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If Elon Musk fired every single federal worker his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would only save a quarter of the money he promised to save and would amount to a piddling 4 percent of annual federal spending, according to a new report.
That doesn’t even count the massive $36 trillion U.S. debt.
Musk, meanwhile, is maneuvering for an additional $2.4 billion federal contract for his SpaceX company. And some members of his crew of DOGE workers are reportedly collecting six-figure salaries funded by American taxpayers as they slash an estimated tens of thousands of federal jobs for others.
A New York Times podcast has mocked Musk’s antics as the “useless spending cut theater of DOGE.”
But it sells, notes The New Yorker in an article earlier this week. Voters like the idea of increased efficiency, and there’s a lot of animosity among Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters about the idea of the “deep state” peopled by imagined fat-cat federal bureaucrats.
No one really knows how much Musk’s DOGE has saved because each of his lists of savings “receipts” have been riddled with errors. The DOGE team paperwork involving job performance reviews and accounting calculations (if they exist) are not being released to the media or to the public.
If Musk fired all 2.3 million federal workers outside of military or postal personnel, he would cut $245.8 billion a year in federal salaries, The New Yorker has calculated, using an average federal salary of just over $100,000.
That’s just a quarter of the $1 trillion dollars in savings Musk has promised to ax. And that vow is already a 50 percent reduction from an earlier Musk claim that he would save the nation $2 trillion.
The figures reveal how very minuscule an impact on overall federal savings Musk has had.
Cutting every federal worker, used as a comparison, would obviously be counterproductive because there would be no one to ferret out tax cheats or collect the taxes that help run the nation, including stopping planes from crashing into each other and sending out Social Security checks that Americans have been paying for during their working lives.
Trump himself blew a hole in the nation’s debt his first time in the White House with massive tax cuts, which most benefited corporations and the wealthy. The House of Representatives has approved a budget framework this year that provides for up to $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
The cuts, on top of growing interest payments on a ballooning federal debt, defense spending and mandatory spending, which covers payments like Social Security and Medicare, account for 85 percent of the federal budget, and what’s responsible for the growing budget imbalance, not “bloated” federal payrolls, notes The New Yorker.
The number of federal employees has remained “fairly steady” since the 1970s, and has dropped “considerably” as a percentage of the “workforce at large,” the magazine reports.
“If the goal is to reduce spending, you’re not going to get there by firing federal employees,” Manhattan Institute fellow Jessica Reidl, a fiscal conservative, noted in an opinion column in The New York Times Wednesday. “Most government spending goes to benefits to us, not to administrative costs,” she added.
The really startling news? Reidl estimates that DOGE has realistically saved “perhaps” just $2 billion, not the $55 billion Elon Musk initially claimed.
