The "idea" was an ideological purge dressed up as something everyone can get behind. Given the outstanding success in bamboozling idiots, I expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
Yeah, I still can't understand how people don't get it yet. They never wanted to reduce the deficit whatsoever, they just wanted to cut spending on things they didn't personally like.
The point was never to "save money" for the United States. They might as well have said the point was to save puppies -- it's just a framing they adopted so people would say "I agree with it in spirit". Instead of focusing on and pointing out the corrupt intent, you say you actually agree with their intent. Diabolical really.
Come to think of it, they did it with immigration to. DOGE was going to get rid of waste fraud and abuse. ICE was going to get rid of rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. Who can disagree wit that goal? You don't support MURDER do you?!
But just as DOGE didn't live up to their promise, ICE went after landscapers, builders, and farmers and people are surprised Pikachu over it. "But I thought he said just the violent criminals..."
It's worse than "the idea is better than the execution." You are offering a lot of leniency in the meaning of your words there, and that should bother you more than it seems to but here we are.
The "idea" that was executed on here was a non-starter to begin with. You don't get anywhere by lighting everything that seems like waste on fire and burning it to the ground, learning its effects later. A modern government is not something that is riddled with waste so much that it does nothing. Their first target, USAID, as far as I could tell had no idea what was coming. They didn't even seem to bother to look into what they did, just the cashflows. Which of course will seem wasteful if you don't have a human heart with feelings, it's called U-S-A-I-D. Saying the idea was good here is like giving them the benefit of the doubt that sure maybe they can't read or understand anything, but let them axe these things without a second thought? Come on, you shouldn't let Elon off that easy.
> Like a lot of things, the IDEA is good, the execution is trash.
The idea was trash, too.
The idea wasn't actually make "a more efficient government with less corruption," it was "let Elon Musk and a bunch lackeys literally just move fast and break things."
Nope, can't all agree. DOGE was great and you should expect to see a lot more of it in future, even more systematized.
Look at it like this:
> About half of the rehires, Kamarck estimated, “appear to have been mandated by the courts.”
So of the employees the government actually wanted back, there were maybe 10,000 - according to Ars which is an enemy of DOGE and Musk. Probably far fewer in reality.
But this was always the plan, it's what worked at Twitter too. The theory is that you can't easily know if you can cut more until you start finding that you needed people. And the US Gov is in so much debt, drastic measures are absolutely required. Any argument to the contrary ignores the fiscal situation.
As always, 60% of government spending is in 3 categories. Anyone who is touting a ned to balance the budget and is not taking moves to hit on these 3 (Medicare, Social Security, National Defesnse) is not seriously interested in balancing the budget.
- SS is political suicide and no one is even fancying touching it (and to be fair, it's hard to touch). Just kicking it down the road until it's too late. Ideally we remove the contribution caps from this so we can keep it funded, but alas.
- Medicare is the health plan for the old people, so it's equally risky to touch that
politically. Any backlash seen from making healtchare cuts this year would be 10-fold if they touch medicare
- So then there's national defense. Not as unpopular to touch, but instead we keep pouring more money into it.
So no. Playing penny slots with all this turmoil isn't helping the budget. Pretty sure the ICE funding boost alone cancelled out even the most optimistic reports of DOGE savings.
The problem with DOGE savings is that they had the typical Musk promise progression:
October 2024: Musk: “at least $2 trillion” promise.
January 20 2025: DOGE officially established by executive order.
February/March 2025: Revised target up to $1 trillion.
10 April 2025: $150 billion savings expectation announced.
By April 2025: Claim of ~$160 billion saved.
23 November 2025: Reuters reports DOGE disbanded ahead of schedule.
Independent reports of the actual result ... well claim negative savings. Musk increased spending instead of decreasing it:
A analysis by CBS News reports DOGE claims to have saved US$ 160 billion, but estimates that the cuts may instead cost taxpayers around US$ 135 billion.
The Washington Post showed that many of the announced savings were inflated: for example, of 1,125 contracts listed as cancelled, only ~US$ 7.2 billion in savings could be verified; many reflected zero savings.
There was just the longest federal shutdown in history exactly because the Republicans were trying to control healthcare spending. You can't claim they aren't trying to touch the big ticket items.
They theorize that the ICE funding will be net revenue positive in the end.
They've also done big tax rises (tariffs), again, partly to try and get the debt under control.
You can't claim DOGE is somehow inconsistent or they're chickening out of fights over spending. They are doing what they can within the party allocations the voters gave them.
Musk/DOGE started out by claiming they could save $2 trillion of the federal budget. They quickly backpedaled to $1 trillion and kept downscaling it, until now they're claiming less than $160 billion. Independent reports claim it is closer to MINUS $200 to $300 billion (as in Musk/DOGE increased federal spending rather than save anything at all).
I would call this a pretty fucking big inconsistency. If you backpedal on your promises 100% I would call that inconsistent. Musk/DOGE backpedaled on their promise 92%, and according to independent observers 115%.
Whichever of those 2 figures is true, I would call it pretty damn fucking inconsistent ...
When "your household" is a metaphor for "a government", the obvious other things they can do include:
• Just directly ordering itself more income (taxes)
• Literally printing more money to reducing the burden of existing interest payments that are 4 times what DOGE claims to have saved
• Increasing the pension age, broadening the tax base and reducing the expense for whatever the USA's federal pension is. Every year of increase to the federal pension age makes about as much difference as DOGE claims to have made.
• In the USA's case sorting out the mess that is how Medicare (12.7% of federal spending) and Medicaid (9% of federal spending) spend more per person than the UK spends on the NHS despite Medicare and Medicaid being in addition to all that private healthcare and also despite the combination of public and private American health spending giving worse average life expectancy. This would free up by far the largest amount of money in the overall economy, but you may have to pretend in this already hypothetical scenario that the federal government first nationalised all the insurance payments before you see it impact the combined budget of taxes-and-insurance.
• Even just shrink the armed forces (12.5% of federal spending) from "biggest by a large margin" to "biggest by a smaller margin".
• Encouraging as many working-age foreigners as possible to come and do work while being registered as taxpayers.
AI told me 7 of 9 CVEs were exploited in the wild. Copilot gave me a different 7 than ChatGPT. Both were wrong about at least one.
My intern, a goofy 20 year old EE student, got different results too, but he at least was able to tell me "i'm not sure" and give me real links to where he looked.
