Techdirt: DOGE's performative destruction of democratic government cost much more than the agencies it tried to destroy.

[ancianita]

Last edited Tue Oct 14, 2025, 02:44 PM - Edit history (1)

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https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/14/musk-promised-to-cut-2-trillion-government-spending-went-up-instead/

1.
"...DOGE was never about efficiency. It was always about ideological destruction masquerading as fiscal responsibility.

It was performance art designed to satisfy the fantasies of people who think running a government is like optimizing a social media algorithm.
Musk and his DOGE vandals assumed that complex government operations were just inefficient startups waiting to be “disrupted,” when in reality they were critical functions that keep society running.

The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of the year-end figures puts DOGE’s failure in stark relief: https://archive.ph/dqVXS

... The numbers are even more damning when you dig deeper.
The WSJ notes that the Trump administration recorded a $131 billion noncash spending reduction related to modifications in student-loan programs—essentially an accounting adjustment, not actual savings.
Without this paper shuffle, noninterest spending would have risen by $351 billion for the entire year.
DOGE was so ineffective at cutting real spending that they had to rely on accounting gimmicks to make their numbers look less catastrophic.

...The only categories where spending actually declined were the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (because fewer banks failed) and the Small Business Administration (because disaster-related loan costs from 2024 didn’t recur). Neither had anything to do with DOGE’s “efficiency” efforts. So much for revolutionary cost cutting.

The real story in these numbers is what any competent budget analyst could have predicted:
the biggest drivers of spending—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—all increased by 8%.
These programs grow because of aging demographics and rising healthcare costs, not because of bureaucratic inefficiency that can be solved by firing middle managers.

2.
...then there’s the perfect metaphor for DOGE’s “efficiency”: the government is now scrambling to rehire many of the workers Musk fired in his cost-cutting blitz. ...
The GSA rehiring wave is spreading across multiple agencies—the IRS, Labor Department, and National Park Service have all had to bring back employees who took DOGE’s buyout offers. When you’re rehiring at multiple major agencies simultaneously, that’s not fine-tuning efficiency—that’s admitting your entire approach was fundamentally broken...

...trying to bring all those people back while all non-essential government work is shut down and many government employees are simply not getting paid suggests it’s going to be even more difficult (and, therefore, costly) to eventually restaff the jobs that DOGE screwed up in cutting.


.3.
spending increased because DOGE was focused on ideological destruction rather than understanding what government actually does. You can’t achieve efficiency by firing the people who know how to do essential jobs and then hiring them back at higher costs.
... when you put conspiracy theorists and tech bros in charge of complex systems they don’t understand... DOGE’s ... expensive chaos ... proves some people’s expertise actually matters ... and that Silicon Valley billionaires don’t understand what that expertise does.

DOGE’s singular achievement was proving that “move fast and break things” is catastrophically unsuited to governing a democracy.
In Silicon Valley, you can break a social media feature and roll back the code.
In government, you break USAID and people die.
You fire essential workers and create expensive chaos that costs more to fix than the original “inefficiency” ever did.

The CBO numbers are the final punctuation mark on this expensive lesson in the difference between actual efficiency and performative destruction.

4.
Given what conspiracy-theory-driven approach has already cost taxpayers ... given the ongoing government shutdown and hiring crisis -- Americans should expect that bill to keep growing.".
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5. My thoughts...
While coping with the techbro insurgency's costly failure, we Americans also cope with Heritage Proj 2025's economic privatization plan, with all the imposed sickness and poverty it will bring.

As we try to elect a new government to rebuild...
Can we learn enough from the DOGE debacle to control & regulate techbros and media that try to sell Americans on government run by AI?

***The most important thing to remember: The U.S. Constitution was written for Humans, not for corporations and AI.
Humans must not themselves be the tools of corporations and AI. Corporations and AI are the tools of Humans.***

[Solly Mack]

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[yellow dahlia]

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