceptionalism” come to mind. There is no precedent for an unelected private citizen to be charged with cutting two trillion dollars from a 6.75 trillion federal budget.

There is no precedent either for DOGE, which is not a cabinet-level department of the U.S. government but was established as an advisory group. There were no guidelines on the extent, or limits, of its power. Musk appears to believe its authority trumps laws and regulations.

Where else could an immigrant from South Africa amass a fortune estimated at $424 billion, more than $150 million more than Jeff Bezos, the U.S.-born Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon and is the world’s second-richest man?

Where else could a private citizen, with the help of a super smart former employee of one of his companies, gain access to the payments system of the U.S. Treasury which processes federal spending accounting for roughly a fifth of the U.S. economy?

Where else would a president ignore the possibility of huge conflicts of interest by giving free rein to a cost-cutting czar who has billions of dollars worth of contracts with important agencies of the government and some of the most important companies in the defence and space industries?

All of this is exceptional though it is not the kind of American exceptionalism that has filled generations of Americans with pride – a country based on an idea rather than on blood and soil.

So, how much government spending has been cut in the first three weeks of DOGE and what have been the primary targets of Musk’s cost-cutters?

Given the outsize role of “defence” in the U.S. economy, you might assume that the Pentagon has been under early scrutiny following the “shock and awe” announcement of impending cuts. This does not appear to be the case despite a history of jaw-dropping waste.

The Pentagon’s budget for fiscal 2025 (ending in September) is$849.8 billion. But rather than going for the big stuff, both Musk and Trump have been focused on USAID, the US Agency for International Development.

Its spending accounts for around one per cent of the overall federal budget. On his social media platform X, Musk described USAID as a “criminal organization. Time for it to die.” Trump asserted on his platform that USAID is “run by radical left-wing lunatics.”

Neither Trump nor Musk has provided concrete examples of malfeasance or lunatic behaviour. That has not kept them from planning to cut USAID personnel from around 10,000 around the world to 294.

USAID is the most visible demonstration of “soft power” demonstrating to people around the world that the United States can be a force for good. It provides food for the hungry and medicines for the sick.

As Samantha Power, who ran USAID from 2021 to 2025, put it in an opinion piece in the New York Times: ”We are witnessing one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in history.”

Halting aid programmes around the world, she wrote, imperils millions of lives, thousands of Americanjobs, and billions of dollars of investment in American business and small farms.

Killing USAID “is a win for autocrats everywhere,” she concluded.

Judging from a string of surveys over the years, such arguments do little to touch emotional buttons for most Americans. Aid to foreigners is not popular, thanks partly to lazy journalism omitting context that might sway public opinion.

Poll after poll has shown that most Americans believe that foreign aid accounts for around 25 per cent of the federal budget. Year after year, the actual figure has been around one per cent.

That vast gap between perception and reality makes USAID an easy target.