Readers respond to Question of the Week: Will D.C. be the same without Elon Musk?

Elon Musk

Draining the swamp is a daunting task, even for Musk. The swamp is fighting him every step of the way. We all know the waste he has already found. I have been following on X the daily reports on the contracts they are canceling. It is amazing. The Dems say they are not very much. Wait a minute, $100 to $200 million wasteful contracts are not much?

The thought of our government issuing checks with no cost codes is criminal. How can any of this be audited? It can’t. Computer systems are outdated and no one cares. They do now. You hear about cuts to Medicaid. What they are looking at is government spending for duplicate payments. I could go on. Lets just leave it at that. These are your tax dollars.

— Robert David, Redondo Beach

Musk’s destructive attack

Elon Musk did a most dishonorable and destructive attack upon this country. Anyone who tries to justify even a shred of his actions at DOGE is insane.

It is now known that not only did he not save one red cent for the country, but his actions will end up costing us taxpayers tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars. Space here does not permit the long list of damages he committed. Just spend a minute and Google it. It is well-documented. But can we totally blame Musk? After all, he was working for a grifter and a criminal. Therefore his job was doomed from the start.

— William Stremel, South Pasadena

Musk in Washington

Elon Musk’s time in D.C. will prove to be unimaginably lucrative — for him. Musk has repeatedly expressed a desire to re-purpose X as a financial services platform. We learned that “DOGE” operatives repeatedly attempted, apparently successfully, to access the private data of U.S. citizens stored by the SSA and the IRS with the stated pretext of uncovering “fraud.” Of course, the real fraud will be revealed when it turns out that the data was spirited away to data centers owned by Musk to be used for training AI models and for designing and marketing financial products to the very people whose data was stolen. Musk’s brief sojourn as a “special government employee” will turn out to be very worthwhile indeed.

— Steven Pencall, Riverside