The Real Cost Of DOGE: Musk’s Government Cuts Creating Massive New Expenses
from the seems-bad dept
Imagine you had pretty much unlimited power over the government and wanted to save taxpayers’ money. You could:
- Carefully study government operations to understand what works and what doesn’t
- Make targeted improvements based on data and evidence
- Track results to ensure changes actually deliver savings
Or you could do what Elon Musk did with DOGE: declare everything wasteful, start firing people at random, and claim you’re saving billions through pure destruction.
It’s long been clear that Elon has never considered Chesterton’s Fence — the (generally somewhat conservative) principle that before dismantling long-standing systems, you should first understand why they exist.
The results are exactly what you’d expect when someone treats government operations like an ExTwitter poll: lots of dramatic announcements, very little actual improvement, and some spectacularly costly fuckups.
Rather than trying to understand the complex mechanisms of government operations, Musk’s DOGE crew has taken a slash-and-burn approach that’s clearly designed more for headlines and memes, than anything around actually improving the government.
Let’s start with DOGE’s claimed “savings” — a masterclass in creative accounting that would make Enron blush (not to mention Hollywood accountants). We’ve already covered how they’re effectively making up their numbers, but the creative fiction writing continues.
The DOGErs recently announced updated figures, claiming they’ve saved the government $115 billion. But pretty much anyone who understands any of this stuff says that’s a load of absolute bullshit.
The largest saving listed on the wall of receipts is $1.9 billion, achieved from cancelling a contract in the Department of Treasury with software company Centennial Technologies. However, last month, the company told the New York Times that the contract was canceled under the Biden administration, not by DOGE. The team then deleted the charge, per ABC, but since then it has been re-added. (Centennial Technologies did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment by press time.)
The Times reported, citing federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list, that at least five of the 20 largest “savings” in the updated claims appeared to be exaggerated.
Earlier this month, the team also quietly removed over 1,000 contract cancellation claims from its “wall of receipts,” reducing reported taxpayer savings by $4 billion.
Even if we pretend those $115 billion in “savings” are real (and they’re not), they’re actually costing us way more than they’re saving. It turns out that when you mindlessly slash government operations without understanding how they work, you end up breaking things that actually make money.
Take the IRS. The Washington Post recently pointed out that DOGE’s cuts there alone would likely cost over $500 billion in revenue. That’s not a typo — the “savings” just at the IRS alone are costing us more than four times what DOGE claims to have saved across the entire government.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year….
Slashing and cutting with wild abandon, only to find out that rather than “saving” money, it’s actually costing huge amounts of revenue? Where have I heard that one before? Oh, right. Twitter. Elon Musk did the same fucking thing with Twitter. It was a disaster there and it’s looking like a disaster here. But on a much bigger scale, with much more dire consequences.
And that’s not all. Inc. magazine has been detailing how many of the other cuts across the government are likely to cost taxpayers way more than they save:
“These firings they’re conducting without following the law will result in hundreds of thousands of former federal employees being owed back pay, plus interest, plus benefits, plus attorneys fees,” said labor attorney Suzanne Summerlin in an interview last month with The Guardian. “When the bill comes, it will be monumental.”)
This isn’t just speculation. We’re already seeing the consequences of DOGE’s reckless approach:
The full cost of the number of workers currently on forced administrative leave is something no one has been able to calculate yet, in part because of the rapidly escalating number of people being impacted by reductions in force and the ensuing court fights.
Those legal battles, which will likely stretch for several months (or even years), will also use a currently countless number of worker hours, as staff responds to legal challenges via briefs and arguments in front of judges (along with the prep time required for that), further escalating the price tag of DOGE’s actions.
But what about Musk’s claims that all this destruction is justified because he’s conducting a much-needed “audit” of government waste? Like everything else about DOGE, it’s complete nonsense. Wired spoke with some actual auditors who claim that what’s happening with DOGE looks nothing like an actual audit.
