John Oliver had warned viewers last summer about how Project 2025 sought to dismantle the federal government. But the Last Week Tonight host couldn’t have imagined then that it’d be unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his crew of college-aged flunkies doing the actual dismantling.
In his Season 12 premiere—just four weeks into the second Trump administration—Oliver said: “When I pictured the evil masterminds who would be taking down the American government from within, I pictured comic book villains standing over the city as lightning struck.” Not Russell Vought, the head of the Office and Management and Budget. And certainly not Elon Musk, “looking like a scrotum dressed for a funeral,” Oliver said, adding: “He looks like a witch from Dutch folklore.”
Oliver knocked down Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, (named after his own memecoin) for opening with a foolhardy and potentially illegal offer for all federal employees to take deferred resignations. “Take this money now or risk being eliminated isn’t how you run the federal government. It’s how you run Beast Games,” Oliver said.
But it’s Musk’s hires—young men, some in their teens or under 21—that are keeping federal workers up at night even while they’re turning agency offices into makeshift bedrooms. “It is madness,” Oliver said. “Imagine being a federal worker and having to listen to a guy who wasn’t alive for 9/11, Shrek 1 or Shrek 2, say to you, ‘You’re being downsized. Please leave this office which is now my bedroom. Also: Can you please buy me a beer?’”
And some of Musk’s minions have “checkered employment histories,” including one young man who had access to the U.S. Treasury’s pocketbook despite espousing eugenics on social media. And then there’s Edward Coristine, who called himself “Big Balls” online, fired from an internship in 2022 for leaking proprietary info to a competitor. “What a fun time to be alive this is. I’m so glad our country is based on merit again. Otherwise candidates like Big Balls the fired intern might’ve been overlooked,” Oliver quipped. “I expected better of Big Balls…or as he’s now known, senior adviser at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security.”
Oliver responded to a Feb. 3 X post by Musk claiming he spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chopper” instead of going “to some great parties.” “First, any party you attend is definitionally terrible,” Oliver said. “Second, don’t you have like 100 kids? Go hang out with them on the weekends, you parasitic freak.”
Perhaps more disturbing, though: Seeing how Musk, with one of his toddlers in tow, told reporters in the White House Oval Office not to believe everything he says will be correct. Who’s the kid on Musk’s shoulders? “That’s the new undersecretary of Housing and Urban Development. Or it’s one of Elon’s kids. Or possibly both,” Oliver joked in reference to Musk’s 4-year-old son, X, before turning serious: “But it is noticeable that his answer to how can we trust what you’re saying is true, is basically you can’t. Also for the record: Trump isn’t even pretending to care anymore, is he? He’s so restless and bored, he’s making the exact same face as a four-year-old at the exact same time.”
Meanwhile, Musk’s schemes to defund the federal government come while his SpaceX runs off of $22 billion in government contracts; his companies in total have upward of 100 contracts with 17 federal agencies, all while 11 agencies have or had opened 32 different investigations into complaints about Musk’s companies.
“This all feels fast and headspinningly corrupt,” Oliver said.
Meanwhile, he found some solace in one TikToker’s musical number, which Oliver suggested could be the new national anthem–one that even Canadians wouldn’t boo.
