DOGE has published a "Wall of Receipts" claiming to have saved taxpayers $55 billion. The New York Times isn't buying it:
The math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.... Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted.
The Times is reluctant to estimate how much DOGE is actually saving, but I'll take a crack at it. A blogger's crack, that is, meaning it's the roughest possible horseback guess and not to be taken too seriously.
Contracts: The Times figures that contracts amount to 20% of the DOGE total, but when you account for all the mistakes it probably comes to 10%, or about $5.5 billion.
Lease cancellations: DOGE says this amounts to roughly $100 million. Let's take them at their word.
Staff cuts. The AP estimates DOGE has cut about 300,000 employees, which amounts to 3% of all federal workers. However, many of these took buyouts and most of the rest are probationary, which makes it hard to even estimate savings. But I'm going to anyway: $5 billion for the former and $11.5 billion for the latter, coming to a total of $16.5 billion
GRAND TOTAL: $22.1 billion.
So there you have it. My best guess is that DOGE has saved about $22 billion, almost all of it from firing federal workers. If this is close to accurate, it comes to 0.33% of the total federal budget. You may decide if this is a lot or a little.
"You may decide if this is a lot or a little."
I bet it is a little saving at a lot of cost.
Yeah, this. The harm caused far outweighs the costs. The additional delays and uncertainty from blowing up government operations is going to add a fuckload of additional costs into the economy, nevermind the direct impact on quality of life. That's going to cost way more than like 20 bil.
The directly reduced employment and uncertainty will just multiply unemployment.
Its like saving money by not changing the oil in your car, or going to a Third World clinic rather than Johns Hopkins.
You can really save money on the flight crew if you fire the pilot and copilot.
I've got to imagine this will run like most conultent led superficial cost cutting projects.
1) Wrack up a bunch of misleading cost savings to accomplish the project and promote as a wizard (or genius) of industry.
2) Bask in the adulation of others (this was the point) and give yourself a big bonus (this was the other point).
3) Quickly rehire people & restart canceled initiatives under different names.
Lots of disruption, destruction of value and miserable people. Rinse and repeat.
That's pretty optimistic, thinking that this regime will rehire any of the folks in the:
IRS
NPS
CFPB
USAID
HUD
FDA
CDC
NOAA/NWS
NASA
etc.
Since the firings on non probationary personnel were blatantly illegal, the courts will force them to be rehired with back pay. And they have already rehired many of the people they claimed to have fired on the basis that the government can't live without them. Firing all of the people answering IRS help lines will create enough public outcry from small business owners that they will be rehired as well. The republicans can't live without the small business owner community.
Some of the old school Club-for-Growth types slinking around the West Wing might pine for large cuts, but Elon and the other radicals running the show (Vought, Miller, etc) don't really give a rat's posterior about the actual size of the budget. Hell, one Steve Bannon has already warned the regime against Medicaid cuts. Musk just wants the power of the Deep State* brought to heel. Which basically means breaking it.
*What the MAGA true believers call the Deep State, of course, normal people call "the government."
So, yeah, this isn't really about fiscal concerns. Trump himself, God bless him, might have some vague notion (because that's what's he's been told) that firing enough bureaucrats will free up money for tax cuts to please the base. But that's because he's got about as much knowledge of public policy as a slime mold. Meaningful shrinkage can only be accomplished by cutting retirement and healthcare programs.
These people are radical, deeply undemocratic, utopian revolutionaries, and for them this is all about breaking US state capacity—in essence destroying the government as we know it. it has nothing to do with the deficit.
"Meaningful shrinkage can only be accomplished by cutting retirement and healthcare programs *and the defense budget*."
FIFY
People say that, but I don't see how the numbers pencil out. We're spending about 3% of GDP on the military. According to Paul Krugman, that's roughly the amount needed to stabilize our debt to GDP ratio and begin nudging it downwards. Even slashing the defense budget by fully half (a frankly unimaginable scenario) would still leave us with something like a half trillion more in cuts just to get us to that "stabilization" point. And even at that we'd still be borrowing nearly a trillion annually.
Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security by contrast are a combined $3 trillion item. As Krugman says, the government is a very big insurance company with a sideline in national defense.
If you want to seriously reduce the deficit by budget cuts, safety net programs are where the main action has got to be. Everything else is BS. And of course, knowledgeable people realize we don't need cuts in any event: America's public sector is quite small by rich world standards. What we actually need isn't cuts but more federal revenue.
(And yes, for the record I don't favor significant cuts to the US federal budget; rather, I'd like to see us spending significantly more to meet a variety of priorities.)
Social Security pays for itself and is budgeted separately. It is dishonest to include Social Security as part of the general fund budget. If you remove Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the military is a much larger fraction of the total federal budget.
Also, the figure you quote is military spending as a fraction of GDP. Well, the US national debt as a fraction of US GDP is far less than Japan's debt/GDP ratio and their economy is fine. So why do we need budget cuts?
Social Security pays for itself, but the general fund has been borrowing from it since the 80's and owes it a big pile of money, and it's about time now to start paying it back, or it won't have the cash to meet SS obligations.
And not paying it back has been the goal of Republicans since about 2000.
The Trust Fund is already being drawn down, as boomers retire. As the Trust Fund redeems Special Issue securities the Treasury either pays out from revenues or rolls the debt over into securities sold to investors on the open market. And yes, the Republicans have been trying to sow doubt about the Special Issue Treasuries since the Reagan years, implying that somehow they are different from the bonds sold to investment firms and wealthy individuals. Because sowing mistrust in government is central to the brand, and because SS benefits are only crucial for the middle and lower quantiles.
It is dishonest to include Social Security as part of the general fund budget.
Huh? I didn't use the world "general fund budget." That's your own contribution. Social Security is the single largest federal program! It's not "dishonest" to talk about Social Security when discussing federal outlays and the nation's overall fiscal picture. Rather, it's ludicrous to avoid doing so. I get that you don't want to see entitlements cut. Nor do I. But this policy preference doesn't require us to jettison plain language.
So why do we need budget cuts?
We don't need budget cuts, as I made clear in the very post you were responding to (And of course, knowledgeable people realize we don't need cuts in any event: America's public sector is quite small by rich world standards.).
Solid reading comprehension on your part! lol.
It is dishonest to talk about Social Security when discussing federal outlays and the nation's overall fiscal picture. SS is not part of the nation's overall fiscal picture. It is funded separately.
As for my question concerning budget cuts, I never claimed you asserted that we needed them. Solid reading comprehension on your part! lol.
Social Security is not funded separately, and it never has been. The trust fund has always been a fiction.
The program is funded through taxes. That is revenue that could be spent on something else. That it is funded through a separate tax does not change that. It still has opportunity costs.
I agree with you that Social Security shouldn't be cut, but it's a dishonest fantasy that it is somehow unrelated to other government expenditures.
I can agree that there is an opportunity cost for Social Security, but its funding stream is not only separate, but dedicated. The FICA tax is structured differently than any other tax (flat rate, on earnings only, capped), and the revenue cannot be used for any other purpose. The Trust Funds are as real as any ledger entry, that is, as much as any investment you or I own. When FICA revenues exceed benefits paid, the surplus over reserves is used to purchase Special Issue (non-tradable) Treasury bonds. The Treasury can spend the proceeds of those sales to cover any obligations of the Federal government. That’s what started the accusations that the Trust Fund was being ‘raided’. In fact, the SS system has merely exchanged one asset, cash, for another, bonds.
SS is not part of the nation's overall fiscal picture.
That's Orwellian as fuck.
When I discuss Social Security, I usually do so in the context of arguing that it should be made more generous. But nonetheless the program does bear discussion. Sheesh!
But it’s destroying the government for a purpose: so that big business can run wild, no longer restrained by pesky government regulations.
That's exactly it. All this nonsense isn't about saving the government money, it's about finding ways to let the foxes into the henhouse (aka letting corporations and crypto scammers run roughshod over the country). Firing all the people charged with keeping the gates locked and guarded seems like a logical first step.
