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Tech billionaire and DOGE hatchet man Elon Musk promised to save the nation $2 trillion.
In reality, in spite of massive cuts in federal agencies, contracts, services and jobs by U.S. government spending is actually up more than 6 percent over the same period last year during the Biden administration, according to new Treasury data.
That increase doesn’t include the added costs of required payments to a quarter-of-a-million ousted federal workers (either fired or urged out the door), unemployment benefits and pricey rehirings of of employees mistakenly fired.
According to a model by the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, using weekly Treasury data, spending climbed 6.3% (about $156 billion) since Trump took office, compared with the first four months of 2024 when Joe Biden was president.
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Many of Musk’s cuts will actually cost, including taxpayer funds going to an army of lawyers from the Department of Justice battling a cascade of court cases against the government’s dismantling that many judges have already said appears to be illegal.
Damages from any illegal firings are likely also to be extremely pricey. So is the loss of critically important workers who earn far more than their salaries, or will have to be replaced for critical services by more expensive private-sector employees.
Among the most massive costs will be the huge reduction in workers at the Internal Revenue Service, who are worth their weight in gold because of the taxes they collect or ferret out from cheats, the key source of income for the country.
Musk, who is no longer working at the White House, initially promised he would shave $2 trillion from federal spending and debt, but quickly cut that amount in half. Last month he lowered it further to $150 billion, then upped it to $160 billion, a tiny fraction of what he first promised.
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But it’s difficult to know how much his Department of Government Efficiency has actually saved, given the error-riddled “receipts” that have been posted on the DOGE website.
Jessica Riedl, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute, recently estimated the actual savings at about $2 billion The Atlantic noted. Prediction markets expect a grand total of $1 billion in savings.
In any case, the Trump administration two weeks ago had already spent $5 billion dollars more than the total Musk claimed he had saved.
Though the cost savings – the purported reason for Trump and Musk’s dismantling of the government – was a flop, the DOGE impact was nevertheless massive.
“In terms of downsizing,” what DOGE has done is “unprecedented for sure,” Richard Stern, a federal budget expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told Politico.
Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan, pro-government nonprofit, told Politico that DOGE has touched “every element of our government,” but its impact has been particularly significant in the fields of scientific research, health care, and in international development, which he said has been “wiped away.”
He added: “What they’ve gotten rid of is important capability, amazing talent and deep relationships, both here and in other places. To rebuild will require not 100 days, but years and years.”
Musk could not immediately be reached for comment. White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields told Politico that Trump had a “mandate” to “uproot waste, fraud and abuse.”