The two auditors told WIRED that going through the technological and financial minutiae of even just a single project or part of an agency can take anywhere from six to 18 months.
“You can’t coherently audit something like the whole Social Security system in a week or two,” says the second auditor. It’s exactly this rush to crack systems open without full understanding, the auditors say, that has led to Elon Musk’s false claims that 150-year-olds were receiving Social Security benefits. “It could be that DOGE didn’t de-dupe the data.”
“In no uncertain terms is this an audit,” claims the second auditor. “It’s a heist, stealing a vast amount of government data.”
The actual auditors, like the other reports above, are pointing out that DOGE’s actions will almost certainly end up costing taxpayers way more money:
Since sweeping through the government, DOGE has canceled thousands of government contracts, including 10,000 specifically for humanitarian aid. According to reporting from the Associated Press, 40 percent of those canceled contracts through late February will likely not save the government any money.
“They’ll end up costing more in some way, whether it’s time, inconvenience, or money,” says the second auditor.
This is the cruel irony of DOGE: while Musk claims to be saving taxpayer money through “disruption,” he’s actually creating a massive financial burden that will take years, if not decades, to fully understand. The punchline, if you can call it that, is that we’ll need real auditors to eventually figure out just how much this fake audit actually cost us.
The program that promised efficiency through targeted destruction is instead delivering chaotic and costly destruction through incompetence.
When you tear down Chesterton’s Fence without understanding its purpose, don’t be surprised when everything behind it comes crashing down too. The bill for DOGE’s reckless demolition will be paid by all of us — and it’s already clear the price tag will be astronomical.
Comments on “The Real Cost Of DOGE: Musk’s Government Cuts Creating Massive New Expenses”
Not even good at being a Nazi
I thought Nazis were supposed to be all about efficiency? He’s too deep in a k-hole to most of the time up that’s a different thought. Sounds like this goose-stepping, sieg heiling, drug addicted illegal immigrant needs to be deported to me. Isn’t that what the right wants?
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That’s how fascists market themselves, but despite what you’ve heard, Mussolini never made the trains run on time.
The cruelest (and punchiest) part of all this is, by the time we fully understand how much all this wild “saving” truly costs, no one will care. It will be old news, years if not decades out of date. How many citizens actually read the 9/11 Commission’s final report? This will be that, only ten times longer and more out of date by the time it finally arrives.
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We’re still suffering from Reaganomics, and Reaganomics have effectively become a given on both sides of the aisle.
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Worse still, by the time it comes to pay the bill, the Democrats will be in office, and they will get the blame for it.
The “massive financial burden” may be part of the plan. Coupled with billions of dollars worth of tariffs (a huge tax increase for consumers), the result will be further taxes on the “little people” to finance substantial tax cuts for the ultrawealthy (which will be much greater than stated because the IRS will cease auditing the ultrawealthy).
The difference between an honest person and a liar
The largest saving listed on the wall of receipts is $1.9 billion, achieved from cancelling a contract in the Department of Treasury with software company Centennial Technologies. However, last month, the company told the New York Times that the contract was canceled under the Biden administration, not by DOGE. The team then deleted the charge, per ABC, but since then it has been re-added. (Centennial Technologies did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment by press time.)
The Times reported, citing federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list, that at least five of the 20 largest “savings” in the updated claims appeared to be exaggerated.
Earlier this month, the team also quietly removed over 1,000 contract cancellation claims from its “wall of receipts,” reducing reported taxpayer savings by $4 billion.
An honest person acting in good faith upon being told that what they’d just said was wrong will correct themselves and strive to avoid making the same false statement again in the future.
A liar and/or a fraud upon being told that what they just said was wrong will either double-down and therefore transform what could have been an honest mistake into a deliberate lie, quietly try to scrub their statement without admitting that what they said was wrong, or both.
The fact that Elon keeps getting caught lying shows without any room for doubt that even he knows he’s lying when he makes sweeping claims about the government fraud and inefficiency he’s finding, and the real kicker is that if he was honestly looking to cut down on those things I’ve no doubt that he could find it.
