Elon Musk’s DOGE Promised Savings, But It’s Cost Us a Fortune
A new report from the Government Accountability Office misses the point entirely.
Michael Mechanic
The US government doesn’t have many watchdogs left. Donald Trump fired a whole bunch of them shortly after returning to power, and many others have been pushed out since. We do still have a Government Accountability Office (GAO), for what it’s worth, and one week ago, that office published a report detailing the remarkable lack of transparency in how Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency conducted its affairs and how the savings DOGE reported fell far short of its claims.
But here’s the thing: a) We knew that from the start, and b) the GAO entirely misses the point.
DOGE saved us nothing. In fact, Musk’s little project has cost America dearly. In countless ways, we are much worse off than we were on the day Trump took back the Oval Office and invited the richest man on Earth to come in and break things.
Here’s just a partial accounting of what their nonsense has cost us.
A ton of money: Before he was tapped to run the IRS under President Barack Obama, John Koskinen spent decades as a turnaround man, helping large, failing organizations get back on track. And “the last thing I ever thought,” he told me, reflecting on how DOGE was gutting the tax agency, “was, ‘Well, let’s starve the revenue arm.”
But starving the government’s revenue arm is precisely what DOGE and Trump have done, with the gleeful complicity of Republican leaders long hostile to tax enforcement yet who are always eager to enact obscene tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
During Trump’s first year back, through the firings and deferred resignations that DOGE spearheaded, the IRS lost 28 percent of its workforce. The first to go were probationary employees, Joe Biden hires who had been on the job less for than two years. “A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds and experience in technology and tax law management,” Koskinen said. “They weren’t 25-year-olds. They were filling important positions.”
Cheered by Republicans, these firings crippled the IRS’s capacity to collect unpaid taxes and investigate sophisticated tax cheats—rich individuals and companies, including firms that, as we speak, are routing their substantial profits through offshore tax havens without consequences.
The IRS’s inability to conduct complex audits encourages law-breaking by the uber-rich, the richest of whom invariably avoid punishment. (Commoners who defy the rules are easy to catch.) An April report from the Yale Budget Lab estimates that the 2025 IRS layoffs will cost the nation $600 billion in lost revenues over 10 years—and the IRS budget cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill will add another $263 billion to the deficit. The combined losses total about what you’d need to restore the Medicaid funding that congressional Republicans, in passing that bill, took from America’s most desperate people.
On Joe Biden’s watch, the IRS was making progress on enforcement and collections, but that’s over now. And taxpayer services? Forget about it. Trump killed the agency’s free filing program on behalf of some billionaire software moguls. And my colleague Stephanie Mencimer recently wrote about the scorched wasteland that IRS customer service has become under Trump.
Good luck getting through.
Our humanity: Musk’s unsanctioned HR strategy was notable for its cruelty, not only for the hundreds of thousands of US workers whose lives and livelihoods were upended, but for the people they served. His abrupt destruction of the US Agency for International Development—which he’d vowed to feed through “a wood chipper”—has sown death and misery all over the globe. That’s not a great look for a once-admired nation.
“The cuts were done not on a glide path, as one would do if one had conducted a reasonable review of programming, but it was a cliff,” former USAID Administrator Samantha Power told PBS one year later. By that time, at least 800,000 deaths had been chalked up to Musk’s thoughtlessness, and the British medical journal The Lancet estimated 14 million people would die by 2030 if the programs DOGE destroyed weren’t resumed. The mindless way the cuts were done, Power noted, ensured “the most human harm possible.”
The world can now thank Musk for, among other things, the out-of-control Ebola outbreak now wracking the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
A semblance of privacy: To be fair, we lost our privacy ages ago to corporations like Lexis, Equifax, and Cambridge Analytica, but at least our government could be trusted to protect the confidential information it collected on citizens and others living here. Enter Elon Musk. In April 2025, Wired reported that DOGE, without authorization, was rapidly consolidating data from agencies including the IRS and the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as state voting records, into a massive Department of Homeland Security database. “The scale at which DOGE is seeking to interconnect data, including sensitive biometric data, has never been done before, raising alarms with experts who fear it may lead to disastrous privacy violations for citizens, certified foreign workers, and undocumented immigrants,” the article noted. And this “has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending,” a senior DHS official told Wired.
It also goes well beyond the administration’s efforts to track down and deport undocumented immigrants. As Wired reported separately in January, a Department of Justice court filing indicated DOGE may have shared SSA data with an outside group that seeks to “overturn election results in certain states.”
