Did Elon Musk Disprove Government Waste?

Soon after Donald Trump's second inauguration, Elon Musk was given the keys to a wide swath of the federal government, including almost all unclassified data and the entire Treasury payment system. Ostensibly, Musk intended to leverage his wealth of Silicon Valley tech and innovation experience to streamline the federal government, rooting out the fraudulent and wasteful spending we all knew was rampant.

Before even setting foot in the door, Musk boasted of $2 trillion in potential savings, although he quickly backtracked (apparently seriously) to a mere $1 trillion. But once the work started, reality started to set in. Social Security was not paying billions of dollars annually to dead people. Or illegal immigrants. Fraud and abuse were not, in fact, "everywhere". And waste? Well, it depends who you ask. DOGE found highly-publicized waste on the regular, but often such "waste" was better characterized as "spending Musk, Trump, et al disliked or thought unnecessary". Examples ranged from trivial (a "circadian lighting pilot study" of $250K at the USGSA) to more ideologically motivated ($10M to "gender equity in the Mexican workplace" at the DOL). Some noticed that Elon's efforts had a concerning tendency to target agencies that happened to be investigating his companies.

All this is quite to be expected when the executive branch has burgeoned to its current size. None of this is unconstitutional, and usually it's perfectly mostly legal. That's not the point at hand. We could dwell on the nuances of implementation all we like, but accountability and transparency for the feds are admirable goals.

The point, rather, is that the headline amounts of fraudulent or wasteful spending are simply not there to be found. DOGE's website currently claims to have saved a mere $180B. However, not all of that number is itemized; in late April, BBC could only find receipts for about $30B. CBS argued (from a partisan slant? Surely) that the cuts would actually cause as much unforeseen spending as they reduced, citing trivial details like the 24,000 fired government employees the courts ordered re-hired. Incidentally, federal spending this year exceeds last year by some $300B.

Finally, in perhaps the most damning indictment possible, a former DOGE engineer told the press that fraudulent spending in the federal government was "relatively nonexistent", saying that he was "surprised" at how efficient the government actually operated. As of now, DOGE has been working hard to cancel unused phone lines and Office subscriptions. The savings? In the hundreds of thousands.

And here's where we need to have a brief conversation about the federal budget, because massive numbers can get thrown around without appreciating the scale we're talking about. The fed brings in nearly five trillion dollars of income annually (almost all from personal and payroll taxes). However, the fed spends nearly seven trillion per year, putting the deficit at a little less than two trillion dollars: $2,000,000,000,000.

What composes that seven trillion? Every year, one and a half trillion dollars are Social Security benefits. Nearly another two trillion is healthcare (Medicaid and Medicare), codified into law by the ACA. DOGE can't cut that. And they can't cut the trillion dollars a year we spend on interest on the $36T of amassed debt. Throw in another $880B on national defense (easily the most justified spending our government can perform) and we've already cleared our measly five trillion of revenue. The rest of the deficit is the little stuff: veterans' benefits, education, transportation, and everything else.

DOGE was doomed from the start. Even savings of $200B would be a drop in the metaphorical bucket. (Maybe that's harsh. It would not be meaningless.) But without meaningful legislative reform, the financial direction of this country can't be meaningfully altered. Perhaps the more telling story is the (unsurprising) development that the GOP isn't exactly jumping over itself to get the DOGE cuts codified into law.

Selling off national forests will not even dent the deficit, let alone the debt. Neither will selling $300B of "gold cards". The $175B the US sent to Ukraine is one-eighth of what we send to our senior citizens each year. The debt problem isn't waste or fraud. It's the entitlement spending: the massive programs we've set up that we always knew were untenable. The government has gotten too large and is collapsing in on itself. It has already, and there's no good way out. In hindsight, the thought that a ketamine-fueled innovator was the one to bring relief should never have been taken seriously.