Will DOGE Even Save More Than It Costs?

DOGE is about destructive power, not money. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux

Now that DOGE has been allowed to rampage and burrow in throughout the federal bureaucracy for a few months, and in anticipation of its creator, Elon Musk, ramping down his involvement as he focuses on saving Tesla, it’s a good time to take an accounting of what all the chaos and disruption have accomplished. It’s been obvious for a while that federal spending has actually been continuing to rise despite all the braggadocio from Musk and his minions. Musk himself keeps lowering estimates of the taxpayer dollars he’s saving even as those estimates are being exposed as not terribly accurate. But observers are only now beginning to assess the costs imposed by DOGE in the way of inefficiencies, confused directions, illegal personnel actions that have to be reversed, and other bad business practices run wild. As the New York Times’ Elizabeth Williamson reports, it’s increasingly likely that DOGE is a net money sink for the federal government, generating nothing but dysfunction:

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity, and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000 …

Neither of these estimates includes the cost to taxpayers of defending DOGE’s moves in court. Of about 200 lawsuits and appeals related to Mr. Trump’s agenda, at least 30 implicate the department.

So even on this limited accounting, DOGE-imposed costs offset the poorly documented Musk claims of $150 billion in savings. But there are some other important costs on top of those Williamson mentions, notably in federal revenue collections, as Bloomberg reported on April 15, Tax Day:

It’s Tax Day, and the big question on the minds of some analysts is whether the mass layoffs at the IRS instigated by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will end up costing the government more revenue than DOGE saves in total …

One study, by the Yale Budget Lab, estimates that such a cut could end up costing the U.S. roughly $160 billion in revenue on average annually if taxpayers increasingly see it as an opportunity to shirk compliance.

Additional revenue loss, averaging $30 billion a year, could come from a DOGE effort to force the IRS to share information on undocumented immigrants with law enforcement. That may encourage undocumented workers to seek more off-the-books pay.

The IRS situation is just the most startling example of a general problem with DOGE: Most federal employees do actual work that needs doing, and when it’s not being done there are consequences that often come with dollar signs, noted the Times’ Williamson:

[E]xperts on the federal work force said it did not have to be this way. Federal law and previous government shutdowns offered Mr. Musk a legal playbook for reducing the federal work force, a goal that most Americans support. But Mr. Musk chose similar lightning-speed, blunt-force methods he used to drastically cut Twitter’s work force after he acquired the company in 2022.

As a result, productive sheep are by no means being discerned from unproductive goats in the federal bureaucracy, and the dysfunction associated with mass firings, funding freezes, and contract payment “pauses” (e.g., the federal government refusing to pay its bills) is multiplied by the litigation DOGE’s methods guarantee. Talk to virtually anyone in a decision-making position in or near the federal agencies DOGE has targeted and you hear the same story: Not a lot of work is being done other than frantic scrubbing of websites and agency documents to eliminate banned terms or topics. Job No. 1 for middle managers and contractors in DOGE-targeted agencies has been to keep one’s head down so as to avoid notice by DOGE staff or brand-new political appointees looking for trophies to mount on the wall.

So if fear and paralysis across the “deep state” is the idea, DOGE is doing a good job. But let’s not confuse that with saving money, which is the goal Trump officially announced in authorizing Musk’s band of engineers and coders to run wild in federal agencies whose missions they knew no better than a warthog knows about theoretical physics.

Will the dysfunction and waste end if and when Musk does “step aside”? Probably not. DOGE is fully embedded in the federal agencies it has invaded where it works hand in glove with new MAGA political appointees who mistrust and, in some cases, hate their new colleagues and subordinates. More important, the personnel cuts and programmatic terminations DOGE has (often illegally) undertaken may now be carried forward by Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget. Even more important from a legal point of view, destructive DOGE/OMB decisions may be rubber-stamped by Congress soon through (a) formal “rescissions” (i.e., cancellation) of current-year federal appropriations; (b) the upcoming budget-reconciliation bill; and (c) appropriations for the fiscal year that begins in October, which will be deeply influenced by Vought’s Fiscal Year 2026 presidential budget due out any time now.

In other words, while DOGE’s raids have simply ravaged the bureaucratic landscape rather than creating a new MAGA-fied civil service, the actual reconstruction of the federal government may be put into place down the road by Russell Vought and by Trump’s loyal vassals in Congress. In any event, now or in the future, budget savings really aren’t the point. It’s about power and blowing up institutions so that even if Trump’s team is ejected from office in 2026 and 2028, nothing will ever be the same.