Ding dong, the DOGE is dead
The wasteful DOGE
We got hosed
Ding dong, the con job DOGE is dead
Yes, that’s right. DOGE is passed on. It’s no more. It has ceased to be. It’s kicked the bucket. It’s shuffled off its mortal coil.
The Department of Government Efficiency, or as I’ve said was more accurately described as the Department of Departments Going-away (DODG), was so efficient it completed all of its goals eight months ahead of time. Its search to find all of the waste and fraud that’s so rampant and rife within the U.S. Government was a resounding success. Musk expertly wielded that chainsaw and it continued to be expertly wielded after he left. After less than ten months in existence, it’s just not needed any more.
The official statement about two weeks ago from the Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor is DOGE “doesn’t exist”. Some of the DOGE employees were laid off, but others have moved on to other jobs within the government.
You may be wondering why, if it was so successful, how could it be referred to as a “con job”? Well, if it wasn’t, then the people that worked in it appear to have been inept and lacking in basic math skills like addition, subtraction and multiplication. Those two factors led to savings that not only fell massively short of what was promised, it ended up creating more costs than it saved.
When it was first announced, saving $2 trillion was the goal. By the time the November 2024 election took place, it was half that. It dropped further when the department was officially formed and began its work three months later.
According to the “Wall of Receipts” section of the DOGE.gov website, as of October 4, they list $110.1 billion in savings. Divide that by the initial $2T and you get 5.5%. When all was said and done, DOGE couldn’t even reach 10% of the original goal.
Of that $110.1B, $61B is savings from contracts. But if you go by what Politico reported in August, they could only verify $32.7B of the contracts and estimated what was saved was only $1.4 billion. If we’re being generous and let DOGE keep the claimed savings the other $49B from Grants and the $113 million from leases, that’s only $50.5B saved, and out of the promised $2T, it’s a 2.5% success rate.
Here’s how they fell so short:
- In February, DOGE said it cut a $2.5B contract, but the previous contract was just $880M.
- In April, it claimed it had saved $160B, but it wasn’t itemized and only 40% was listed on the Wall of Receipts.
- A $1.7B contract was canceled before any money had been spent on it. Technically, this is a savings, the best kind of savings.
- $2.9B was claimed as a savings by cancelling a contract and projecting out what would have been spent on it through 2028, then subtracting what was spent. Hence, more technically savings.
- Savings for other contracts were counted in the same way, but if the contract impacted two divisions, the “savings” were counted twice, once for each division.
- Contracts that already ended were counted as cut contracts, hence more savings, even though some of the already-ended contracts were more than a decade old.
- An $8 million contract cut was initially reported as $8 billion.
- Some cut contracts were determined afterward as being essential, so they had to be moved to different companies, erasing the savings.
- Some of the organization hit by DOGE cuts couldn’t function and had to re-hire the cut employees and hire new employees.
- NASA is ordered to make $240M in cuts to space programs, less than 1% of their budget. Guess who just happens to have a space transportation company? Can you say “conflict of interest”? I knew you could.
- During the year, various things on the Wall of Receipts disappeared, erasing some of the claimed savings.
- At one point, Musk sends out the “Give me five reasons why you should keep your job” emails that he loves. The confusion led to some governmental departments telling its employees to wait, others said ignore it, and a couple told their employees they had to do it.
- All cuts ordered by DOGE have lawsuits filed against them.
- You remember that scene in Iron Man 2 where Justin Hammer tells Rhodey he’s going to upgrade the software in the armored suit Rhodey flew off in after fighting with a drunken Tony Stark at his party? You remember that became the gateway Ivan Vanko used to gain control of it? Yeah, the DOGE team uploaded various software, including some A.I. programs, into department systems like at the Social Security Administration, creating problems and making them less efficient.
All of these will take years to fix, but perhaps the biggest failure of DOGE stems from its mission to find fraud in the government. Whatever fraud they found, if any, has resulted in nothing. No punishment or consequences of any kind, and definitely not any indictments or criminal charges.
As a result, the legacy of DOGE is two-fold. It’s an example of how it’s easier to destroy than to create, and an example of a department formed to solve a problem became the very problem it was supposed to solve.