Elon Musk Says His Work On DOGE 'Mostly Done' As Tesla Slumps

Elon Musk, the world's richest person and the man leading the Trump administration’s effort to slash federal spending, is preparing to cut back on his role in the government starting next month.

In Tesla's first-quarter earnings call Tuesday, Musk said he believes he has laid out the groundwork for the Department of Government Efficiency and will start dedicating more time to his beleaguered electric car company.

“The large slug of work necessary to get the DOGE team in place and working in the government to get the financial house in order is mostly done,” he said on the call with analysts.

His comments came after Tesla reported a 71% decline in profit for the first quarter and a $2B drop in revenue. On the call, Musk said he would start “allocating far more” of his time to the company. He added that he still expects to work one to two days a week on federal government matters.

Days after President Donald Trump won the election for a second term, he tapped Musk to head DOGE, which Musk initially estimated could cut $2T in government spending from the $6.8T federal budget. 

Musk has since revised that goal. He said in early January that the department had a “good shot” of cutting $1T instead. The latest estimate for the year appears to be $150B, Musk revealed at a Cabinet meeting this month. 

DOGE’s website says it has saved the government $160B, but details about the cuts have been scarce and reports have found widespread errors in the office's claims.

From the beginning of its work, DOGE has put a focus on federal real estate as one of the major categories through which it intends to save the government money. 

On Jan. 27 — just a week after the Trump administration took office — DOGE posted on X that it had canceled three leases that would save the government $1.6M. Days later, it posted again that it had terminated 22 federal leases, equating to $44.6M in cost savings. 

From there, things escalated quickly. On a new tracking website released on Feb. 17, DOGE posted a list of 100 lease cancellations totaling 2.3M SF across the country. By early March, the list had climbed to 748 cancellations spanning 9.6M SF. 

Those efforts were frequently misplaced, with landlords and brokers who lease space to the government describing the DOGE cancellation process as “pure chaos,” Bisnow reported last month.

The pace of cancelations over the past month has slowed, with a reduction of just 500K SF of leases across four properties in March compared to February, according to Trepp.

The list, as tracked by JLL, now shows the department has canceled 653 leases equating to over 7.6M SF. DOGE has rescinded 181 of the cancelations originally announced, according to JLL.

DOGE has been working with the General Services Administration, the government’s real estate arm, in the process of cutting federal space.

The new GSA is ramping up its efforts to shed the government's 360M SF leased and owned footprint. Trump's new Public Buildings Commissioner, Michael Peters, said in January that the coming reduction could be up to 50% of the government's square footage.

But it also has restarted the process of signing leases, not just canceling them. The GSA signed the first major lease of the new administration — a 403K SF, 15-year renewal for the Department of Justice in D.C.’s NoMa neighborhood — this week, Bisnow first reported.