Yes. This is the answer.
The GOP is not the balanced budget crowd any more. Spending is not Musk's priority, even if he brags about however many billions he's saving; that just fort the rubes. He hates DEI number one, and annoying regulations number two.
They aren't going to have customers as the economy crashes.
Nobody ever accused greed of being smart.
What Musk wants is access to his competitors bids in the competitive bidding process. That way his bids can be precisely one penny less than theirs. Also, he can save the substantial cost of creating his own bids by simply copying and pasting from theirs. Until no one is willing to participate in the utterly corrupt bidding process.
I see it from a wider lens. These people are consistently short-sighted and incompetent in how they execute their work.
- They're applying corporate tech thinking to government operations, believing that the gov't should always operate lean and expand/contract according to earnings/revenue. I didn't realize Musk also enjoyed stomping on his own dick -- who would've known? J/K we saw what happened with his last acquisition.
- He somehow thinks government workers are willing to work beyond the 40-hour work week for the income they're earning, in order to compensate for the reduction in personnel. That shit doesn't...fly...with flight controllers and other critical jobs. Can we, after the fact, sue their asses into oblivion for gross negligence? Rather, how many civil lawsuits can Musk's wealth handle from the consequence of firing too many health inspectors, flight controllers, etc., because the US ain't gonna bail out the fucker for his fuckups.
Bottom line: Most of these "savings" are deferred costs for someone else to worry about.
"Rather, how many civil lawsuits can Musk's wealth handle . . . "
A virtually infinite number. He's already richer than God and is getting even richer by the day.
That, and the US will definitely bail his ass out. Even if he's technically out of government, he already knows how cheap it is to buy whatever outcome he wants.
Of course Musk is richer than God.
"We don't use money in heaven." - Clarence, Angel 2nd Class
Bottom line: Most of these "savings" are deferred costs for someone else to worry about.
^ this 100%
And as we have learned repeatedly, to our cost, that the ones who have to worry about it are the elected Democrats and the ones who pay are us taxpayers, in the lower economic levels.
It's all good, man, if you're a Republican! Mommy cleans upthe mess every darned time!
+1
The next dem president, to clean up the horrific mess.
And it's not as if corporate tech thinking is at all governed by actual business sense, either... tech finance has always been a bubble propped up by cheap money and capital in search of literally any return, and it still is.
" because the US ain't gonna bail out the fucker for his fuckups." I guarantee Trump has indemnified him from the consequences of anything he does for DOGE.
I'd argue that the $5.5B for people is high. Those who took buyouts were probably going to leave this year anyway, and figured "Why not take the extra cash?"
Considering that ~6% of the Federal work force leaves in any given year, 3% taking a buyout is consistent with the proposition that the buyouts saved less than $0.
The main difference is that they won't be replaced.
Of course they're getting rid of the people that chase down fraud and abuse, so the few percent lost that way now will jump and be a great cost going forward. However, that grift is a feature, not a bug for those trying to kill good governance.
Also worth adding the eventual litigation costs into the picture; just the Privacy Act violations from their little smash-and-grab spree likely come to the tens of billions of dollars by themselves, and there’s a whole lot more where that came from.
It's all theatrics. The President Trump show 2.0. A reality show based on the delusions of two narcasists. With a supporting cast of the biggest group of vile sychophants that ever existed.
+10
+10
It's a start! Americans have voted for republicans who promised to cut government spending for a very long time.
Grover Norquist, who founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 at the urging of President Reagan, declared in 2001: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
They are finally getting around to it. No, I don't like it one bit. I will vote to end it in the next elections; assuming there will be elections at some point, but I'm not going to let the many 10's of millions of people who voted for this nonsense over the last 30+ years off the hook for it. Bring on the chaos and the suffering. I hope no one I know is affected, but I suppose we all will be eventually. It's fine. There are casualties in war. Good luck. Charity begins at home.
The looting will only get worse.
