from the the-department-of-gullible-elon dept
We’ve talked a lot about how Elon Musk’s “Division of Authorities Effectivity” (DOGE) was at all times extra about performative cruelty than precise effectivity. However a brand new Senate report reveals simply how spectacularly DOGE failed at its supposed core mission whereas inflicting immeasurable human struggling within the course of. The complete idea blew up extra spectacularly than one in every of Musk’s Starships.
The numbers are damning. The report from the Everlasting Subcommittee on Investigations exhibits that DOGE wasted no less than $21.7 billion in simply six months—between January 20 and July 18, 2025. However hey, no less than they bought to really feel like they had been “draining the swamp,” proper?
As Senator Richard Blumenthal put it within the report’s launch:
“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims. At the exact same time that the Trump Administration is chopping well being care, vitamin help, and emergency providers within the title of ‘effectivity’ and ‘financial savings,’ they’ve enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of no less than $21.7 billion {dollars}.”
To recap the “effectivity”: Musk promised to avoid wasting trillions, truly wasted over $21 billion. That’s some galaxy-brain effectivity proper there.
To be truthful, a lot of that “waste” comes from Musk’s Twitter-style “resign now and we’ll pay you for a lot of months” plan to rid the federal government of staff. Because the report notes, that value the federal government $14.8 billion in salaries of people that couldn’t truly do any work after which one other $6.1 billion from folks DOGE fired. And I’m certain that DOGE-supporting MAGA sorts will attempt to declare that that is tremendous, as a result of it’s a one-time value and can decrease authorities bills going ahead.
However that’s unfaithful. A part of the issue right here is that—opposite to the favored perception in MAGA circles—most individuals within the authorities had been truly doing necessary work that the federal government must do. Firing all of them doesn’t change that. Each few weeks there are one other set of tales about how the Trump admin has to scramble to attempt to rehire the those that DOGE fired.
Doing issues that approach virtually definitely will increase prices, due to the extent of painful inconsistency and the necessity to persuade staff to come back again to this shitshow after being handled so horribly. And, after they received’t come again, then the federal government has to exit and discover new folks to fill these roles, which can also be a really costly proposition—and one the report didn’t even discover.
Not solely was a lot of this wasteful, it was wasteful for the stupidest of causes: a lot of this destruction was primarily based on conspiracy theories that Musk discovered on social media.
As Don Moynihan documented in his evaluation:
The destruction of USAID was exceptional in that it didn’t mirror any kind of broad-based consensus. Whereas different actors in Trump’s political surroundings—such because the Undertaking 2025, or the funds blueprint from the Heart for Renewing America, led by Trump’s funds chief Russ Vought—known as for reductions in USAID spending, they didn’t search to remove it. The assault on USAID appeared disproportionately pushed by the beliefs of 1 individual, Musk. And people beliefs had been largely disconnected from the truth of what USAID did.
For instance:
- Musk stated that 90% of USAID spending by no means reaches communities, implying that the majority funding was wasted. However this declare demonstrates a misunderstanding of the funds. Whereas 10% of the funds goes to direct funds to native organizations, one other 46% goes to funding to multilateral companies and 31% to American firms and nonprofits, a lot of which matches to direct provision, equivalent to HIV packages, anti-malaria merchandise, and emergency meals providers.
- Musk claimed that $50 million was spent to ship condoms to Hamas. Trump repeated this false declare, as did members of Congress. The group that receives the funds does present household planning, however its USAID funds had been offering emergency well being assist to refugees in Gaza.
- Musk has repeated different conspiracy theories about USAID discovered on-line together with that it helped to create COVID-19, is rigging elections, and manufacturing media consent.
- Musk elevated claims that USAID was protected by journalists as a result of it had been secretly funding the media, primarily based on authorities subscription providers to media retailers.
Musk was not atypical of the broader Trump motion, which held conspiratorial worldviews about different elements of presidency it labeled as “the deep state,” however the impact on USAID was probably the most instant and consequential. Such views may have been simply debunked, had DOGE been keen to speak to and belief profession officers. However Musk displayed deep mistrust of civil servants, labeling USAID “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” and “a prison group.”
Musk elevated these conspiracy theories to the mainstream on his social media platform X, reposting a small group of fringe accounts on X and selling posts from Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official and key voice behind USAID conspiracy theories. Benz has argued that “USAID is infamous for funding the darkest, most controversial, most horrifying tasks identified to all of mankind” and Musk believed him. Within the area of a 12 months, Musk engaged with or elevated Benz’s messaging 160 instances. Unsurprisingly, Benz has additionally embraced white supremacy politics.
The richest man on this planet, put in control of authorities effectivity, made life-and-death selections primarily based on conspiracy theories from fringe social media accounts. What may go unsuitable?
Properly, every thing, because it seems.
DOGE’s crown jewel achievement was utterly destroying USAID primarily based on—and I really feel the necessity to repeat this—conspiracy theories. A research revealed in The Lancet discovered that USAID had prevented 92 million deaths between 2001 and 2021. The company’s destruction is now projected to trigger 14 million avoidable deaths over the following 5 years, together with 4.5 million youngsters underneath age 5.
That is blood on the palms of Musk and the ridiculous nonsense peddlers he believed, moderately than speaking to precise specialists.
Experiences from the bottom present the instant human value. As ProPublica paperwork:
Within the southeastern African nation of Malawi, U.S. funding cuts to the United Nations’ World Meals Programme have “yielded a pointy enhance in criminality, sexual violence, and situations of human trafficking” inside a big refugee camp, U.S. embassy officers advised the State Division in late April.
