In case you were wondering how much DOGE actually saved the US, here is the summary: it didn't save anything but cost us quite a bit:
--Kim
Remember DOGE? You're gonna love this update! 
You probably heard that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency was going to save us $2 trillion. Then it was $1 trillion. Then $150 billion. What you might not have heard is that it's already dead - eight months before its charter was supposed to end - and the actual numbers tell a very different story.
OPM Director Scott Kupor confirmed it to Reuters this week: "That doesn't exist." DOGE is no longer a "centralized entity."
The chainsaw-wielding chaos that dominated headlines since January has quietly been absorbed into the Office of Personnel Management. No fanfare. No victory lap. Just a quiet admission that the whole thing fell apart.
Here's what the receipts actually show. A Senate investigation found DOGE generated $21.7 billion in waste. Not savings. Waste. The bulk of that - $14.8 billion - went to paying approximately 200,000 federal employees not to work for up to eight months through the Deferred Resignation Program.
Another $6.1 billion covered the costs of involuntary separations and administrative leave for people who were fired, then hired back, then put on extended paid vacation while agencies figured out what to do with them.
The Partnership for Public Service calculated that the total cost of this chaos - productivity losses, paid leave, firing and rehiring mistakes - hit $135 billion. That's not a hypothetical. That's what happened when you fire nuclear safety experts, then scramble to bring them back. When you lay off bird flu researchers in the middle of an outbreak, then realize you actually needed them.
But wait. It gets worse.
Treasury Department and IRS officials projected that DOGE-driven workforce cuts would cause a 10% drop in tax revenue - more than $500 billion in lost collections for this year alone. That's not a typo. The IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. Gutting the agency's auditors meant wealthy taxpayers started gambling that nobody would check their returns. Yale Budget Lab estimates the long-term impact of these cuts at $350 to $560 billion in lost revenue over the next decade, because every dollar spent on IRS enforcement returns multiple dollars in collected taxes.
The whole project was a lesson in absurdity. DOGE's entire claimed savings - $205 billion, according to their own website - is dwarfed by the tax revenue they helped rich people avoid paying.
And then there's the return on investment that got destroyed.
The CFPB had recovered $21 billion for taxpayers through enforcement actions before DOGE went after it. NIH research funding generates about $2.50 in economic activity for every dollar spent - and DOGE cut $4 billion from medical research, translating to roughly $10 billion in lost economic activity and 44,000 jobs.
We all should know by now that the whole setup was never about efficiency. It was a billionaire with regulatory problems getting unprecedented access to the agencies investigating his companies, then breaking them. Musk's enterprises stood to benefit from at least $2.37 billion in avoided liability from federal investigations that DOGE disrupted. That's according to the same Senate investigation that documented the waste.
While everyone watched Musk wave a chainsaw at CPAC, the actual federal deficit grew by $76 billion compared to the same period last year. Government spending increased by $301 billion in fiscal year 2025. None of the supposed savings materialized in Treasury data.
The man who promised to delete $2 trillion from the budget couldn't even stick around for his own project's expiration date. He left in May after clashing with Trump over legislation. The initiative he championed as "the chainsaw for bureaucracy" managed to cost more than it saved, break things that worked, and quietly dissolve before anyone could hold it accountable.
If you're wondering who actually benefited from ten months of federal chaos, look at who's no longer being audited.
I've said this before and I will say it again - we have the money to take care of almost every hardship of the American people, it's not a financial issue - it's a people in charge issue. They would rather burn the whole thing to the ground before actually helping anyone but themselves.
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