"Blockchain analysis firm Elliptic later linked the attack to North Korea's Lazarus Group, a state-sponsored hacking collective. Bybit, a major cryptocurrency exchange, has been hacked to the tune of $1.5 billion in digital assets, in what's estimated to be the largest crypto heist in history."
The largest crypto heist in history was when all of those "digital assets" were sold to somebody for real money in the first place. The only savvy "investors" are the drug dealers and extortionists who needed a way to transfer huge sums of money without going through a regulated financial institution. I suspect that at some point the cartels will act as a sort of central bank to keep some coins actually stable. It is possible they already are.
Well! As Ben Franklin would say: A penny saved is a $10 tax cut for Herr Musk and Baby Hitler.
Not "saved", "cut". When you fire a bunch of essential federal employees, less money is spent in the short term, but long-term costs go up. Stopping spending on science? Costs the US money. Cutting food safety inspectors? $billions in medical bills and lost work. Cutting FEMA? Depressed local economies because communities don't recover. Cutting IRS? More rich tax cheats, higher taxes on working people.
+25
+2
Don't forget the big $$$ saved by gutting enforcement at the IRS.
From the NYT article:
The numerous mistakes, according to people familiar with the complex world of government contracting, suggest that Mr. Musk’s team of outsiders, charged by the president with cutting spending, don’t fully understand it.
You don't say...
That is NYT speak for "haven't got a fucking clue what they are doing".
Restating what some commenters have alluded to:
Dollar amount aside, DOGE has not shown how any of the cancelled spending is wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive. Not shown that taxpayers could obtain the same value of services for less money.
^^^This.
In fact, it is clear that none of the cuts are in any way related to performance, outcomes, or any measurable components of productivity or efficiency at all. Buyouts allow self-selection; the best performers will be overrepresented, because they are most employable elsewhere. Probationary employees are being fired simply because they can be, not for any performance issues. They are recent hires or newly in position level, so hardly ‘deep state’ masterminds.
Right. And let's shed a tear for the young people whose resumes will now show a job where they were fired for "poor performance". Some future employers will understand but many will not.
Despicable.
Au contraire!! You're just operating on a different definition of waste. In DOGE world, waste is anything that benefits people not like them:
money to fund USAID = waste
money to pay contracts to Musk companies = not waste
Dollar amount aside, DOGE has not shown how any of the cancelled spending is wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive. Not shown that taxpayers could obtain the same value of services for less money.
Yes. This is a fundamental point. I could "save" money by not getting my car repaired. But if I lose my job because of my inability to get to the office, it probably wasn't a very sensible trade off.
A write-up about what those cuts to research grant overhead does: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/continuing-nih-nsf-crisis-part-iii-indirect
I assume if the courts aren't going to stop this, the buck is just going to be passed onto donors of private universities and facilities and to the states in the case of public universities and facilities. And if states don't step up, those universities are going to have to scale back their research. That may result in scientists either moving to China to conduct their research where the CCP will fully fund breakthroughs that would have otherwise occurred in the US, or the CCP may fund US scientists in order to get a share of the benefits of the breakthroughs with the US locked out.
Wherever the US cuts, opportunistic countries will eagerly fill in the gaps.
What potentially is going to happen is that we go through the painful process of moving things back from indirect costs to direct costs. How much time do I need from my computer system administrator? How much time do I need from my purchasing admin? Let me put that directly in the budget, rather than just a fraction of my grants. And I use that as an example, since we recently had a computer security break in (damn you careless grad student ...), which led to having to rebuild the cluster kernels and upgrade the security, which led to my 11 year old laptop no longer being able to support our security protocols, which led to me asking my purchasing admin to getting me a new one (I was really trying to avoid the few days of my life that was going to be spent rebuilding software packages), so I can work at home again in the evenings via my laptop. Their time was just part of my indirects, but yeah, I could try and figure out a way of putting that into directs. But it's just more efficient to do it via indirects, especially since everyone in the department is sharing things like the computer admins and the purchasing admins.
