Now that the smoke has cleared and the Department of Government efficiency is no longer with us, we can take an honest assessment of what DOGE was. A SCAM. In April of 2025, I wrote a piece warning Americans that because of the lack of transparency from the government regarding DOGE and the untrustworthy characters leading this operation, that this would be a full-fledged scam ran on the American public in the name of increasing productivity and cutting and or managing governmental waste. In January of 2025, President Trump created DOGE a short-term initiative aimed at cutting federal spending to reduce costs, reduce waste and reduce fraud within our federal government, set to end in July 2026 but quietly and abruptly ended in November of 2025 months before its scheduled termination. The problem with DOGE was that it was NOT a traditional cabinet level department that was created by Congress. DOGE was a temporary organization created by executive orders. Meaning that the oversight and overall authority of this department is very unclear. The architects of this department made it this way so that when the heist is over, no one will be held accountable, and this is exactly what has happened. With Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men at the helm being the driving force backed by President Trumps executive orders, DOGE and its appointed members were granted legal authority to restructure agencies, cut spending for agencies and fire/layoff questionable staff that they felt didn’t meet certain criteria’s. Many critics originally stressed about the problems that would arise by DOGE’s sweeping powers to access agency data, terminate contracts, restructure agencies how they deem fit and most importantly, cut spending, all while having access to citizens private info. According to its website, DOGE terminated 13,440 contracts, 15,887 grants and 264 leases. These estimates that fluctuated dramatically over its 10-month existence. We also can add the 317,000 layoffs created by DOGE with about 68,000 employees being rehired because of necessity. That still leaves about a quarter of a million people without jobs after being fired unjustifiably. DOGE has also lied about its overall savings. Elon Musk originally claimed DOGE would save Americans 2 trillion dollars. In February of 2025, when DOGE’s savings tally stood at $55 billion, former Labor Department Chief Economist Betsy Stevenson said the real figure was likely between $1 and $7 billion. In early August, Politico and NPR analyzed DOGE’s claim that it had saved taxpayers $52.8 billion through canceled contracts. However, of the $32.7 billion in contract savings the outlet could verify; it said the true number was closer to $1.4 billion. More importantly not one dollar of that 1.4 billion will help lower the federal deficit which DOGE originally “intended” to do unless Congress intervenes. Instead, the money has been returned to the agencies mandated by the US law to spend it. The numbers that DOGE puts out are completely unreliable and are not based in good faith at all.
For agencies, employees and employers, the rapid structural changes and layoffs have been obnoxious and devastating to our economy. According to Reuters, throughout 27 agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, Environmental protection agency, Department of Education etc. There have been over 300,000 layoffs. In the department of Veterans affairs there have been 80 thousand layoffs alone, with about 1 of every 4 VA workers being a veteran; DOGE has now put veterans on the street without work. With 2 million federal workers receiving buyout offers in exchange for them to resign, the federal workforce has undergone a major change for the worse. In March of 2025, the monthly total for job loss was the 3rd highest it’s ever been behind April and May 2020 during the peak of the covid pandemic according to Challenger since they started tracking this data in 1989. The idea that more people are losing their jobs than ever before and why that would be a good thing is still yet to be answered by this current administration and architects of this program. The government was created by the people and for the people. Federal judges have recently ruled that the Administration illegally fired thousands of employees because agencies did not follow these reduction-in-force procedures. Instead of ranking employees as required, several agencies issued stock-language termination letters to thousands of employees stating that they were being fired because of their “poor performance,” even though many employees had recently received positive performance reviews. Judges in these cases directed agencies to reinstate the employees who were fired. The Administration has appealed the findings and attempted to place reinstated employees on administrative leave in order to combat the judge’s rulings. What DOGE is doing is a violation of human rights and economic precedent. The government led all sectors in job losses in 2025 unfortunately.
The truth is that DOGE cut muscle and not fat out of the economy. DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math that the architects of this program don’t want you to understand. In other words, I’d call it faulty accounting. The way DOGE operates is DOGE uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline. This is called “ceiling value”. This is all the money an agency COULD spend in future fiscal years. Not the money they are spending, have spent or plan to spend. The figure that DOGE uses far exceeds what the government commits. Counting the ceiling value creates an untruthful narrative about government spending and creates a fake picture/scenario for taxpayers where they think DOGE is making valuable cuts to spending. But they aren’t. DOGE is doing the equivalent of a person getting a credit card and adding a 50k limit to that card and then cancelling the card and acting like they saved 50k. This is a clear and direct sign of a scam.
DOGE architects and figureheads cannot even come up with realistic and truthful numbers about what they have “saved” because the numbers are so exaggerated. In many agencies, they are clearly lying about the numbers. For example, Through July of 2025, DOGE claims to have saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion. Another example is the Department of Veterans Affairs. DOGE’s page reported savings of $932 million from contracts canceled show the VA recovered just $132 million from these awards, or less than 15 percent of what DOGE claimed, and that the VA reinstated the contract for suicide prevention support, cancer registry and other health care support. In my opinion, the greatest example of them lying is DOGE’s dealings with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). DOGE has added canceled contracts at very exaggerated values, once claiming to have cut an $8 billion contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that was actually worth $8 million. A very tricky move by DOGE inflating the savings it said it was achieving also while fanning the flames of the immigration debate. These exaggerations have become all too common. CBS News analyzed from August 2025 that DOGE was overstating savings from some of the largest cuts by as much as 97 percent when dealing with ICE.
