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A deplorable level of waste, abuse and fraud persists in the federal government, as well as in local and state governments run by both parties and in major corporations too. At the moment, however, America’s most prolific source of fraud and waste appears to be the ironically named Department of Government Efficiency.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course. When Donald Trump returned to the presidency, he vowed — as he had done many times before — to crack down on all the loafers, crooks and spendthrifts on the government payroll. With a flourish he appointed the obscenely rich Elon Musk, who needs no further introduction, to lead DOGE and its cost-cutting crusade.
Having promised initially to cut $2 trillion — or nearly a third of what the United States government spends annually — Musk quickly backed away from that inflated target. The host of engineers, lawyers and right-wing political hacks that he imposed on federal agencies under the aegis of DOGE soon alarmed everyone by demanding access to confidential data and classified information, at great jeopardy to national and personal security.
Leaving aside the dangers posed by DOGE’s bumbling invasion, the sum total of its cost-cutting campaign falls far short of the extravagant claims promoted by Musk and Trump. Nearly every day, the billionaire and his aides have cited millions and billions “saved” by eliminating federal programs, agencies, services and research, often with seemingly ludicrous examples of wasteful spending. Trump echoed many of them in his State of the Union speech, including an alleged study of “transgender mice.” That was one of many mistakes served up by Trump and Musk — in this instance, the research they were mocking involved “transgenic” mice, used to assess cancer and chronic illness treatments.
Much of what DOGE has served up so far is misinformation and disinformation of equally dismal quality. Its name should be changed to the Department of Gross Errors. Debunking the howlers tossed out by Musk’s crew is now a regular beat for many news outlets, as “billions” of dollars in supposed savings routinely shrink by factors of a thousand or more — to an infinitesimal fraction of what the grandiose Musk has asserted.
ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative reporting outlet, found that the cuts imposed on the IRS by DOGE are likely to cost the United States billions of dollars over the coming years. As every tax expert knows, the salaries of the auditors and experts dismissed by the DOGE geniuses are earned back many times over as they claw back taxes owed by wealthy miscreants. Firing these experienced auditors means squandering an investment that would have paid huge dividends for decades. Musk may not like what IRS auditors do — which billionaire does? — but that saves money for people like him, not the honest taxpayers.
And according to a front-page analysis published by the Wall Street Journal — an impeccably right-wing newspaper owned by Fox News boss Rupert Murdoch — DOGE’s “wall of receipts” doesn’t quite add up. Musk has boasted about his outfit cutting $55 billion in waste so far, but the canceled contracts posted on its website only came to $7 billion. And the Journal’s reporting shows that at least half of those cancellations saved no money at all — which means the real cuts represent less than 10% of the advertised amount.
Shall we call that “fraud,” or is it “abuse”? Considering the time and money spent on DOGE, including its pointless distraction of federal employees who do real work with demands that they draw up lists of their achievements, it is certainly an enormous waste.
Meanwhile, Musk’s minions keep busy spreading faked figures about one federal agency after another, as does their billionaire boss.
Evidently, they all harbor deep hostility toward the nation’s most popular government program, Social Security — which is why they have accused the Social Security Administration of paying out billions of dollars to people who have been dead for hundreds of years. Trump made a fool of himself with his dramatic repetition of that obviously false indictment before Congress, only to have Musk “apologize” and promise to do better.
But he assuredly will not do better, because his true purpose is not to “reform” the government or conserve its assets. Musk and Trump are waging ideological warfare against the idea and practice of democratic government that is of, by and for the people. They are creating an autocratic administration that extends control by would-be tyrants — and, to judge from the Kremlin’s admiring reviews, by tyrants who are already in power.
Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com and author of several books, including (with Gene Lyons) “The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Conason co-produced a 2004 documentary film, “The Hunting of the President,” based on the book. His new book is “The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism,” with a foreword by George T. Conway III.
