Elon Musk’s five-month tenure in the Trump administration provided the country a funhouse mirror version of technocratic governing. Here was a supposed expert in efficiency, a genius brought into to make the fixes politicians couldn’t. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency that he may or may not have led promised to slash $2 trillion in wasteful spending from the United States budget. According to its own “Wall of Receipts” website, it cut at most $215 billion, or about 11% of that initial projection.
DOGE’s failure at its task is about all we know about it. A new report from the Government Accountability Office explains that the quasi-agency vastly exaggerated the savings it produced. Some of the claimed cuts are impossible to verify. Despite promising transparency and a data-driven mindset, DOGE was a jumbled mess, and we’re left with little understanding of what it did or didn’t do.
Indeed, a month after it officially shuttered, we’re still struggling to figure out exactly how much harm was caused by Musk and his similarly unqualified wrecking crew.
This is a preview of a column by Hayes Brown. Read the full column here.
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