The Real Cost Of DOGE: Musk’s Government Cuts Creating Massive New Expenses
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.