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It is as if Elon is out to prove that there are no shades of gray. The the universe is pure black and white. Probably in every possible meaning of that analogy.
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If fraud was found, there would be lawsuits against the people committing the fraud. There aren’t any. What does that tell you?
If waste was found, there would be restructuring in order to achieve the same, Congress-mandated and appropriated tasks using fewer resources. There isn’t. Instead there are mass firings and shutdowns.
That tells you that there is no intent to reduce fraud and waste (and it wouldn’t make sense to fire the Inspector Generals if there were). Instead the intention is to stop the administration from doing tasks mandated by Congress.
Trump isn’t interested in separation of powers. He shuts down the legislative’s field of control. He is also in the process of shutting down the judicative (turning the Department of Justice into something heeding his call instead of being a part of the justice system is dismantling a significant part of the justice system, including all of the criminal justice system).
All this is done using appalling simplistic and shameless lies and “justifications” that are arrogantly wild and foolish.
It is a criminal enterprise that has taken over significant parts of the government that could previously have held it to account, like one of those ichneumon wasps that stings a host in central parts of its nervous system and guides the willingless creature to some place where the eggs of the parasite will hatch and divest the host that lives as a willingless husk until too much of its vital organs have been consumed.
When you mention Chesterton’s fence, I am reminded that Newton’s Third Law applies to just about any action — For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The nice part about physics is that “equal” and “opposite” are defined. Outside physics, “equal” and “opposite” are wildly unpredictable and often dangerous!
When you’re a business genius, and you’re confusing billions in saving with millions, and millions of costing with billions…
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But the DOGE people are kind of technically correct here (“the best kind of correct”). If the I.R.S. collects less money, that’s not a cost; it’s just a reduction in income, even if that has the same net effect on the U.S. economy.
I say “kind of” correct, because Wikipedia says “Saving is income not spent”, and by that definition it wouldn’t be a saving. But another common definition is “A reduction in cost or expenditure”, which would apply.
Realistically, this is a symptom of an even larger problem of non-holistic thinking. For example, reducing government spending in one place doesn’t help if it just shifts elsewhere. Like if everyone needs internet access, and the government cancels subsidies, individuals will just pay more; as a class, Americans will be worse off overall. Or if something increases poverty, and poor people end up in emergency rooms, everyone else’s health-care costs go up. But, hey, it’s not on the government’s books anymore.
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There’s so much of the offset effect that is going to fuck up whole industries and the economy at large. All the government employees losing their jobs are thrust into the private sector. All the people who worked for grant-funded initiatives are going to be looking for new jobs. That drives down incomes because the employers know more people are searching for jobs and are desperate to feed their families and pay their rent/mortgages, etc. And many won’t be able to find jobs. They’ll lose their houses. They’ll need food and housing support. It will strain already strained systems that will have fewer of those grants and resources to be able to help anyone. The only ones this helps is the wealthy, who can afford to buy up cheap property after foreclosures or already own the banks that foreclose. They’ll lower wages. They’ll get the next big tax cuts.
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Which means that the state governments not aligned with Trump will see extra expenses for that, and state tax rates may have to go up—or state debt (with the Feds crashing the economy, interest rates could decrease; but tax revenues might also decrease, despite increased rates).
In states with similar ideas to the Feds, that slack will have to be taken up by private donations to food banks, homeless shelters, and such, for which the donors will receive federal and state tax deductions (and I doubt any politicians will be looking to end that). Then the politicians will have an excuse to cut expenses even more.
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Blue states will attempt to pay to care for the dispossessed.
Red states will bulldoze them into mass graves.
Re: Re: Re:3
That’s not far off. There are lots of people who donate to poverty relief organizations in the “blue” states, often for religious reasons, but I highly doubt those donations will increase by anywhere near the amount that Musk and Trump are cutting. And a patchwork of unofficial services doesn’t make up for a lack of proper government support. So, yeah, people will die, and the aforementioned pair of assclowns will probably post sarcastic messages about it, as they did with the deportees.
