Just before the election last fall, Elon Musk predicted that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. By early January, a couple of weeks before President Donald Trump returned to the White House and appointed Musk head of the newly created not-quite-department dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, he was calling $2 trillion “the best-case outcome” and saying “we’ve got a good shot” at getting $1 trillion in cuts. In late March, he said DOGE would deliver $1 trillion in deficit reduction by the end of May. By April 10, that was down to savings of $150 billion. Draw a trendline through Musk’s pronouncements so far, and it shows the DOGE savings number going negative on May 21 and becoming a deficit increase of more than $2 trillion on Dec. 1.