It was never meant to be $2tn. Elon Musk’s vow last year to cut almost a third of the annual federal budget, made in front of a frenzied Maga crowd during a Trump rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, came as a surprise even to the event’s organisers.

“The deal was he was going to [say he would] cut $1tn,” Howard Lutnick, the prominent Trump backer and now commerce secretary — who had invited Musk on stage — later admitted. “What was I supposed to say?”

The impromptu pledge has increasingly become an albatross around Musk’s neck. Six months after Donald Trump officially announced the formation of Musk’s cost-cutting vehicle, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), it has yet to find a fraction of that initial sum on a one-off basis, let alone make the sort of cuts that would reduce spending year after year.