Meanwhile, spending overall grew by $500 billion, driven by programs no one in the White House dared touch: Medicare, Social Security, defense.
“They fired cancer researchers and kept Pentagon pork.”
DOGE’s workforce overhaul made the biggest headlines—and created the most chaos. Nearly 260,000 federal employees were pushed out in five months. Some took buyouts. Many were fired. Thousands were later reinstated by court order, with full back pay. The cost? Roughly $135 billion, according to nonpartisan watchdogs.
So much for saving money.
One health analyst put it bluntly: “They cut cheap civil servants and replaced them with expensive contractors. It was a full-cost own goal.”
And yet, the restructuring served another goal: fear. Career staffers got the message. Speak up, and you’re out. Complain, and DOGE bots would drag your name online by nightfall.
“It wasn’t reform. It was regime change.”
Behind the curtain, Musk’s role blurred lines. He wasn’t elected. He wasn’t confirmed. But he had passwords. He had access. Government networks, procurement systems, internal communications—sources inside two agencies confirmed Musk-affiliated firms received “data access no outsider should ever get.”
No firewall. No oversight.
When questioned, officials cited “partnership innovation.” No one mentioned the billions in federal contracts tied to Musk’s companies.
“The man who sells rockets now controls procurement.”
Meanwhile, the deficit ballooned. The administration’s proposed tax expansion added $500 billion annually. DOGE’s trickle of savings vanished in its wake. Cuts to IRS enforcement, education loan collection, and regulatory agencies didn’t just fail to help—they widened the hole. Economists called it sabotage disguised as streamlining.
And the big cuts? Still pending in court. Congress never passed them. Most live on paper, as proposals or executive actions stuck in litigation.
But the headlines had already done their work.
“They didn’t need to win. They just needed the photo op.”
DOGE’s real success was narrative. It let Trump say he was “fixing” Washington while gutting the parts of government his voters hated. The parts that helped people unlike them. The parts with experts. The parts that fought disease, enforced the law, or taught science.
The deeper goal was structural. Strip the civil service. Gut the agencies. Hand keys to loyalists and allies. Make government small enough to be sold off in pieces, wrapped in slogans and SpaceX livery.
“This wasn’t about cutting the budget. It was about cutting the brakes.”
In April, a whistleblower from the Department of Education described her last day. She walked past two shuttered offices and a whiteboard that still read “Audit Prep, May 2024.” She wasn’t replaced. Her role—tracking fraudulent for-profit colleges—no longer existed.