By all measures, DOGE was a colossal failure. Far from making “at least $2 trillion in cuts,” federal spending increased in 2025. The only real cuts DOGE made was to USAID; American small businesses; scientific, cancer And Alzheimer’s research; and to programs devoted to civil rights and diversity – but these costs, while seriously damaging to many individual Americans and our country overall, were miniscule compared to the behemoth that is the federal budget.
All their cutting really achieved was to inspire over 200 lawsuits, most of which are still pending, challenging the needless pain DOGE inflicted – for everything from firing federal workers to the freezing of grants to the elimination of already funded programs.
Beyond the diminutive savings and the many ongoing lawsuits challenging the legality and actions of this destructive experiment, new cumbersome red tape (including hours spent justifying the cost of mundane but extremely important tasks like having the windows washed in air traffic control towers or demanding vendors swear a blood oath to never engage in evil DEI activities) created massive gridlock and delays.
Even though no real money was saved, within weeks of storming Washington, Elon had moved aggressively to disrupt U.S. agencies (Department of Defense, Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, Federal Aviation Administration, Internal Revenue Service, and Treasury Department) or dismantle them altogether (Department of Education, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Institutes of Health, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and, of course, USAID).
…and disrupt them he did, with consequences that are still being felt far and wide today. The Social Security Administration – the $15.4 billion agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans – is struggling. The website crashes, average hold times last hours, and the customer experience has plummeted as an exhausted workforce tries to keep up with 6 million unresolved cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions out in the field.
The IRS, which lost around 25 percent of its workforce, is fighting a substantial backlog of cases. The Environmental Protection Agency also lost around 25 percent of its workforce and had $28 billion in grants cancelled – a disheartening development for anyone who values clean air and water and protected federal lands.
The Agriculture Department lost 20,000 workers and is decimated to the point that farmers who need vital information about the grants they rely on can’t get anyone to answer the phone. This is distressing at a time when the agriculture industry is already in crisis thanks to the Trump/Vance administration’s aggressive immigration tactics and high tariffs. This has gotten so bad that Wes Gillingham, a farmer and the president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, told The New York Times that, “We’re just going to see a huge amount of farms going out of business this year because of the mayhem.”
To be sure, the most devastating long-term consequences the failed DOGE experiment inflicted will be felt in our federal workforce, where almost 249,000 highly experienced employees were forced out.
The U.S. government employs over 3 million civilians who work in hundreds of agencies. Around 4,000 of these are political appointees while the rest are nonpartisan people hired to do the tedious and often boring work of the government. Who did Donald & Co. think make sure our drinking water is safe? Who did they think tracks extreme weather? Who did they think calculates the Consumer Price Index? Who did they think cleans our parks or handles our air traffic control systems? Who did they think designs our spaceships and nuclear bombs?
Well, they found out real quick who does these things because most agencies – including the IRS, State Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Food and Drug and Social Security Administrations – scrambled from practically Day One to hire back many of the people that Elon fired.
This included the Department of Agriculture, which desperately tried to hire back bird flu response workers after an avian influenza outbreak, and the National Weather Service, which lost meteorologists, hydrologists, physical scientists and electronics technicians in the initial cuts – a mistake that became painfully evident when, shortly after, Americans lived through devastating wildfires in California; deadly flash floods in Texas; and tornados, hurricanes, and hail storms across the entire nation.
The way Elon Musk and the Trump/Vance administration treated these hard-working, dedicated Americans is outrageous. This “Deep State” b.s. is a highly insulting and sinister narrative that has gotten completely out of control.
This hateful rhetoric needs to stop right this second, and we ALL need to start appreciating lifelong federal employees for what they truly are: extraordinary Americans doing nothing more or less than the grinding, behind-the-scenes work of the American people. These hard-working Americans don’t deserve to be ridiculed and disrespected by rich guys trying to consolidate power.
….and don’t think for one second this unprecedented disrespect won’t have long-term effects. One employee who returned to the Food and Drug Administration summed it up to The Washington Post: “Being back feels like a funeral. Morale is terrible. Everyone is stressed and feels the absence of our colleagues. … I’m looking for another job.” Other people just didn’t go back at all. One former Department of Agriculture safety inspector said this when he was asked to return: “I was like, yep, nope, I’m not risking it again. I’m gonna try to take the money and try to find something else.”
It’s baffling that Elon Musk was ever chosen to lead this endeavor because one must look no further than what happened at Twitter, now X, after Elon bought the company in 2022 to understand that, while he may be a genius at some things, talented cost-cutter and management guru? Not so much.
After he made an offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion – using loans for a third of the amount, making the acquisition essentially a leveraged buyout – he tried, after weeks of high drama, to back out of the deal (he only went through with it when a Delaware judge forced his hand).
Immediately after taking the reins, he cut 80 percent of the staff, including many of the engineers who literally kept the site operating. He also decided he wouldn’t honor back pay for thousands of the employees he laid off, or the severance packages that he knew top executives were contractually entitled to – vacuous choices that resulted in multiple lawsuits (some still ongoing).
