June 03, 2025 12:25 PM UTC

D'Oh-GE! Elon Musk Ended Up COSTING America More than Money

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• by: Colorado Pols

Billionaire meddler Elon Musk officially left his ambiguous role in the Trump administration on Friday, leaving a legacy of disaster and reams of new red tape in his wake.

As The Washington Post explains:

…layers of new red tape are plaguing federal staffers throughout the government under the second Trump administration, stymieing work and delaying simple transactions, according to interviews with more than three dozen federal workers across 19 agencies and records obtained by The Washington Post. Many of the new hurdles, federal workers said, stem from changes imposed by the U.S. DOGE Service, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, which burst into government promising to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse and trim staff and spending.

The team’s overarching goal was in its name: DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, although it is not part of the Cabinet. But as Musk departed government on Friday, many federal workers said DOGE has in many ways had the opposite effect. [Pols emphasis]

DOGE’s intense scrutiny of federal spending is forcing employees to spend hours justifying even the most basic purchases. New rules mandating review and approval by political appointees are leaving thousands of contracts and projects on ice for months. Large-scale firings spearheaded by DOGE have cut support offices — especially IT shops — that assisted federal workers with issues ranging from glitching computers to broken desk chairs. And the piecemeal reassignment of staff is causing significant lags in work in some agencies, notably Social Security, as inexperienced workers adjust to new roles.

Meanwhile, most everyone, across every agency, is dealing with fallout from new policies or executive orders — even as colleagues continue to resign or retire, increasing the workload for those who remain.

“Leadership is overcome with meetings and questions from people on how this will all work. The Human Resource teams have conflicting information, and confusion reigns,” said one Defense Department employee who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. Every day, he said, it feels like “each person still standing is battling a dozen fires.”

During the 2024 campaign, Musk boasted that — with Donald Trump’s authority — he could easily cut $2 trillion from an annual federal budget of of $7 trillion. Musk later revised that expectation down to $1 million. The final numbers were more in the range of $160 billion. If you’re doing the math at home, Musk oversold his cost-cutting ability by…well, by a lot. And that’s only if you don’t consider how much all of this mindless cutting could end up costing the federal government.

By at least one account, Musk’s DOGE experiment will likely COST American taxpayers $135 billion in the current fiscal year alone. As CBS News explained in late April:

The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce.

PSP’s estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE’s actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn’t include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE’s actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS.

This $135 billion includes deferred resignation payments for federal employees; the cost of rehiring employees who were mistakenly fired; and the estimated loss of productivity resulting from the firings and hirings and the new red tape stuck to every federal agency. It’s not clear if this study also includes the loss of revenue from massive cuts to the IRS and National Forest Service (National Parks generate significant amounts of money from tourism).

The loss of productivity will only get worse as well. Purchase orders that once took 15 minutes to complete now waste two hours of an administrator’s time. The simple process of hiring a vendor (say, catering) that once took the better part of a day now takes more than a week to conclude.

As The Washington Post continues:

Many federal employees said they supported closer inspections of how the government spends money. But in practice, they said, the Trump administration’s chokehold is tangling up basic, everyday tasks.

The results seem to run counter to the goal of efficiency.

While DOGE seems to have failed at its most basic task, the Trump administration has succeeded (if that is the correct word) in royally screwing up a host of other critical government programs. The Associated Press ran a detailed story over the weekend outlining the damage that DOGE has done — both to this country and the world:

Americans are losing a vast array of people and programs dedicated to keeping them healthy. Gone are specialists who were confronting a measles outbreak in Ohio, workers who drove a van to schools in North Carolina to offer vaccinations and a program that provided free tests to sick people in Tennessee.

State and local health departments responsible for invisible but critical work such as inspecting restaurants, monitoring wastewater for new and harmful germs, responding to outbreaks before they get too big — and a host of other tasks to protect both individuals and communities — are being hollowed out…

…The Trump administration is cutting health spending on an unprecedented scale, experts say, including pulling $11 billion of direct federal support because the pandemic is over and eliminating 20,000 jobs at national health agencies that in part assist and support local public health work. It’s proposing billions more be slashed.

Together, public health leaders said, the cuts are reducing the entire system to a shadow of what it once was, threatening to undermine even routine work at a time when the nation faces the deadliest measles outbreak since at least the 1990s, rising whooping cough cases and the risk that bird flu could spread widely among people. [Pols emphasis]

The moves reflect a shift that Americans may not fully realize, away from the very idea of public health: doing the work that no individual can do alone to safeguard the population as a whole. That’s one of the most critical responsibilities of government, notes James Williams, county executive in Santa Clara County, California. And it goes beyond having police and fire departments.

It should go without saying that the costs of dealing with a public health epidemic are significantly more than what it would cost to prevent that epidemic in the first place.

In March, the Trump administration pulled $11 billion from state and local health departments without warning under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist and public health critic. The cuts abruptly ended COVID-era grants, which had also been approved for non-COVID work including vaccination and disease detection, tracking and testing.

A week later, thousands of people were laid off at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many had worked closely with state and local health departments to provide information, grants and other support.

The sudden, one-two punch delivered a serious blow to the system, public health leaders said in interviews, court filings and public testimony…

…HHS justified the grant cancellations by saying the money was for COVID and the pandemic is over. But most of the cuts were in areas that are especially important given today’s health threats. The biggest chunk, more than $8.9 billion, involved epidemiology and laboratory capacity related to infectious diseases, while another $2 billion was related to immunizations. In some places, the cuts are on hold due to a federal judge’s order in a lawsuit by states. But elsewhere, cuts are continuing.

The cost of cutting federal government services is only expected to rise, particularly if Trump’s “big, beautiful” bullshit budget bill makes it through the Senate with significant cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits left intact. As we noted on Monday, Colorado is bracing for what could be an additional $300 million in expenses to help make sure working families have enough to eat — money that the state doesn’t have. Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers in the state legislature talked eagerly about creating their own version of DOGE for Colorado; thankfully, they are hopelessly removed from majority control at the moment, or Colorado could be in even worse trouble.

The Trump administration is now preparing to ask Congress to codify the DOGE cuts, which would turn a temporary debacle into a long-term disaster.

You can argue, we suppose, about whether or not DOGE was a good idea…but it didn’t work. Any theoretical “savings” that came from DOGE will be offset by new costs and ridiculous, time-wasting red tape. Republicans would be smart to just let the DOGE experiment die from lack of oxygen. Unfortunately, the GOP likes nothing more than doubling down on terrible ideas.