We’re still learning the damage Musk and DOGE wrought

Elon Musk’s five-month tenure in the Trump administration provided the country a funhouse mirror version of technocratic governing. Here was a supposed expert in efficiency, a genius brought into to make the fixes politicians couldn’t. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency that he may or may not have led promised to slash $2 trillion in wasteful spending from the United States budget. According to its own “Wall of Receipts” website, it cut at most $215 billion, or about 11% of that initial projection.

DOGE’s failure at its task is about all we know about it. A new report from the Government Accountability Office explains that the quasi-agency vastly exaggerated the savings it produced.  Some of the claimed cuts are impossible to verify. Despite promising transparency and a data-driven mindset, DOGE was a jumbled mess, and we’re left with little understanding of what it did or didn’t do. Indeed, a month after it officially shuttered, we’re still struggling to figure out exactly how much harm was caused by Musk and his similarly unqualified wrecking crew.

We’ve known for months there were major issues with the numbers DOGE released. GAO’s report homed in on roughly $110 billion of the savings DOGE claimed in canceled contracts, grants and leases, but investigators couldn’t assess how much money was actually saved.

As the GAO noted, 108 of the 264 leases posted on DOGE’s website were “were already in process for termination when DOGE was established.” Missing data prevented the GAO from identifying roughly one in every five grants DOGE said were canceled, which “accounted for more than 50% of the reported grant savings.” Nor could investigators piece together which contracts were eliminated, given that roughly 60% of the savings DOGE posted didn’t follow DOGE’s own methodology.

Such carelessness was most evident in the hasty shuttering of  the U.S. Agency for International Development. The GAO report’s authors report that they “met with the Department of State to discuss USAID contracts and grants and were informed that the Department of State does not have access to information on terminated contracts and grants included in USAID legacy systems.”