DOGE has tried to create a narrative of transparency by creating a public list of records or “wall of receipts”. This wall of receipts isnt very accurate. As of July 2025, roughly 40% of the claimed savings can’t even be verified due to a lack of identifying information and fuzzy math. To assess DOGE’s actual savings so far from canceled contracts, POLITICO created a database of every traceable termination posted on DOGE’s wall of receipts through July 26 that was at least one month old, about 10,100 contracts. Of these 10,000 plus contracts, DOGE has saved less than 5% of what its claimed. Roughly 2,400 cancellations on DOGE’s termination list through July cannot be independently verified. Some of these cancellations are too recent to show up in public records, but most had their identifying information redacted by DOGE, which has often labeled those entries as “unavailable for legal reasons” that DOGE can’t mention… Reeks of a scam because of the lack of transparency. A Pivotal point is that DOGE’s calculations don’t account for expenses that come from ending contracts early, like payments for outstanding leases, subcontractors, or work already performed which adds up on the backend.
DOGE was a financial disaster that only lasted 10 months, but its impact will be far greater, and it is still too early to tell what those negative impacts will be. While decreasing the quality of service for Americans through shutting down agencies, Trump and Musk’s gutting of the federal governments civil service will have a direct result in higher costs for the country. Trump is cutting employees whose career is to root out waste and fraud. For example, Trump fired the Inspectors General at 17 agencies during his first week in office in January 2025. Additionally, 80 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services employees were fired from the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, which sets and enforces health insurance standards to keep healthcare affordable for Americans. At the Department of Education, the current administration has fired every attorney responsible for ensuring that states and school districts compliantly use funds intended to support students with disabilities and those living in poverty. Trump even made cuts to the IRS that will directly benefit wealthy people and directly negatively impact non-wealthy people. Cuts to the expertise at the IRS will benefit wealthy tax cheats and billionaire donors. Reduced staffing results in fewer enforcement actions by the IRS and smaller revenue collections. For example, some Treasury and IRS officials predict that tax receipts by April 15, 2025, could be 10 percent lower than in 2024 because of these cuts. Additionally, CBO estimates that for every $1 reduction in spending at the IRS, the government loses about $3.25 revenue to tax cheats. CBO also estimates that each successive cut results in progressively larger reductions in revenues, meaning the actual amount of lost revenue is likely to be higher. For instance, the Yale Budget Lab estimates that DOGE’s IRS cuts could lead to a $2.4 trillion loss in revenue over 10 years due to increased tax cheating by the wealthy. Fewer federal employees is not the correct way to go to save revenue and manage waste in the American Economy. Approximately 4 percent of all federal spending is compensation for civilian employees. In fiscal year 2022, the federal government spent $6.3 Trillion in total outlays but only $271 Billion was from compensation to civilian employees. For comparison, the gross tax gap from taxes the wealthy owe but refuse to pay is approximately $696 Billion or 2.5 times more than all compensation to civilian employees. Total civilian employee compensation is dwarfed by the amounts that wealthy tax cheats don’t pay in taxes. Federal workers provide essential services that everyone benefits from, and most people don’t even realize it will impact them until it happens.
One of the last and most devastating aspects of DOGE and its massive layoffs and lack of transparency is the loss of talent in the workforce. Many long-time essential government workers decided to leave or retire instead of getting fired by DOGE. Out of the 154,000 workers that signed up for the resignation program Trump once offered, 70,000 of them have fully retired. Many agencies are now scrambling to find and hire talented, qualified workers. Many of these professions were engineers, doctors, public health professionals, and national security professionals. This abrupt exit of talent has left many agencies’ services in a state of uncertainty. DOGE’s chaotic lack of transparency and bogus claims about savings has actually cost the taxpayers. As of November 24th, 2025, DOGE claimed its savings have saved around $214 Billion, but the truth is DOGE’s actions have actually made things worse and has costed taxpayers money. The Partnership for Public Service found DOGE’s actions had cost taxpayers around $135 billion in its first 100 days through the loss of federal worker productivity, repeated fire-and-rehire cycles and paid leave. As one can see in every facet and every aspect, DOGE has been a mess and a scam. The sad part is that Elon Musk got access to everyone’s information, ran arguably the biggest scam in American history and gets to walk away unscathed with no accountability. No punishment, not even a slap on the wrist. Working class people will see this and become more upset that this program was created to benefit everyone but by the end only benefited the rich and powerful. The Structure of DOGE was beyond questionable, murky and filled with intentional structural loopholes that relieved the architects of responsibility while giving them powerful oversight. Because of this, the Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s of the world were able to avoid direct liability. One could look at this situation and say maybe they had good intentions, but I do not believe so. I do not believe that wealthy and powerful people have average citizens and the working classes best interests at heart. DOGE is the perfect example that the rich and powerful will say whatever lie and trick needed to get their agenda across and multiply their power.
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