Outside the Beltway

The Failure of DOGE

Jobs were lost and people have died (and will die), but at least we didn't save any money!

Steven L. Taylor · Friday, December 26, 2025 · 1 comment

The NYT asks, How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government — slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants.

But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

How is that possible?

I mean, who could have predicted that a dude who thought naming the organization after a meme coin and who came to work in a goofy ball cap would end up being non-serious? I mean, most very important government activities are heralded by waving around chainsaws and employing people who haven’t even graduated from college, including a dude with the moniker Big Balls.

Who could have imagined that a guy who clearly did not understand government, and who thought that “move fast and break things” was a great approach to a highly complex system would fail to achieve his stated goals?

Oh, yeah, a lot of people did. For example, this guy back in February:

I have doubts, however, that the mythic “fraud, waste, and corruption” that many conservatives have been promising to find since at least my youth will ever be located and excised from Washington.

[…]

But neither savings nor improvements to services/the functioning of the federal government will come about from a bunch of amateurs running around and looking at things they don’t understand. I don’t care how much money Elon Musk has or how many high-tech companies he owns, he does not know what he is doing.

All of us who have worked in a serious environment, whether it be in the public or private sector, would have found it absurd if our employer hired a consultant analogous to what we saw from DOGE.

I mean, if I showed up at an attorney or accountant’s office and the main guy looked like this, would you let them near your legal problem or money?

To be clear, unorthodox people can be quite competent, but it was clear from the beginning of all of this that the issue was not Musk’s lack of orthodoxy; it was his lack of expertise and seriousness, coupled with the hubris of being far wealthier than mortal men, that was the core problem.

Back to the NYT, which answers its question thusly,

One big reason, according to a New York Times analysis: Many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong.

Allow me to pause and note that this is not a good answer to the question, which was, again,

But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

How is that possible?

The fact that they failed to do what Musk promised is, again, because they didn’t know what they were doing. The errors were a result of that ignorance; the errors were not the failure but rather a symptom of the broader problem. To me, this is yet again a mainstream media outlet not really getting to the core problem, which is how incompetence and simplistic thinking, two resources that this administration has in large quantities, lead to errors.

Still, there is some good reporting on the facts in the piece, to include this comedic chart showing a massive number of oopsies on the part of team DOGE.

Here’s an impressive order-of-magnitude error (emphasis mine).

At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Mr. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations,” and said their demise had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.

Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.

All this created a great deal of chaos, lost jobs, and real damage to important aif programs. People have died because Elon Musk thought he knew what he was doing and because college kids were given ridiculous amounts of power.

One reminder of the real consequences, via UCLA: USAID cuts may lead to more than 14 million deaths globally, including 4.5 million children under 5 by 2030, researchers say.

But, you know, Elon got to wear some hats and wave around a big chainsaw, so it was worth it, right?

One parting thought on how worth it all of this was, via NPR: Former DOGE engineer says he was ‘surprised’ by ‘how efficient’ the government is.

The lack of savings, the lack of finding massive fraud and waste, and the deaths will all be solace, no doubt, to all the people who lost jobs and had their lives disrupted. Report: DOGE responsible for nearly 290k job cuts.