The Boston Globe

The political bromance between President Trump and Elon Musk may be over — or not! — but the damage done by the tech billionaire’s pet project, the Department of Government Efficiency, continues.

Billed as a tool to weed out government waste, fraud, and abuse, the agency — whose legality and constitutionality is still being challenged in court — failed in cutting even a fraction of the costs Musk promised, even by DOGE’s own often error-ridden calculations. And that says nothing of the human toll.

Here’s our DOGE report card.

The DOGE numbers don’t add up

Calculating how much DOGE has saved is difficult, but it’s not at all hard to see that it didn’t deliver what was promised.

After Musk revised down his own early projection of DOGE savings from $2 trillion to $1 trillion, the department’s website now estimates it has found more than $170 billion in taxpayer savings — a recent CBS analysis found that only $70.9 billion was itemized on the department’s website.

But even that figure should be taken with a grain of salt, given that past examinations of DOGE’s “wall of receipts” has found errors, including a claim of $8 billion in savings from the cancellation of a contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, when the contract was actually for $8 million.

DOGE moved to correct the error, as well as change the website to make such errors harder to find. But a New York Times review still managed to spot more inconsistencies, including a claim of $1.9 billion in savings from the cancellation of an IRS contract that was actually terminated during the Biden administration.

And though it may seem counterintuitive, cutting jobs doesn’t actually translate to savings if it results in less productivity — if fewer IRS workers means less tax revenue is collected, for instance. An April 29 report by the Partnership for Public Service estimated that the cost to Americans for the DOGE cuts amounted to $135 billion — either all but erasing DOGE savings or leading to a net loss for taxpayers, depending on who you ask.

And even some Republican lawmakers have expressed unease with backing many DOGE-recommended cuts in a $9.4 billion legislative “rescissions” package to claw back previously approved funding.

House lawmakers expressed concerns to CNN about cuts to things like public media organizations and efforts to prevent and treat HIV and AIDS across the globe. If the bill fails or is reduced significantly, that’ll drive the actual savings from the department estimate even further down.

DOGE has roiled the job market

According to the latest jobs numbers, DOGE cuts contributed to a 50 percent spike in layoffs in May over the same period last year, Fox Business reports. More than 63,000 layoffs were announced in May, but even that was a drop from the DOGE-driven 105,441 lob losses the previous month.

Exacerbating the damage the firings alone have created is the chaotic way in which they were implemented. Federal agencies like the State Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Food and Drug Administration, National Weather Service, and the IRS are among those rushing to rehire terminated employees. That’s because many of the estimated 135,000 DOGE-axed positions are for critical functions, like approving drugs and forecasting weather disasters. The layoffs’ often-disorganized manner has confused dismissed workers and overtaxed remaining ones, many of whom have been asked to work overtime, volunteer to take on additional roles, or be pushed into new positions, according to Axios.

One former FDA worker told The Washington Post: “They wanted to show they were gutting the government, but there was no thought about what parts might be worth keeping. Now it feels like it was all just a game to them.”

That’s not to mention the blow to communities in states where the largest percentages of federal workers are located, as well as government contractors that face secondhand profit and job losses due to the cuts.

Outside of the greater Washington, D.C., region, which includes Virginia and Maryland, the hardest-hit states when it comes to canceled government contracts based on anti-DEI initiatives alone include Texas, California, North Carolina, Georgia, and Colorado — affecting politically red communities as well as blue. DOGE’s harms know no partisanship.

The incalculable costs

On June 9, a federal district judge in New York ordered the Office of Personnel Management to temporarily stop giving DOGE broad access to its IT systems, holding that such actions likely “violated the law and bypassed its established cybersecurity practices.”

“This was a breach of law and of trust,” wrote Judge Denise Cote in issuing the temporary injunction. “Tens of millions of Americans depend on the government to safeguard records that reveal their most private and sensitive affairs.”

Whether some or all of DOGE’s efforts to gain access to Americans’ most sensitive information through agency databases will be declared unlawful is still uncertain. Challenges are still being litigated, and in a lawsuit involving DOGE access to Social Security data, the Supreme Court allowed the department to continue accessing the information while that challenge moves forward.

According to a report by the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, even allowing DOGE employees “read-only” access to Americans’ data at federal agencies like the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the Veterans Administration is risky. That data can still be used to deny access to public services, housing, food, student financial assistance, veteran or military benefits, public contracts, and more, the report stated. Unauthorized copying of data can also lead to doxxing, or the information being sold to foreign entities or data brokers.

Some DOGE staff have been granted temporary “edit-access” to data, which means the information can be altered or deleted entirely within the federal system.

That says nothing of the broader global impact, particularly through the dismantling of agencies like the United States Agency for International Development, which once provided critical life-saving humanitarian aid across the world. DOGE has reduced it to a single webpage with nearly all its staff placed on administrative leave.

The government claims that shuttering the agency saved Americans nearly $60 billion, or less than 1 percent of the federal budget. According to estimates by Oxfam, the loss of grants and other USAID funding will lead to 23 million children losing access to education, up to 95 million people losing access to basic health care, and upwards of 3 million preventable deaths each year. Shutting it down will also weaken American influence and diplomatic relations, while disrupting American farms and organizations that rely on USAID contracts.

Musk is already back to playing with his cars and rocket ships as the federal government picks up the pieces from his DOGE tantrum. But the global ripple effect is a reminder that some of the damage can’t be undone.