If this stays at 15% being the new upper limit on indirects, and we didn't transfer things to directs, we're looking at losing $150 Million/year. Or about the income generated from 20% of our endowment. That's a lot. (People tend to forget that Universities live off the interest on the endowment, not directly drawing down the endowment itself. The news tends to quote the fraction of the total endowment, making it sound like it's a much smaller hit than it really is.)
Or another way of putting it, we could make it up by increasing tuition by $10K/year for every single undergrad and grad student and law student and business school student and medical student in the University. Good luck with that.
Wow, that's a huge amount! 😬
Universities aren't going to increase the amount of their endowments going to research. Increasing tuition for engineering/science research grad students can't make up for research funding cuts because that tuition is entirely paid from research funding. And there aren't a lot of other grad students besides those other than mba students and they are already charged the maximum tuition the market can bear.
I am much less informed than Kevin so I will estimate that in the end they will have saved around 22 cents. I'll bet they'll waste more money defending all that in court than they can claim they're saving, but they'll have harmed a lot of people in the process, and that's the real point, isn't it?
Don't wingnuts think all contracts are sacred and can never be cancelled? Isn't that one of their big deals?
Their party is led by a guy who is famous for not paying his contractors, so gonna go with no
You're right, they'll only care about that if a Democrat wants to cancel something, then it's an existential crisis.
No kidding!
So roughly the amount of contracts Space X has with the federal government.
Doge has you blogging, and that is priceless.
Exactly. Apparently, the few people telling Mr Drum to back off from the news and "rest" may have had it backwards.
I think you are looking at the situation rationally and not emotionally.
1.) You are conflating math with symbolism. A lot of Trump voters believe that the US government does not function properly. Thus, as long as you don't damage a program I care about, THEN all attacks on the US government is good.
2.) Most Americans have very basic understanding of the Federal budget, or perhaps even math. Thus, 'saving' 22 billion dollars sounds like a huge win.
Many of the firings and contract terminations are going to be overturned in court. Even ignoring the lost services, not only are they not saving all that money, but they are also incurring a lot of litigation costs on top it, not to mention burdening the court system.
The WaPo has a different offer. Nothing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/22/doge-savings-found-list-analysis/
Musk’s DOGE says it has saved $55 billion. Not so fast.
A Washington Post analysis found that hundreds of the canceled contracts DOGE listed represent savings of $0 each.
Mr. Drum forgot to mention that most of this is illegal/unconstitutional.
When you let everything in the fridge rot because you didn't pay the electricity bill, did you save any money?
Ugh.
Kevin,
Your numbers account for only 1/2 of the cost-savings equation.
Since most of the "savings" comes from firing employees, it's essential to ask what their absence will cost and then subtract that from the "savings" achieved by firing them.
It seems reasonable to me, under the circumstances we've been seeing, that the vast majority of these employees were not fired for legitimate cause and they can therefore collect unemployment. First subtraction.
Assuming again that they weren't fired for cause, they actually were producing work of some value. There is a product there that will no longer be there because of their absence. Subtraction #2.
Then there are the indirect impacts. USAID will no longer be buying food from American farmers, all of whom will lose revenue, which means they won't be paying taxes on that now non-existent income. The fired workers probably won't spend as much as before, so all of the stores, restaurants etc. that they frequented will also lose income. Rinse and repeat throughout government. In the aggregate, subtraction #3.
Finally, all of this assumes that these cuts were done "efficiently," which we know is not the case. Food will rot in warehouses; there will be gaps in contraceptive use; some of the work not being done will end up costing vast amounts of money. Contracts were abrogated and lawsuits will result from the government's failure to comply with them.
Subtraction #4.
I strongly suspect that a proper accounting will show that what this administration has done so far has actually added far more than it's saved from a strictly monetary point of view. Forget the morality or whether any of this actually makes sense. The way it was done will prove to have been SO inefficient (despite the title of the organization) that it will be incredibly counterproductive in every imaginable way.
That's BEFORE considering any of the policy implications and human costs which are vast and disconcerting.
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