“What I want people to be scared of,” Jonathan Kamens, a former government cybersecurity expert, told NPR, is “that this data that the government has on them, which in some cases can be used to damage them, will be used to damage them.”
Leadership in science: A friend who runs a life-science lab at UC Berkeley told me that he’d recently lost a third of his grant money and now would have to lay someone off. He studies RNA-protein complexes, which have nothing to do with DEI. No matter. Musk and Trump’s freezing, slashing, and bottlenecking of National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation funding for research labs all over America, and the gutting of federal staff responsible for ensuring grants are doled out smoothly, threatens to destroy one thing that really has made America great—our global leadership in science and innovation.
Who do you think built the foundation for all the big biomedical and tech innovations over the past three-quarters of a century? You and your loved ones likely owe your lives to the US government-funded development and distribution—now in jeopardy thanks to Trump and RFK Jr.—of vaccines for scourges like Covid, diphtheria, pertussis, polio, mumps, measles, rubella, and countless more. Our tax dollars have paid for the revolutionary development of CRISPR and mRNA vaccines; pioneering surgical treatments; and HIV and cancer therapies. Guess who sequenced the first human genome? Literally built the internet? Invented GPS? Funded the Google guys as they were developing their cute little search engine? Provided the fledgling EV industry with the subsidies and loans that Musk relied on for Tesla’s success?
And yet, after taxpayers helped him get rich, Musk set out to drive a stake through the heart of America’s innovation engine. Very classy, pal.
Educational opportunities: The funding delays and cancellations initiated by DOGE, and the ongoing attacks on higher education by the Trump administration and Congress, not to mention the immigration threats and denials of visas for international students, have resulted in painful cuts to undergraduate and graduate education across America. With grants throttled and funding uncertain, colleges have laid off faculty and staff; rescinded acceptances; and eliminated courses, graduate programs, and even entire departments. There’s “a whole generation of young scientists who see no pathway into the field for them,” a paleoecologist who’d stopped taking on new graduate students told the Guardian.
Now Trump wants to hand oversight of federal grants to his political appointees at the Office of Management and Budget, the same office whose chief, Russell Vought, vowed to put federal workers in “trauma” (and succeeded). The new plan faces fierce public opposition, and rightly so. Not that Trump gives a damn.
Safe food: Got cyclospora? I’m sorry. The FDA’s food inspection regimen was never 100 percent reliable. Produce coming across the border is spot-checked for disease-causing organisms, but that’s not foolproof, so occasional outbreaks of food-borne illness are inevitable. It’s what happens next that matters.
The public health response to the cyclospora outbreaks have been “confusing,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Minnesota Public Radio. Cyclospora is a tough parasite to track, Osterholm conceded, but “the cuts that have occurred in this administration, and some of it with DOGE itself, [have] really crippled us in terms of our ability to respond. I mean, the senior leadership in the laboratory science area at CDC and parasites were all let go, basically. We’ve had just a number of issues where there’s a shortage of public health workers, and so it has hindered this investigation. There’s absolutely no question about it.”
Another thing to pin on Musk: explosive diarrhea.
Consumer protection: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was a staunchly independent agency created by Congress and funded by the Federal Reserve to protect people against the kinds of deceptive corporate practices we saw from Wall Street in the lead-up to the Great Recession. The CFPB launched in 2011, and in its first 10 years secured about $14.4 billion in relief and $1.7 billion in civil penalties for millions of American families. It still would be protecting them were it not for DOGE. By June 2025, according to the public interest group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Musk’s minions had ensured the loss of nearly 1,500 CFPB employees and “effectively shuttered an agency which returned over $26 billion to the American people…but only cost taxpayers a fraction of that amount to run.”
Some additional realms in which the DOGE cuts have cost us dearly:
- Clean air and water protections
- Government oversight
- Upkeep and protection of national parks
- Local public safety
- Disaster preparedness and response
- Health and pandemic response
- Reliability of federal data
- Veterans health care
- A functional Social Security system
I’ll bet you can come up with 20 more.
The point is, talking about “savings” from DOGE is like talking about savings from not paying your mortgage, ignoring the part where the bank comes and takes your home. Such is the subterfuge we’re dealing with.
Breaking things is disastrously easy. Building them is hard. Elon Musk pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall. Piecing him back together, if even possible, will take decades, concerted effort, and enormous sums of money—money that will now be in short supply thanks to Trump and his enablers.
