DOGE promised trillions in savings and delivered billions in waste instead
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 the head of the federal HR office says 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. Senate Democrats’ investigators found DOGE generated at least $21.7 billion in waste in its first six months. 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 severance and paid administrative leave for more than 100,000 people pushed out - including thousands of fired probationary workers who were ordered back, then put on extended paid vacation while agencies figured out what to do with them.
The Partnership for Public Service estimated that the total cost of this chaos - productivity losses, paid leave, firing and rehiring mistakes - could hit $135 billion this fiscal year. And the chaos behind that number wasn’t 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.
Back in March, three people told the Washington Post that Treasury and IRS officials were bracing for a 10% drop in tax receipts by the April deadline - more than $500 billion - as the IRS got gutted. That’s not a typo. The IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. Treasury called that report “sensational and baseless,” and receipts ended the fiscal year up, not down. Gutting the agency’s auditors meant wealthy taxpayers started gambling that nobody would check their returns. Yale Budget Lab estimates that cutting the IRS workforce in half would cost about $350 billion in lost revenue over the next decade and around $560 billion the decade after, 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 - $214 billion, according to their own website - could be dwarfed by the tax revenue a gutted IRS stops collecting.
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 when the administration tried to cut $4 billion from medical research, one watchdog figured it could cost roughly $10 billion in economic activity and 44,000 jobs a year. That cut was put on hold within days after 22 states sued.
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 an April memo from the same investigators who documented the waste.
While everyone watched Musk wave a chainsaw at CPAC, the deficit barely moved - fiscal 2025 still ended $1.78 trillion in the red, only about $41 billion better than the year before. Government spending increased by about $275 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 at the end of May when his 130-day stint ran out, and by June he was feuding with Trump over the Big Beautiful Bill. 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.
SOURCES
https://time.com/7336327/doge-disbanded-elon-musk
https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/07/31/2025/the-217-billion-blunder-new-psi-report-reveals-billions-in-taxpayer-dollars-squandered-by-doge
https://fortune.com/article/doge-mass-federal-workforce-cuts-taxpayers-billions/
https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/doges-big-illusion-the-heavy-costs-of-the-trump-administrations-so-called-efficiency/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-cuts-cost-135-billion-analysis-elon-musk-department-of-government-efficiency/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/22/irs-tax-revenue-loss-federal-budget/
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/revenue-and-distributional-effects-irs-funding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Efficiency
Correction, September 28th, 2026: This essay first said the $6.1 billion went to people who were fired, hired back and put on leave - most of it was severance and paid leave for more than 100,000 people pushed out. It said Yale Budget Lab put the lost revenue from IRS cuts at $350 to $560 billion over the next decade - it’s about $350 billion over the next decade and $560 billion the decade after, if the IRS workforce were cut in half. It gave DOGE’s claimed savings as $205 billion - its website said $214 billion - and said they were dwarfed by taxes rich people avoided, which rests on projections that haven’t happened. It said DOGE’s $4 billion cut to medical research cost $10 billion and 44,000 jobs - that was one watchdog’s estimate if the cut went through, and it was put on hold within days. It said the deficit grew by $76 billion and spending rose $301 billion - those were early figures, and the final numbers show the deficit fell about $41 billion and spending rose about $275 billion. And it said Musk left in May after clashing with Trump - his 130-day stint ran out in May, and the feud came in June.
Update, September 28th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so - it’s the head of the federal HR office who says DOGE is dead, the $21.7 billion is Senate Democrats’ investigators’ count for its first six months, the $135 billion is the Partnership for Public Service’s estimate for the fiscal year, and the $2.37 billion comes from an April memo by the same investigators - and the 10% tax drop now reads as what it was, a private March projection Treasury called “sensational and baseless,” with receipts ending the year up.