Billionaire Elon Musk has said his time leading President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting task force is coming “to an end”.
Musk has helped lead the Department of Government Efficiency – known as Doge – since its inception this year.
He was designated as a “special government employee” – which allows him to work a government job for 130 days each year. Measured from Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, he would hit that limit toward the end of May.
Musk thanked Trump for the role in a post on X and said he believed the cost-cutting agency would become a “way of life throughout government”.
“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk wrote on X.
He added the agency will “only strengthen over time”.
A White House official told news outlet Semafor that Musk’s “offboarding” as a special government employee would begin on Wednesday night.
Musk’s exit comes after he criticised Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill – the legislative centrepiece of the president’s agenda that he has spent political capital lobbying members of Congress to pass.
The budget measure includes multi-trillion dollar tax breaks and a boost to defence spending.
Musk said in an interview with BBC’s US partner CBS that he was “disappointed” the bill would increase the federal deficit, adding that he thought it “undermines the work” being done at Doge.
His departure caps off a tumultuous entrance into politics that both transformed him into one of Trump’s closest advisers and saw plunging profits at his company Tesla.
The electric car firm warned investors that the financial pain could continue, declining to offer a growth forecast while saying “changing political sentiment” could meaningfully hurt demand for the vehicles.
Musk told investors on an earnings call last month that the time he allocates to Doge “will drop significantly” and that he would be “allocating far more of my time to Tesla”.
