Rocketeers are natural risk-takers who expect some of their launches to blow up on the pad. Running the federal government, even in search of greater efficiency, cannot be undertaken so recklessly.
Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s largest financial backer and the world’s richest man, convinced the president to create an unaccountable sub-department of government to purportedly root out waste and fraud from the federal budget. While the idea sounded appealing, the result was anything but efficient and has instead inflicted lasting damage.
At the outset, Musk promised the Department of Government Efficiency project would cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal budget, a risible claim given that the entire discretionary portion of annual spending is only $1.8 trillion. Musk subsequently scaled back his estimate to $1 trillion. The actual results have been, to put it charitably, underwhelming.
DOGE, aptly named after an internet meme, now claims savings of just $170 billion according to its website, just 8% of its original promise. But the department’s ciphering has been riddled with errors, exaggerations and falsehoods that have annihilated its credibility. While it promised to substantiate savings on its “Wall of Receipts,” only 42% of the line items include any documentation and many of those simply read “currently unavailable.” Dozens more have been rescinded when errors were highlighted by journalists.
The chaotic assault on government brings its own costs that largely nullify the purported savings. According to the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, rehiring essential employees fired by mistake, paid leave for furloughed personnel and lost productivity will cost taxpayers $135 billion this year alone. This figure does not include legal costs to the government to defend the numerous lawsuits challenging the legality of many of its actions.
Even Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a purveyor of numerous discredited health conspiracies, acknowledged that one fifth of the 10,000 experts discharged from his agency were fired by mistake. “We’re going to do 80% cuts but 20% of those will have to be reinstalled because we’ll make mistakes,” said the cabinet secretary in charge of America’s health care. Meanwhile, vaccine opponents in Texas have succeeded in making measles great again.
It hardly ends there. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that cuts to the IRS workforce will result in $8 billion in lost revenue this year and $323 billion over 10 years. If even 80% of its claimed reductions are accurate (a generous concession given rampant errors), DOGE is costing the taxpayers more than it is saving.
Elon Musk promised to extirpate “waste, fraud and abuse” in government. Most Americans agree with this goal, but like all complex bureaucracies in government and the private sector, excising inefficiencies requires expertise, rigor and patience, not a gilded chainsaw hacking away at meat and bone along with the fat.
As for fraud, DOGE has uncovered surprisingly little, and many if not most of its reports have not held up to scrutiny. One example: Social Security. A junior underling of Musk’s falsely claimed that 40% of calls to the Social Security Administration were fraudulent. The story was picked up by Fox News and subsequently repeated by both Musk and the president. Trump’s own acting Social Security Commissioner debunked the claim, reporting that the actual rate of fraudulent benefit payouts was 0.006%, barely a rounding error. Industry estimates of losses to fraud at Visa and MasterCard are closer to 6%. DOGE’s actions to combat non-existent fraud caused hold times to surge.
DOGE has double- or triple-counted canceled contracts, included savings from grants that had already ended, counted contracts out for bid but never awarded and moved decimal points transforming millions into billions. The agency canceled nearly 500,000 government credit cards used to procure routine supplies and counted the sum total of their maximum credit limits as cost reductions. It is no exaggeration to say DOGE has perpetrated more fraud than it discovered.
DOGE’s mission appears not just to decimate the federal workforce but to demoralize it. Russell Vought, the powerful director of the Office of Management and Budget and a principal author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as villains.” The president himself said of federal workers, “They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people.” Imagine the catastrophic effect such rhetoric has on efficiency and productivity at the Veterans Administration.
Indiscriminate defunding of basic research and the firing of talented scientists will have implications for decades. DOGE has slashed research at the National Institutes of Health and is dismantling the National Science Foundation. The U.S. government is the single largest funder of basic research that drives medical breakthroughs and technological advancements. You wouldn’t have statin drugs, chemotherapy or an iPhone if not for government-funded research.
America’s retreat from scientific leadership has economic and geopolitical implications. Basic research often leads to profitable private sector applications. About 99% of the drugs on the market today owe their invention to government research funding. Forbes estimates that the current cuts to the science budget will translate into $10 billion per year in lower economic output.
The geopolitics are perhaps more alarming. China already matriculates twice as many science and technology PhDs as the United States, and three times as many if one excludes foreign students at American universities. The decimation of research funding by DOGE as well as the president’s ideological war with elite universities translates directly into fewer American doctoral graduates just as China in stepping on the gas. Xi Jinping cannot believe his good fortune.
Every American supports efforts to reduce waste and save taxpayer dollars. But there is a huge difference between pursuit of efficiency and wanton destruction. As Elon Musk retreats to address his own self-inflicted crisis at Tesla, we can pronounce DOGE at best as a failure and at worst a wound that will take years to heal.
Christopher A. Hopkins, CFA, is a co-founder of Apogee Wealth Partners in Chattanooga.