Re: Re: Re:3
Or what already happens—red states bus homeless people to blue states and then criticize blue states for having a homeless problem.
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Well, who’s gonna pay for that? It seems like an easy service to cut.
I saw a comment the other day to the effect of “You can’t actually call something a savings if you’re only looking at one side of the balance sheet. For example: I just saved thousands of dollars by not paying my mortgage!”
Of course, that’s if DOGE’s numbers weren’t completely made up to begin with.
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But they did, thereby proving otherwise.
I can, too, because I guess I’m just better at bullshitting that whichever “you” was being addressed. I can call anything anything. The cuts to the IRS are a colorless green idea sleeping furiously; see?
In this vorpal and uffish administration, bullshit knows no bounds, so I suggest we stop talking about what they “can” do. They can say stuff that’s not true; they can do stuff that’s not legal.
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That can work, as we saw around 2008 and 2009. Some of those people lived for free for years, and I guess it works especially well if the courts and counterparties are overwhelmed and distracted. And it seems appropriate for a president who’s been through six business bankruptcies.
There is something strange about how there’s so little in existing welfare programs in the United States that when they try to do austerity they have to cut things like the State Department, tax man, and other stuff that needs in order for the state to function.
Although I would like if DOGE fixed Pacer, but that will never happen.
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They’d be far too late, anyways. Recap’s already done that.
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Not really. Not till the courts are uploading all their documents directly to RECAP, such that nobody ever has to use PACER.
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But with Recap, only Recap has to use Pacer. Get it yet?
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Model For Success
This is similar to what Musk did with Twitter 1.0 — he massively cut expenses and unloaded 60% of the employees. It was claimed that X-Twitter would be unable to operate, but after 2+ years the predictions proved to be wrong.
The U.S. government has been promising studies and targeted improvements and tracking systems for decades. None of it came to fruition. As mentioned in previous comments, Musk is using a radical new system called Zero-base budgeting. And just like Twitter 1.0, everything us working fine, while delivering on major savings for taxpayers.
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Koby, is it really too much to ask that you read and respond to points actually being made in the piece, rather than regurgitating the same old bullshit?
Re: Re:
Koby’s faith in Trusk rivals that of a martyr’s faith in god. Propaganda is meant to be consumed and repeated, not questioned or analyzed. Act now and you too could replace your entire personality with Newsmax sound bites and masochistic support for the dismantling of your own well-being!
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It’s all he has.
If he stops braying the party line for even one minute he knows he will realise that everything everyone said about him is true and everything he believes is a shitty see through grift by a couple of third rate conmen.
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I’m sure that cutting regulation and regulators that stop the common man from being scammed or swindled is going to cost the taxpayer a lot more, even if the federal budget somehow does shrink as a result of this
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Working just fine? In what way? Revenue is declining, active users is declining, and it’s probably still unprofitable.
Hell, the way you’d think that “X” might be doing good is that its valuation went up after being bought for more than it was bought for in 2021.
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If you think X is working, you really know nothing about the technology. It’s pretty clear that X wasn’t generating enough cash flow to make the debt payments. So he sold it to X so he could access that six billion.
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You don’t need to know anything about technology if your basis for truth is just believing what you’re told by your megalomaniacal billionaire edgelord leader.
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“I’m so stupid,” an angry Koby once again yells to everyone, because he thinks they didn’t get it the first time.
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The problem here, Koby, is that you lie and focus ONLY on the single point of “would Twitter be unable to operate.” While there may have been some people who were judging things on that standard, most were not.
And it is SIMPLE FACTS that prior to Musk taking over Twitter, the company was on target to bring in $6 billion in revenue. Nowadays, he’s struggling to get $2 billion.
That’s not a success. That’s a fucking disaster.
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Apropos Xitter, is there an article coming regarding Elon’s sale of the platform to himself for $33bn + $12bm debt?
