DOGE’s “Efficiency” Theater Comes Full Circle: Trump Admin Scrambles To Rehire The Very Workers Musk Fired To “Save Money”

I actually wrote this article yesterday before the government shutdown happened so I don't really discuss that, but it sounds like we may end up going through all this again if the Trump regime goes through with its plans to use the shutdown to fire a bunch more people who are important, but who no one in charge is smart enough to understand what they do.

Remember when Elon Musk and his merry band of DOGE vandals were going to revolutionize government by firing everyone and slashing everything? Yeah, about that. Turns out when you fire people who actually know how to do essential jobs, you eventually need to... hire them back. Who could have predicted this shocking turn of events? (Spoiler: literally everyone who was paying attention.)

The General Services Administration is now desperately begging hundreds of federal employees to come back after Musk's cost-cutting blitz left the agency broken and understaffed." These are the same workers who were supposedly dead weight that needed to be eliminated to save taxpayer money. Funny how that worked out.

The General Services Administration has given the employees - who managed government workspaces - until the end of the week to accept or decline reinstatement, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.

Those who accept must report for duty on October 6 after what amounts to a seven-month paid vacation, during which time the GSA in some cases racked up high costs - passed along to taxpayers - to stay in dozens of properties whose leases it had slated for termination or were allowed to expire.

A seven-month paid vacation. Let's pause to appreciate the stunning efficiency" here. These workers got fired, kept getting paid, and now the government is begging them to come back because-surprise!-they actually knew what they were doing, were needed, and when they were suddenly cut loose it turned out to be an expensive mess that made it harder for the government to function. Meanwhile, taxpayers footed the bill for both their salaries and the mounting costs of properties that couldn't be properly managed without them.

Of course, this was pretty much what a ton of actual experts warned would happen.

This is exactly what happens when a bunch of overconfident, under-informed Silicon Valley bros assume that complex government operations are just inefficient startups waiting to be disrupted." GSA wasn't some bloated tech company with redundant product managers-it's the agency that manages thousands of federal work spaces. You know, actual critical infrastructure that keeps the government functioning.

And, of course, GSA actually had a strong and incredibly effective team that worked on efficiency... and Musk fired them all.

Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed," said Chad Becker, a former GSA real estate official. They didn't have the people they needed to carry out basic functions."

Becker, who represents owners with government leases at Arco Real Estate Solutions, said GSA has been in a triage mode" for months. He said the sudden reversal of the downsizing reflects how Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had gone too far, too fast.

Too far, too fast" is a charitable way to describe what amounts to institutional vandalism. This wasn't thoughtful government reform-it was pure destruction for the sake of destroying anything a bunch of ignorant, incurious idiots didn't understand, on the assumption that if they didn't understand it, it couldn't be that important.

They were wrong, and now taxpayers are left footing the bill.

Also, we're not just talking about GSA here. There's a pattern here of institutional destruction masquerading as reform. The rehiring wave is spreading across multiple agencies as the reality of Musk's efficiency" vision crashes into the actual requirements of running a government:

Last month, the IRS said it would allow some employees who took a resignation offer to remain on the job. The Labor Department has also brought back some employees who took buyouts, while the National Park Service earlier reinstated a number of purged employees.

The scale of this backtracking is breathtaking. When you're rehiring at the IRS, Labor Department, National Park Service, and GSA simultaneously, that's not fine-tuning-that's admitting your entire approach was fundamentally broken.

In the end, the massive job cuts that were supposed to save money have, instead, created expensive messes that cost way more than the original inefficiencies" they were meant to fix:

The administration slashed GSA's headquarters staff by 79%, its portfolio managers by 65% and facilities managers by 35%, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, who was not authorized to speak to the media, provided the statistics on condition of anonymity.

As a result of the internal turmoil, 131 leases expired without the government actually vacating the properties, the official said. The situation has exposed the agencies to steep fees because property owners have not been able to rent out those spaces to other tenants.

This is what happens when you mistake activity for achievement. DOGE fired nearly everyone who managed the government's portfolio of real estate and then acted shocked when nobody was left to manage the portfolios. Now taxpayers are on the hook for steep fees" because properties couldn't be properly vacated. The government is paying rent on spaces it's not using because the people who knew how to handle lease transitions were... fired to save money.

And now they're desperately trying to hire them back so they won't even save money on the decrease in salaries.

Even DOGE's own metrics show how spectacularly this has backfired:

DOGE's Wall of Receipts," which once boasted that the lease cancellations alone would save nearly $460 million, has since reduced that estimate to $140 million by the end of July, according to Becker, the former GSA real estate official.

From $460 million in supposed savings down to $140 million in actual savings-a 70% reduction in their own projections. This collapse in projected savings reveals the fundamental flaw in DOGE's approach: they counted theoretical benefits from lease cancellations without accounting for the institutional knowledge required to execute those cancellations. The real number, factoring in transition costs, legal fees, and operational disruptions, is almost certainly negative. And that's assuming you trust DOGE's remaining figures. Which you probably shouldn't.

This entire debacle perfectly illustrates the fundamental flaw in the government is just a broken business" mentality. Government agencies exist to serve public functions that often don't map neatly onto Silicon Valley efficiency models. When you fire the people who understand complex lease agreements, regulatory compliance, and interagency coordination, you don't get innovation-you get extremely expensive chaos.

The particularly galling part is that these workers will now return to clean up the mess created by their own firing. They'll spend months untangling lease complications, rebuilding institutional knowledge, and reestablishing relationships with contractors and other agencies. All of this remedial work will cost far more than their original salaries ever did.

The Government Accountability Office is now investigating this mess, which means taxpayers will also foot the bill for studying how badly DOGE screwed up:

The Government Accountability Office, an independent congressional watchdog, is examining the GSA's management of its workforce, lease terminations and planned building disposals and expects to issue findings in the coming months, said David Marroni, a senior GAO official.

So we're paying to study the costs of the effort that led to the cuts that didn't save money but instead cost more money. It's inefficiency all the way down.

This is what happens when you let tech bros cosplay as government reformers with no oversight or expertise. They mistake complexity for inefficiency, assume institutional knowledge is just bureaucratic dead weight, and believe that disruption" is always improvement. The result is predictable: expensive chaos that requires the very expertise they dismissed to fix.

The federal employees now being begged to return have every right to negotiate better terms, demand back pay for the chaos they didn't create, and insist on job security protections against future DOGE-style tantrums. They're the ones who will clean up this mess, rebuild what was broken, and restore the basic functions that kept government working before Musk decided to reinvent the wheel as a square.

Rather than government efficiency we ended up with expensive performance art designed to satisfy the digitally-inspired fantasies of people who think running a government is like optimizing a social media algorithm. The only thing DOGE has efficiently accomplished is proving that some people's expertise actually matters, even if-especially if-Silicon Valley billionaires don't understand what that expertise does.

I am reminded of Rod Hilton's viral Mastodon post from a few years back about Elon Musk:

If you can't see that, it says:

He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

I get the feeling that a lot of government workers who previously thought he was a genius may also now choose to stay away from Musk's cars and rockets. As they should.