Tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force was originally promised to find $2 trillion in savings to the taxpayers — a figure swiftly revised to $1 trillion, and then more recently to a far more modest $150 billion. The problem, wrote Zeeshan Aleem for MSNBC, is that we're now getting to savings so low they don't even offset the extra money DOGE is costing the government with its own blunders and dysfunction.
This follows a New York Times report which reveals just how expensive DOGE's operations, and changes to the government, have been to taxpayers: "The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity, and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University."
All of this adds up to around $145 billion in costs, pretty much what DOGE is promising to save in the first place, Aleem wrote — and this is before even factoring in all the legal fees the Justice Department will have to pay defending DOGE's controversial decisions as they are challenged in court.
These numbers, Aleem continued, "raise serious questions about DOGE's net savings — and that’s assuming Musk’s quoted savings numbers are reliable" — and already DOGE has repeatedly had to revise its "wall of receipts" as reporters uncover serious errors and misrepresentations in their claimed savings from canceling various contracts.
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Additionally, "the estimated lost revenue from the IRS cuts would be a recurring phenomenon. Musk’s degrading of the administrative state and social services while potentially saving nothing helps underscore how scammy the DOGE enterprise, and sheds light on how this whole operation is at its core not about fiscal discipline," Aleem noted.
Despite this, Musk himself may still stand to benefit personally from the dismantling of the civil service; a report in February revealed some of the regulators Musk fired were the same ones in charge of overseeing his brain implant company.
"As an adversary of organized labor, [Musk] may have been surprised to find that it’s a bit harder to treat government workers as entirely dispensable. And as someone who has flippantly described the government as nothing more than a corporation, he may have been forced to think twice about the unique logistical, social and ethical obligations and challenges of running a state," Aleem concluded. "If his own conscience and the courts didn’t do that for him, maybe the apparent backlash against Tesla will."
