DOGE May Be Dead, But Its Crimes Live On

DOGE’s supposed North Star was taxpayer savings, but by that yardstick it was a dismal failure. Elon Musk, the billionaire ketamine fancier who ran DOGE through May as a time-limited special government employee, predicted up front that he could cut “at least $2 trillion” from the $7 trillion budget. Then he said $1 trillion. Then he said $150 billion. Today DOGE claims $214 billion in savings, but even if we accept that at face value (probably unwise), that doesn’t take into account the $135 billion that Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, estimated DOGE’s disruptions cost the government in lost productivity, paid leave, and the re-hiring of workers fired mistakenly. Add in cuts to the Internal Revenue Service, which reduce rather than increase revenue, and DOGE’s cost rises to  $458 billion. When you combine that with DOGE’s claim to have saved $214 billion, that nets out to an operating loss of $244 billion. Cutting waste, fraud and abuse is very expensive!

OPM’s Kupor hit the roof after Rozen published her story saying DOGE had turned off the lights. Kupor posted very testily on X a non-denial denial—that is, a statement that purports to deny something but on closer examination does not. “The truth is,” Kupor wrote, “DOGE may not have a centralized leadership under [the U.S. DOGE Service]. But the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.” In other words: Yes, DOGE has been eliminated, and its functions transferred elsewhere, which is exactly what the Reuters piece said. 

Kupor’s fury at Reuters reflected apparent anxiety that if word got out that DOGE didn’t exist anymore, agency heads wouldn’t take DOGE-y directives from OPM very seriously. That’s a rational fear, because OPM has a history of not being taken seriously. Kupor’s X post linked to a memo he sent Friday requiring agency heads, in fulfillment of an October 15  executive order, to submit headcounts to OPM and to create a Strategic Hiring Committee. It’s a venerable Washington fallacy that you can’t eliminate superfluous bureaucracy without first creating some other superfluous bureaucracy to identify where the original superfluous bureaucracy resides. On that, at least, MAGA is in complete accord with the Deep State.