For instance, $3 billion saved from cancelling "Increasing Community Access to Testing, Treatment and Response (ICATT). The ICATT program provides access to no-cost COVID-19 testing in U.S. communities to people that are uninsured and no-cost COVID-19 vaccines to people that are underinsured and uninsured."
That is shortsighted, evil, inefficient (better to keep pandemics from not happening), and idiotic to cancel.
Again, anyone supporting DOGE is not a serious thinker or actually cares about what is "waste"
You realize that website has become a national laughing stock because they keep making multibillion dollar errors?
[edit] to explain further - there were lots of different errors, but a big one is that many contracts have high max values because they can't always predict how much they'll need to spend over ten years but they want a contract in place in case they need to spend money quickly (say for spare parts). So in many cases the number DOGE says they cut was just a placeholder, not an actual reflection of money that was ever going to be spent. So if you have a contract for spare parts for MRI machines for VA hospitals with a max value of, say, $1B over ten years, but you actually spend $100M over ten years, then DOGE will say they saved $1B, when actually they will have only saved $100M. That does not include the downstream effects of not having a contract for spare parts for MRI machines. If the MRI machines have more downtime, then the VA has to spend more money sending patients elsewhere, but DOGE has no way to account for that in their wall of receipts.
Junk food can be cheaper than healthy food, it's not good to save on money now at the cost of spending thousands on medical care and insulin in the future.
Or to paraphrase Terry Pratchett: "boots at $10 dollars that last a month are more expensive than $50 dollar boots that last a year" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
It's the difference between being cheap and being frugal...
There's also the allegation that Elon's Doge cuts were to prevent various agencies from pursuing legal action against him.
If we as a society choose to stop investing in ourselves, we'll have bad outcomes in the end.
Those "savings", if they are correct (serious doubts have been raised about that) looks to me like a set of short-term gains for long-term pains.
It's like if I stop commuting by car to work every day and rent a helicopter. I'm going to save a ton of money by selling the car and not buying gasoline. Of course I spent a ton of money with the helicopter method but we're not going to list _new_ expenses on the website are we?
Spending massively more than you make is just fine, until the repo man shows up.
Tax enforcement is a trivial and almost immediate example. Spending $X on compliance seems to recover about $5X in evaded taxes. On top of that, there are knock-on effects: if it becomes easier to cheat on your taxes, more people may cheat.
Vaccines and other forms of preventative healthcare fall into this bucket too. Even completely ignoring the moral aspect of letting people (mostly kids!) fall unnecessarily ill, it often makes economic sense to pay a little bit to avoid having to potentially pay much more down the road. One ER visit can cover a lot of flu or COVID vaccines; a few nights in the ICU even more.
Research grants are maybe less obvious, but they have a huge multiplier too: the human genome project had something like a $120x return(!). This is not just big breakthroughs, but also all the work along the way. A lot of grant money goes to training people or supports small businesses making their equipment. I saw an interesting article claiming that the Air Force essentially bootstrapped the use of more exotic materials: military contracts covered the initial investment in (e.g.,) machinery for working with titanium, and once those fixed costs are covered, it was feasible to dip a toe into the consumer space and see if there's demand. Thus, titanium golf drivers.
[1] https://www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/annual-economic-rep...
There are many documented instances of DOGE cutting things that they later realized were needed -- leading to unnecessary switching costs and other consequential costs.
Second: deferring costs in the short term are often a bad choice that can cause higher costs over the long term.
Third: some cuts can exchange monetary costs for non-monetary costs. These will make a number look good but can cause impacts that are bad.
For these savings to be good, they need to be good for everyone. And that's not clear.
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'
As a thought experiment ad absurdum, we can save 100% of the cost of government by shutting down the entire government.
... but then what happens next? This trivial exercise demonstrates how on-the-surface positive metrics can hide costs that either aren't being tracked at all or aren't tracked here.
On this topic: some fascinating research recently out of Yale https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-reveals-stark-diffe... investigated the known discrepancy in life expectancy in the American South vs. other states. Their conclusion is that likeliest cause is weather. The reason it didn't show up is that metrics weren't tracking the secondary effects of a region being smashed by one or two hurricanes a year; immediate death tolls are in the low dozens and wouldn't move the needle, but the shared cost of infrastructure rebuilding puts local and state governments perpetually in a reactionary mode, which means they set up welfare programs that they can never fund. It's those on-paper-existing but perpetually-emergency-drained programs that are likely accounting for the difference in life expectancy; it's not about dying in a hurricane, it's about a mother three years down the line losing her newborn to preventable illness that wasn't caught in time because she can't afford pediatric care and her county doesn't have enough money to subsidize it, they're too busy rebuilding all the bridges that got torn in half by floodwaters before that newborn was even conceived.