[….]
“We live off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025,” Landis stated. On a latest go to to a facility treating malnourished youngsters youthful than 5, she stated she noticed youngsters who had been “strolling skeletons like I haven’t seen in a decade.”
In the meantime, Science journal’s reporting from affected HIV packages exhibits medical professionals watching a long time of progress collapse in actual time:
Makwindi says the termination of funding “was a shock” that baffles him to at the present time. He takes a beneficiant view of the U.S. motivation: “I nonetheless consider that somebody didn’t do due diligence and simply terminated us.” Nuha Ceesay, Eswatini nation director for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), has a harsher evaluation. What the Trump administration has carried out is akin to saying, “I’m going to unplug this life assist machine from you,” he says. “It’s as much as you to search out another, and whether or not you perish or not, that’s not my enterprise.”
The “effectivity” right here is breathtaking. Quite than ship emergency meals provides to ravenous folks, the Trump administration selected to incinerate them as a substitute. In accordance with the Senate report, $110 million value of meals support and medical provides are spoiling in warehouses, with some actually being trucked to France to be burned at taxpayer expense.
The waste brought on by misplaced funding is maybe most starkly illustrated by provides bought by USAID sitting in warehouses across the globe that sat rotting moderately than supporting their meant recipients. In February, the USAID Workplace of Inspector Common warned that a whole bunch of hundreds of tons of products had been liable to spoilage on account of DOGE’s try and shutter the company. By Could, 66,000 metric tons of meals valued at $98 million remained warehoused at a number of amenities in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai and Houston. Current reporting indicated {that a} portion (roughly 622 metric tons) of the 1,100 metric tons of meals support saved in Dubai was spared from destruction in June however the remaining 496 metric tons valued at $793,000.00 are to be “become landfill or incinerated” at a price of $100,000.00 to taxpayers. Moreover, as of June, USAID had deserted roughly $12.4 million value of “contraceptives and HIV-prevention drugs” in Belgium and Dubai. Roughly $9.7 million of those contraceptives caught in Belgium had been being “trucked to France” to be incinerated at a price of $160,000.00 as a result of USAID allegedly refused to promote or in any other case switch them to a third-party distributor at something lower than “full market worth.”
However wait, there’s extra! The report particulars how DOGE’s bureaucratic “Defend the Spend” initiative—supposedly designed to remove waste—truly created large new types of purple tape. NASA staff had been pressured to jot down “a number of detailed paragraphs, throughout a number of rounds of emails” simply to buy easy fastening bolts. The FAA required written justifications for window-washing and shopping for pens and pencils.
Effectivity!
And let’s not overlook the comedy gold of forcing almost 1,000,000 federal staff to ship weekly “5-things” emails justifying their existence. The Senate report estimates this pointless train wasted $155 million in misplaced productiveness. The very best half? OPM had no intention of truly reviewing these emails and finally despatched auto-replies saying its mailbox was full.
The demand for weekly accomplishment reviews was an pointless waste of time, primarily as a result of OPM, as an exterior company outdoors the administration chain of command, is ill-equipped to meaningfully assess the work of different companies’ staff. Furthermore, staff can be pressured to redact or omit any particular particulars to keep away from confidentiality considerations, additional diminishing the utility of those reviews. Past what ought to have been instantly obvious, the pointlessness of this train was underscored when OPM briefed companies that it meant to do nothing with the emails, after which a number of weeks later, despatched computerized replies again to staff stating that its “mailbox is full and may’t settle for messages now.” Though the venture continued by Could, roughly 13 weeks in, information emerged that this venture was “dying a gradual, quiet loss of life” throughout the federal government with companies not requiring weekly reviews.
Need to see a bunch of inefficient waste created by DOGE?
That is what occurs whenever you put conspiracy theorists in control of complicated programs. DOGE didn’t simply fail at its said mission—it actively made authorities much less environment friendly whereas inflicting humanitarian catastrophes on an enormous scale. And that’s simply with USAID. We’re not even wanting many of the different cuts. And the report solely briefly mentions the possible impression on the economic system of a few of these slash and burn efforts:
The complete extent of the waste and hurt brought on by DOGE’s disruptive actions is troublesome to quantify as a result of prices stay hidden and most of the penalties have but to completely materialize. Whereas some analyses, equivalent to an unbiased evaluate of DOGE’s cuts at simply seven companies—CFPB, NIH, USDA, USAID, IRS, ED, and DOJ—decided that these actions may end in over $10 billion in misplaced financial exercise within the U.S., these figures solely scratch the floor
In addition they notice that they’re not even counting the authorized prices incurred from the lengthy and ever-growing checklist of lawsuits DOGE’s cuts have spurred, a lot of which have already resulted in losses for the federal authorities in court docket.
The broader lesson right here is one we’ve seen repeatedly: whenever you prioritize performative cruelty over precise governance, you get neither effectivity nor effectiveness. You get waste, chaos, and struggling.
DOGE ought to go down in historical past as probably the most grotesquely incompetent authorities initiatives ever tried. An company supposedly created to remove waste that managed to waste billions in six months, create great inefficiencies within the workforce, whereas destroying packages that truly labored and saved lives.
The one factor it effectively completed was proving that placing conspiracy theorists and tech bros in control of life-and-death selections with no oversight, guardrails, or experience is a recipe for catastrophe on an unprecedented scale.
However hey, no less than Musk bought to really feel necessary for a number of months whereas hundreds of thousands of individuals confronted loss of life and struggling. Effectivity!
Filed Below: doge, donald trump, elon musk, usaid
