Elon Musk’s DOGE Promised Savings, But It’s Cost Us a Fortune – Mother Jones

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The US government doesn’t have many watchdogs left. Donald Trump fired a whole bunch of them shortly after returning to power, and many others have been pushed out since. We do still have a Government Accountability Office (GAO), for what it’s worth, and one week ago, that office published a report detailing the remarkable lack of transparency in how Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency conducted its affairs and how the savings DOGE reported fell far short of its claims.

But here’s the thing: a) We knew that from the start, and b) the GAO entirely misses the point.

DOGE saved us nothing. In fact, Musk’s little project has cost America dearly. In countless ways, we are much worse off than we were on the day Trump took back the Oval Office and invited the richest man on Earth to come in and break things.

Here’s just a partial accounting of what their nonsense has cost us.

A ton of money: Before he was tapped to run the IRS under President Barack Obama, John Koskinen spent decades as a turnaround man, helping large, failing organizations get back on track. And "the last thing I ever thought," he told me, reflecting on how DOGE was gutting the tax agency, "was, ‘Well, let’s starve the revenue arm."

But starving the government’s revenue arm is precisely what DOGE and Trump have done, with the gleeful complicity of Republican leaders long hostile to tax enforcement yet who are always eager to enact obscene tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

During Trump’s first year back, through the firings and deferred resignations that DOGE spearheaded, the IRS lost 28 percent of its workforce. The first to go were probationary employees, Joe Biden hires who had been on the job less for than two years. "A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds and experience in technology and tax law management," Koskinen said. " They weren’t 25-year-olds. They were filling important positions."

"The cuts were done not on a glide path, as one would do if one had conducted a reasonable review of programming, but it was a cliff."

Cheered by Republicans, these firings crippled the IRS’s capacity to collect unpaid taxes and investigate sophisticated tax cheats—rich individuals and companies, including firms that, as we speak, are routing their substantial profits through offshore tax havens without consequences.

The IRS’s inability to conduct complex audits encourages law-breaking by the uber-rich, the richest of whom invariably avoid punishment. (Commoners who defy the rules are easy to catch.) An April report from the Yale Budget Lab estimates that the 2025 IRS layoffs will cost the nation $600 billion in lost revenues over 10 years—and the IRS budget cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill will add another $263 billion to the deficit. The combined losses total about what you’d need to restore the Medicaid funding that congressional Republicans, in passing that bill, took from America’s most desperate people.

On Joe Biden’s watch, the IRS was making progress on enforcement and collections, but that’s over now. And taxpayer services? Forget about it. Trump killed the agency’s free filing program on behalf of some billionaire software moguls. And my colleague Stephanie Mencimer recently wrote about the scorched wasteland that IRS customer service has become under Trump.

Good luck getting through.

Our humanity: Musk’s unsanctioned HR strategy was notable for its cruelty, not only for the hundreds of thousands of US workers whose lives and livelihoods were upended, but for the people they served. His abrupt destruction of the US Agency for International Development—which he’d vowed to feed through "a wood chipper"—has sown death and misery all over the globe. That’s not a great look for a once-admired nation.

"The cuts were done not on a glide path, as one would do if one had conducted a reasonable review of programming, but it was a cliff," former USAID Administrator Samantha Power told PBS one year later. By that time, at least 800,000 deaths had been chalked up to Musk’s thoughtlessness, and the British medical journal The Lancet estimated 14 million people would die by 2030 if the programs DOGE destroyed weren’t resumed. The mindless way the cuts were done, Power noted, ensured "the most human harm possible."

The world can now thank Musk for, among other things, the out-of-control Ebola outbreak now wracking the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A semblance of privacy: To be fair, we lost our privacy ages ago to corporations like Lexis, Equifax, and Cambridge Analytica, but at least our government could be trusted to protect the confidential information it collected...