Elon Musk will step back from his Trump administration work with a trail of wreckage — and failure — behind him.

Musk said last Wednesday that he’d scale back his White House work to one or two days each week soon, likely in May. But he’d already had his power reined in, becoming far less powerful in Washington as his grand ambitions hit a wall.

During his White House service, Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” dismantled a few agencies, fired tens of thousands of federal employees, canceled lots of contracts, and caused a whole lot of chaos.

But beyond making sure that far less lifesaving aid goes to people in foreign countries, it’s difficult to see what he’s accomplished.

The story of DOGE’s failure on spending is simple enough: Its huge ambitions to cut $1 trillion never seemed even faintly realistic, and Musk indeed never got anywhere near that target.

Yet DOGE was also, effectively, an attempt at a new way of running the federal government – an effort to have Musk wield power like a CEO of the civil service, ordering layoffs and making career civil servants dance to his tune, while allies burrowed in every agency carried out his agenda. And this failed too.

For about the first six weeks of President Donald Trump’s administration, Musk really did seem to have something approximate to CEO powers — thrilling the tech right, the Silicon Valley executives who’ve embraced Trump, and dreamed that what they viewed as a sclerotic, inefficient, and untrustworthy federal government could be run like one of their businesses.

Then, in early March, things suddenly changed. In what was, in retrospect, a crucial turning point, much of Trump’s Cabinet revolted against Musk’s dictates, and Trump reined him in, decreeing that his agenda would have to be approved by Cabinet secretaries, rather than imposed on them.

Much of Musk’s agenda — centralization of power under the president, coercion and firing of the civil service — is shared by Trump and right-wing activists, and will continue after Musk leaves. What turned out to be unsustainable was Musk’s own role as the “decider,” and the pace at which he tried to ram those changes through.

Musk’s status as a special government employee always came with a legal time limit — he can only serve 130 days in a 365-day period. But it’s hard not to think that, if Trump and Musk really wanted him to stick around longer, they’d figure out some workaround. Instead, there seems to be mutual agreement that the time has come for Musk to, mostly, depart.

The shock and awe phase: Musk as CEO of the federal workforce

When Trump said he’d appoint Elon Musk to head a so-called Department of Government Efficiency focused on government spending, most of Washington yawned. They’d seen such toothless efforts before.

Almost no one was prepared for what Musk did — for how aggressively he’d move and for the specifics of what exactly he’d try to pull off.

In its first phase, DOGE represented nothing less than a new model of how to run the United States federal government. In it, Musk, a White House adviser empowered by the president, had the power to order sweeping changes and have them carried out rapidly. He acted as the de facto CEO of the federal workforce, as if he got to decide who gets fired, who gets promoted,........

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