Also, the savings are pretty minor overall. If we trust the website, we get $1.3k saved per taxpayer. The vast majority of the programs cut would have to be completely useless for me to think it is worth it to save $1.3k.
Cost versus value. E.g, what kind of soft power did the US lose when they shredded USAID?
What kinds of medical research will not be done because of cuts to NIH:
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-layoffs-budget-cuts-medical...
What kind of tax revenue will be lost because the IRS is even more short-staffed and cannot investigate fraud:
* https://apnews.com/article/irs-doge-layoffs-tax-season-0659e...
For a comparison of DOGE's falsifiable/verifiable claims and reality see:
* https://www.slowboring.com/p/yes-doge-failed-and-it-matters
But there is no perfect solution. There always will be a maniac doing stupid shit because their personal benefit is more valuable for them than the greater good of everyone else. We are now in such a phase again, where all kind of maniacs have become loose, wasting societies for fun and giggles... We will have what we will make of it.
Add to that that most of the things cut, for example weather forecasting, has returns to the economy of several times what is spent on it, and the damage to the economy is much larger than any savings.
DOGE has prominently trading long-term-benefits for short-term-gains. Some are already showing today, but many will show their harm in years and decades, too late to fix it, and when it will cost significant more to handle them.
i.e. doge says they saved some insane amount of money for some program, but most importantly, for many cases:
- most of the money have been paid already, so almost nothing is saved (imagine 5 year program for 10B, but 4 years have passed, 8B has been paid and now it will not be finished);
- program brings more business than it costs;
- or both;
It grinds my gears when musk, trump and the like bring their “run government as a business” attitude. Government is a “meta-business”.
It takes care of things that businesses won’t. Roads, trains, growing and educating new generation of workers and businessmen, army, etc.
thiel’s technofascist libertarian dystopian city states will crumble from lack of infrastructure or if not - more powerful states (China?) will eat them up one by one.
To decide if it's a good thing you need to see if stopping the spending benefits BOTH parties.
How are you unaware of the multiple controversies about the basic factual nature of the claimed numbers. Never mind the lack of any viable strategy.
The fact is that DOGE made cuts to NHTSA. It is also a fact that DOGE made cuts to a bunch of agencies, not just ones related to something Elon was doing.
There isn’t even any evidence that DOGE was more aggressive about cutting things related to Elon vs other government waste.
Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government. The opinion is that the reason is to cut people specifically going after Elon.
And to be clear I gave no opinion on what Elon did or didn’t do. My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious.
What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
NHTSA, CFPB, DoT (FAA), DoE
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/21/musk-doge...
We have fiscal issues, clearly, and they thought they were doing good work, but it was an absolute failure and many of the issues still remain, and were exacerbated by what DOGE did.
That’s what C- brains bring to a project.
Everyone left and right instinctively knows this is, that it's a problem that they're both taxed directly for and (I hope) many people know they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime.
Don't worry – unless we stop giving out tax cuts as well, we'll still be running deficits until Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. For the average taxpayer, it's about fiscal sustainability - "smaller government" may as well be a feel-good abstraction compared to that.
I believe that is the reason why DOGE was supported by Trump, but I do think something like DOGE is needed but perhaps for better and less egotistical reasons.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
The number of federal government employees has also remained mostly flat for the past 50 years (and IIRC most growth in overall public sector employment comes from schools).
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
Reference: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...
People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
On what timeline? The week of the first round of RIFs? The first month?
I assure you, as someone who works with in the space where DOGE has played, it will NOT be a reduction in costs in the long run. In fact, costs will go up because of the indiscriminate nature of "cost reduction". When the only people with knowledge of a system are removed, the remaining people cannot run it - no matter what AI they are given. At that point, you have to either hire back the people you fired, with a serious delay of important work, or you stumble for years until it can be figured out at the cost of delays, protests, lawsuits, whatever.
Considering firing everyone a reduction in costs is a shallow, short-term view.
That’s the first sign that a large group of people are going to something thoughtless and destructive.
Looking around at actual data from both gov and think tank sources, this quote from Pew is a good summary: “While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years.”
But that’s not the whole story. The postal service is shrinking, the vast majority of those federal employees work for the VA, the amount of funding being directed by the federal employees has grown (because of budget growth), federal regulations touch more private sector activity than in the past, and state and local governments employ significantly more people than they used to.
DOGE’s focus on headcount was wrongheaded because the number of federal employees is not the problem. The problem is Congress (budgets and laws) and states.
Conventional wisdom is that federal payroll growth is massive, and that is just wrong.
mlinhares•1h ago
tines•1h ago
foogazi•1h ago
I see hollowing out of institutions but no one is building anything