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Yeah, Koby. And he largely failed with all of it. Stop being such a goddamn stupid sycophant.
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It’s rather ironic you were here touting the success of downsizing Twitter, while researchers were discovering that 34 GB of user data was exfiltrated by hackers….which would make it the largest breach in the history of social media. And it appears the X has no idea what’s going wrong.
Come on Mike, don’t go crazy now. We all know that Elon has not cut everything. He still gets his government checks!
Who would win?
A hundred-years old functional republic with checks and balances and a guarantee for civility, equality, and freedom.
-OR-
A gang of cringy Edgelords led by a 4-Chan user who has way too much money.
The answer will deeply depress you.
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Uh, that’s like climate change. The consequences arrive after the fact.
You lost it at the ballot box. Musk is not “winning” as much as reveling in the spoils.
This is what Benjamin Franklin meant when he answered the question about the form of government the U.S. was now under with “a Republic, if you can keep it”.
You couldn’t. The defense of a democracy are not its institutions but its constituents.
He could consult an expert..
Musk could just bring in an actual budget expert that understands how to make targeted responsible cuts that actually lead to allocation improvements.
The problem is that the best candidate for that just came out as trans which will be really icky to some people on the right:
https://x.com/JessicaBRiedl/
https://www.jessicariedl.blog/p/yes-my-name-has-changed
In the end Elonald gets terabytes, if not petabytes, of personal and governmental data to hide away in, no doubt, secret locations to use at his leisure in future after he finds the just right breed of white fluffy cat to stroke as he wreaks havoc.
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“Elonald” strokes nobody but himself.
Re: Job security for DOGers
Among the petabytes, I’d guess that there is information that some members of the administration do not want made public. DOGe personnel have a powerful incentive to copy and store any potentially compromising information about those within the government who might threaten their employment (or health). The President, his senior advisers and staff, Cabinet members and all of their family members, corporate associates, Republican legislators and any friends of the preceding would be natural targets.
Have DOGe personnel somehow been prevented from accessing the relevant data? Is it already too late to prevent such access? If DOGe personnel believe that they would be imprisoned, tortured and/or killed if they accessed such data, wouldn’t that further increase their incentive to download and store the information with ‘dead man switches’ to ensure its wide, immediate dissemination if they were arrested or harmed in any (other) way?
The President and his allies might regard themselves as immune to being compromised. The President might well think that he himself is immune (in part because his strongest supporters would simply refuse to credit any negative information, no matter how credible), though electronic health records might contain details that he would strongly prefer not to have to deny.
But it is less clear that all of the President’s allies believe that they are similarly immune, given that some nominations have been withdrawn when additional negative information came to light. It seems unlikely that, speaking purely hypothetically, Secretary Rubio would be allowed to remain in his position if it were revealed that had been born as Marcia, a woman, and not [Little] Marco, a man. The President would seem to regard the need to replace many of those who carry out his edicts as a significant(?) inconvenience, especially if the need occurred repeatedly.
Reminds me of a movie
Aha! Elron reminds me of an old movie of a programmer who wants to make millions, and does it at the leftover bits a penny added to his accounts. “His people in charge are the best” past criminals.and who knows what they are doing. We already had a ” Doge”, congressional oversight.
Musk has uncontrolled access to all the records where the money is, and how it is spent,
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Superman 3.
The man bought Twitter for a fuck ton more than it was worth, then fired everyone who actually did any real work there. He fired entire teams that he NEEDED at Tesla simply because he had a grudge with their department head. Nothing he’s ever done has ever been any form of efficient.
There will be no way to build back better after this, it will take generations to restore the infrastructure, expertise and trust that Elon has destroyed. If you were a world leading expert in disease control, would you risk uprooting your life and face being unemployed or even prosecuted out of spite the next time america has a collective stroke?
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There are three world powers now: the EU, China, and Russia.
The EU is not perfect, but given those options, I sincerely hope they gain the upper hand.