Elon also didn’t like that he had to pay rent for office space, so he just stopped paying it, resulting in lawsuits (and threatened lawsuits) in San Francisco, New York, Oakland, Columbia, and Boulder, among other cities.
Now, we imagine most prospective bosses would be concerned if not repelled by this prickish behavior, but Elon’s buddy Donald was likely super impressed because Lord knows he has also left plenty of people – including hard-working Americans who built his casinos – holding the bag through the years.
But by far the most perplexing thing Musk did after buying Twitter was sabotage the company’s relationships with its advertisers – an insane thing to do when advertising is your primary source of revenue. Elon & Co. has even sued some of them and, at one point, told them, from the stage of The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit no less, to “Go f^*k yourself.”
Surprising nobody but maybe Elon, this ridiculousness decimated X’s revenue. According to the investment firm Fidelity, X’s valuation dropped 79 percent from October 2022 to October 2024. It eventually dropped to a $9.4 billion overall valuation, a devastating nosedive from the $44 billion that Musk paid for the company. < That said, in March 2025, the value of X returned to the value Elon paid for it. This happened because investors valued X at $44 billion in a secondary deal, where they exchanged existing stakes in the company).
Meanwhile, from the day Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 to the end of that year, Tesla’s stock fell by half. Although Tesla’s stock rebounded by the end of 2024 – inching back closer to $400 for the first time since 2022, in part because Tesla was predicting vehicle delivery growth in 2024 – it was reported at the beginning of 2025 that the company’s sales had dropped for the first time in twelve years, sending the stock diving six percent. Tesla shares lost 44 percent of their value from December 2024 to the beginning of April 2025.
Then, Tesla lost an additional $152 billion in value – the largest hit to its market cap in its history – after the infamous Trump-Musk showdown in early June 2025, when President Trump threatened to pull government contracts from Elon’s companies.
In the months leading to the inevitable Clash of the Titans, it certainly didn’t help Tesla or X that Musk – who at a 2024 Trump campaign rally said, “I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark Gothic MAGA” – was extremely aggressive in his support of Donald Trump in the 2024 election, while consistently trashing Democrats.
Or that he threw what looked eerily like a Nazi salute at President Trump’s inauguration, twice. Elon denied that’s what he did, posting on X, “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is soo tired,” and many Americans – way too many, in our opinion – bought his b.s. denials. But Germans sure didn’t, with Tesla car sales in Germany nosediving 76 percent in February alone.
While all these are perfectly legal things to do in the United States of America, it may not be the smartest business move for an executive chairman of a social media company and a public company during the most divided election in modern U.S. history.
Tesla storefronts, charging stations, and vehicles became targets for violence, including AR-style semiautomatic weapons being fired at Tesla storefronts, and Molotov cocktails thrown through store windows and at Tesla vehicles.
Elon and his beloved X also faced an additional problem: Users leaving the platform in droves. X lost 2.7 million active users in the U.S. between October 2024 and December 2024 alone. Meanwhile, Bluesky – a social media platform founded in 2019 by the creators of Twitter and publicly launched in 2024 – gained 2.5 million users during that time, an increase of 1,064 percent. By the end of 2024, Bluesky had well over 26 million users and by July 2025, 35 million.
Why did this happen? Well, it appears that many people felt the discourse on X had become far too toxic and that misinformation on the site had gotten out of control… which it has.
Beyond the unfortunate choice of leadership, there are several other issues with DOGE, the least being that the whole venture was probably illegal. But I’m going to just leave those questions to the poor judges who are still trying to figure out this mess.
Another issue was the set-up of the Department of Government Efficiency itself. Don’t be fooled by the name. DOGE was not in any way a “department” of government, which must be established by Congress. In truth, on its own, this new entity had no real power at all.
Worse, Musk was never an elected official. He wasn’t confirmed for a cabinet-level job, didn’t have a presidential commission, or hadn’t even been appointed to a high-level position within the administration. He was nothing more than a private citizen who had evidently been designated a “special government employee” after, of course, he pitched the idea to Donald while contributing almost $300 million to help him win the presidency.
Not to mention that most of the original “agents” at DOGE were engineers from Elon’s companies who had little to no work experience, much less government experience, and ranged from 19 to 24-years-old. These kids essentially took over the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, and they had access to the Treasury Department’s payment system – meaning they had access to the sensitive information of most Americans, including Social Security numbers and bank account information.
In January 2026, the Trump/Vance administration admitted that members of the DOGE team accessed and shared sensitive Social Security data. Agency officials admitted that one employee signed a secret agreement with a political advocacy group that called for sharing Social Security data with the aim of overturning election results in certain states.
The next problem was that none of these guys seem to understand how the U.S. government operates because their “savings” targets were delusional – and literally unobtainable – from the start.
They never seemed to comprehend, for example, that there are two types of government spending: discretionary and mandatory.
Discretionary spending is authorized by Congress each year through the appropriations process, but mandatory spending basically runs on autopilot. Mandatory spending, or spending that is required by law, is handled through authorizing bills, allowing the government to fund all costs associated with programs like Social Security, military pensions, benefits for veterans, Medicaid and Medicare.
