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DOGE was supposed to save money by cutting $2 trillion of waste, fraud, and abuse. What has it accomplished?
Elon Musk's original savings estimate was scaled back to $1 trillion and then scaled back again to $150 billion. The DOGE website now claims $165 billion was saved, but that's using fuzzy math. An analysis in The Atlantic (gift link) found that federal spending actually increased by $86 billion in February and March compared to the same time last year.
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has even taken a cursory glance at the federal budget. Most of the budget goes to health care (26%), Social Security (22%), interest on the debt (14%), and defense (13%). DOGE touched none of these. Instead, it went after minuscule budget items, without providing evidence that any of this spending was actually wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive¹.
In an interview with NPR, a former DOGE employee said he was surprised to learn that the federal government doesn't have much waste, fraud, and abuse.
I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent. And the reason is — I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.
Listen to the whole interview here.
Ultimately, the most important effect of DOGE cuts won't be spending cuts but lives lost. Many of the program cuts were for programs that saved lives or were keeping people alive. One peer-reviewed estimate found that, as of today, the cuts will lead to the deaths of nearly 215,000 children and 103,000 adults.
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Click here to see how much those numbers have changed since that screengrab.
For just one example, NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof shared the story of Evan Anzoo, a 5-y-o born with AIDS and living in South Sudan (gift link). He received medicine through PEPFAR, a program passed with bipartisan support under President George W. Bush. DOGE froze funding for the program in January, 0.0000009% of the federal budget, claiming the program is inefficient, even as 26 million lives have been saved by the program so far. Evan died not long after his treatments ended.
That’s the legacy of DOGE.
Check out this previous newsletter about DOGE:
Is Franklin Graham Corrupt for Taking USAID Money? | ||||||
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Corruption flows from USAID, right-wing commentators argue, yet somehow Franklin Graham remains clean. | ||||||
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What Else You Should Read
Russell Moore: “PEPFAR and the Uneasy Conscience of American Christianity”
Perhaps there’s a better way than PEPFAR to save the lives of children and adults with AIDS and other deadly diseases. Maybe there’s an 11-cent solution instead of a 12-cent one. If so, let it be proposed and debated.
What’s happening now, though, isn’t that. It’s the denial, first, that vulnerable people are dying at all. But most of all it’s the ignoring of the whole matter. Christians in the Global South—where the gospel is spreading fastest in the world—see what is happening, but it is easy for North American Christians just to pretend people like little Evan aren’t there at all.
One Christian—a nonpolitical sort—told me that he had asked for prayer in his church’s weekly prayer gathering for those with AIDS who are in jeopardy due to these cuts. He made no further comment about them. Yet he was told that he should keep the “political speeches” out of prayer. “How is praying for ‘orphans and widows in their distress’ [James 1:27] a political speech?” he asked. If it is, what does that say about our politics? Or our prayers?
World Relief: “When One Part Suffers: Standing with the Church at Risk of Deportation”
The stories that follow highlight three Christians with TPS who, despite long-standing contributions to their communities, now face the looming threat of deportation.
ProPublica: “‘The Federal Government Is Gone’: Under Trump, the Fight Against Extremist Violence Is Left Up to the States”
Across the country, other state-level security officials and violence prevention advocates have reached the same conclusion. In interviews with ProPublica, they described the federal government as retreating from the fight against extremist violence, which for years the FBI has deemed the most lethal and active domestic concern. States say they are now largely on their own to confront the kind of hate-fueled threats that had turned Temple Israel into a fortress.
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The leader of one large prevention-focused nonprofit that has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations, speaking on condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities, said it’s important not to write off red states. Some Republican governors have adopted strategies after devastating attacks in their states.
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The pitch is key, the nonprofit director said. Republican officials are more likely to be swayed by efforts focused on “violence prevention” than on combating extremist ideologies. “Use the language and the framing that works in the context you’re working in,” the advocate said.
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To learn more about how J29 Coalition got started read the first substack post below.
As I've pointed out in this newsletter before but should be emphasized every time we talk about the DOGE cuts — DOGE's actions are unconstitutional and illegal. Power over the federal budget is explicitly given to Congress in Article I, sections 8 and 9 of the Constitution, and Congress has reiterated this authority many times in law, most especially the Budget and Impoundment Control Act.
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