Elon Musk’s Doge savings goal
Elon Musk’s Doge savings target
Elon Musk’s Doge savings goal, Elon Musk stands up another goalpost for DOGE on his way out, claiming savings will come ‘over time’
Elon Musk made at least his fourth separate vow on what his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will save on Friday as he stood alongside President Trump during an appearance to mark the conclusion of his service as a special government employee.
“I’m sure that in the long term we will see $1 trillion of savings, a trillion dollars of waste and fraud elimination,” Musk said Friday, vowing that his team’s efforts will continue and that he will remain involved even as he is officially departing Washington, D.C. Elon Musk’s Doge savings goal
“We are doggedly seeking a trillion dollars in reductions in waste and fraud, which will save the American taxpayer,” he said elsewhere. Musk’s newest vow comes after a whirlwind ride on the campaign trail and in Washington that featured him making a series of vows, beginning with $2 trillion in savings per year, which was shortly thereafter cut in half. During a recent Cabinet meeting, he made a third prediction when he admitted that the first savings would translate to reductions in waste and fraud of around $150 billion. Musk’s comments Friday were a change on timeline. The richest man in the world said he has no doubt that “the DOGE team will only grow stronger over time” and that he’d like DOGE to be “like a way of life” in Washington in the coming years.Elon Musk’s Doge savings goal
In November, when Donald Trump originally proposed to put Elon Musk at the head of a new Department of Government Efficiency, the proposal was broadly dismissed as a joke. Then Trump was installed, and DOGE started its very earnest stampede through the government. As an attempt to meaningfully cut federal expenditures, however, DOGE is still completely unserious. Elon Musk’s Doge savings goal
Musk originally vowed to cut $2 trillion of the $7 trillion federal budget, later reduced his sights to $1 trillion, then $150 billion. Even that scaled-back goal is extremely unlikely.
Elon Musk’s Doge savings goal Measuring the budget impact of the Musk experiment precisely is still a challenge, but we can start by considering what has been promised by DOGE itself. Last February, its site asserted to have amassed $55 billion in yearly-spending cuts. But its “wall of receipts” accounted for only $16.5 billion of that amount. The bulk of that came from a typo asserting $8 billion in savings by canceling an $8 million deal. As The New York Times has documented, that was hardly the sole bookkeeping glitch. After fixing such errors like cancellations of nonexistent contracts, three-times counting of identical reforms, and incorporating decades-old lapsed contracts, actual budget saves amounted to only $2 billion.
Brian Klaas: DOGE is flirting with disaster
DOGE’s website currently claims $165 billion saved. Still, it reports only a small percentage of the supposed reductions, and previous accounting blunders have been replaced with newer ones. One sleight of hand that is often commonplace is to cancel a “blanket purchase agreement”—wherein the recipient had been granted the functional equivalent of a credit limit to make necessary expenditures on a project—and then to assert savings of the full credit limit instead of the (often much lower) level actually spent. Even supposing the claimed savings of the website have doubled in accuracy since February, the savings each year would amount to maybe $15 billion, or 0.2 percent of federal expenditures.
Luckily, better sources than DOGE’s own tallies are available. Best of all is the Treasury Department’s monthly accounting of outlays by agency and program. Any real cost-cutting measures by DOGE should be reflected in the budget, along with the impact of other White House initiatives, such as cuts to public-health programs and attempts to shut down USAID and the Department of Education.
According to DOGE, its actions have saved $160 billion, though one analysis suggests those same measures have actually shifted about $135 billion in costs back onto taxpayers.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) credits these savings to its campaign against wasteful and fraudulent government spending.. But that drive might have had a price tag for taxpayers as well, with an estimate from a nonpartisan research and advocacy organization putting DOGE’s actions at $135 billion for this year.
The review attempts to count the cost of sending tens of thousands of federal workers on paid leave, rehiring wrongly fired workers and lost productivity, as per the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan non-profit organization that specializes in the federal workforce.
PSP’s calculation is founded on the $270 billion annual cost of compensating the federal workforce, figuring the effect of DOGE’s activities, ranging from paid time off to productivity losses. Taxpayers’ $135 billion price tag doesn’t account for the cost of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE’s actions, or the effect of projected lost tax revenues due to IRS staff reductions.
DOGE has made attempts to reduce federal spending by calling on government employees to take a deferred resignation scheme, which enabled many staff members to keep full pay and benefits until September without putting in any work. Yet another 24,000 government staff laid off under the reform program have recently been rehired after a court decision.
Other agencies too have rehired some employees after wrongly laying them off, like bird flu specialists who were let go by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Federal employees have also had to perform additional tasks like recording their weekly achievements, which has reduced productivity, Partnership for Public Service President Max Stier said to CBS MoneyWatch.
“We haven’t seen a lot of attention to the waste [DOGE] is causing,” Stier said in an interview with CBS MoneyWatch about his organization’s decision to examine the cost of DOGE’s reductions. “This is an initiative that was put into place to combat waste, but we were witnessing the reverse.”
“In the end it will be the public who will be paying for this,” he added, commenting that he anticipates the cost to taxpayers will increase as other DOGE reductions are implemented.