Because discretionary spending accounted for only 28 percent of the federal budget at the time – which means mandatory spending, plus interest payments on the debt (which alone totaled 13.1 percent of spending in FY2024), accounted for the other 72 percent – it was impossible for DOGE to come close to meeting its goal of making “at least $2 trillion in cuts” by slashing discretionary spending alone. Even if Elon had cut every penny of it, he couldn’t possibly hit his target.
This means that, if Elon was serious about his targets, things like Social Security and Medicare (together, 34.6 percent of the budget) and defense spending (12.9 percent) had to be part of the plan. He also had to break it to his buddy Trump that even if Social Security, Medicare, etc. were on the table, this still couldn’t happen if Republicans passed tax cuts that would add trillions to the national debt – which they did when they passed the One Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025.
The “savings” delusion didn’t stop there. For instance, even with their devious Schedule F workaround, reducing the federal workforce wasn’t going to make a significant dent in the federal budget anyway.
Excluding military personnel, the U.S. government was spending just over $300 billion a year on salary/benefits for federal employees. This equaled only around 4 percent of the federal budget. So even if he cut a quarter of these workers, that’s only a 1 percent reduction. < That said, no one in the Trump/Vance administration probably cared about the money that would or would not be saved here, because the Schedule F scheme was really created to replace the “Deep State” with Trump loyalists – but that’s an issue for another day. >
This reality eventually started to dawn on Elon because, naturally, he started to lie about what DOGE was achieving. Within weeks, Elon announced that DOGE had already saved $55 billion through actions like layoffs, canceled contracts, and the renegotiation of leases.
Problem was, most of the “canceled” contracts were ones that were already completed and most of the leases were set to expire anyway. Analysis by the Associated Press found that almost 40 percent of these contracts weren’t expected to save the government any money in the first place. The New York Times reported that, in DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, the thirteen largest were wrong.
Elon also included blanket purchase agreements (BPAs) in the contract number. This was illogical because BPAs are agreements that can be used if the government needs to buy anything in the future. In other words, no money had been spent yet. But, assigning each of these agreements a random dollar amount gave Elon & Co. a chance to give the false impression of more government spending.
Realizing people were getting wise to their shady tactics, DOGE finally stopped posting any information on its website to support its claims – even though Elon had promised to post solid details to be “maximally transparent.” The New York Times was initially able to get around this because identifying information had been embedded in the group’s source code, but the guys at DOGE changed that as well.
In the end, a Politico analysis of DOGE data showed that Elon’s contract termination scheme saved America less than 5 percent of what he said it did. Plus, the little money that was saved was simply returned to the agencies originally authorized by Congress to spend it. Meaning, not a dime of it went to lowering the deficit – even though Elon and President Trump said otherwise (many, many times).
Yet another major issue was the massive conflicts of interest that existed surrounding Elon Musk and his work at DOGE. The conflicts were epic, and the fact that this was ever tolerated is a flaming red flag that should cause us all to be seriously concerned about the level of corruption in this administration (more on this later).
Elon’s company SpaceX is regulated by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In September 2024, SpaceX was fined over $600,000 by the agency for not following license requirements for two rocket launches. But on February 5th, Elon and the U.S. Department of Transportation announced that Elon had access to FAA technologies to make “rapid safety upgrades.” Ummm…what?
Then, the FAA abruptly put a $2.4 billion Verizon contract to upgrade its air traffic control communications systems under review – reportedly so that the FAA could cancel it to … wait for it… give the business to Starlink, another Elon company. SpaceX employees were promptly issued conflict-of-interest waivers to be able to review FAA technology “on behalf of the United States.” Several of these SpaceX employees even had a FAA email address. Ummm…what?
Of the FAA’s potential shift from Verizon to Starlink, Elon said on X, “The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk.” Right. Of course it is, buddy. < In July 2025, the FAA told lawmakers they were no longer considering replacing the Verizon existing contracts with Starlink. >
Elon also had it in for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that investigated complaints about Tesla’s debt collection and loan policies. In fact, Tesla, SpaceX, and four other businesses Elon controls had been investigated and/or fined 32 different times by eleven different federal agencies, including the Office of Government Ethics and the Securities and Exchange Commission, who he publicly called “bastards.”
Then there were the government contracts. A February 2025 analysis by The Washington Post found that Elon and his companies had received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits over the past twenty years. Almost two-thirds of that money was secured in just the previous five years (at least $6.3 billion was committed in 2024 alone). Fifty-two contracts with seven government agencies were ongoing, which were set to pay Musk & Co. $11.8 billion more over time.
And that’s just the deals that were public. SpaceX is building spy satellites for the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office, a contract estimated to be worth $1.8 billion.
Think about what this means. All of Elon’s successes – all his creating, pioneering, achieving, and money minting – were made possible, not only by migrating from South Africa to a country that is stable and where the rule of law is sound, but through that country’s federal subsidies, loans and contracts. And while he was gobbling up all the favors, money and power he could, he was doing everything possible to burn down the pathways for everyone else. We have news for you, Elon. That’s just not how we do things here.