I admit I’m technologically deficient, but I needed to quickly find out how much money was supposedly saved and how many federal jobs were eliminated by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative. I looked and saw many press releases and articles in many media outlets, but they were contradictory at best and somewhat incomprehensible at worst. (Some have spoken of billions of dollars being considered immediately.)
Having no technical skills in using artificial intelligence (AI), I thought I’d give it a try. One of my apps responded saying it couldn’t find any data when I asked the question above. I was surprised to say the least, after reading a barrage of assertions from the Trump administration and numerous counterclaims from the mainstream and other media outlets. This was supposed to be an example of our best technically skilled technocrats going to revolutionize and downsize government and save huge amounts of money (hopefully enough to offset some of the lost revenue from the administration’s tax cuts for big business and the ultra-rich).
Although Musk resigned in May, I figured someone at DOGE must be tracking the work and its results, but apparently not enough for my AI, Pi, to find specific information. Thinking there must be an error, I tried ChatGTP.
This app gave me sort of a far-fetched answer based on the government’s claims of $55 billion in savings (with numbers possibly higher), but the actual confirmed savings are significantly lower due to data issues.
The response to job losses due to all the associated layoffs, retirements, and buyouts was a bit more specific, at least 260,000 federal civilian jobs.
This savings figure was a far cry from the supposed figures DOGE published on its website in June, its Wall of Receipts, which showed savings and reductions of $180 billion. PolitiFact, the Wall Street Journal, the American Enterprise Institute, the New York Times, and numerous Wall Street advisors quickly showed how erroneous these claims were and how they quickly veered into the realm of Trumpian hyperbole. An analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute said at the time that the claimed cuts were reckless and told media outlets that the results of DOGE’s achievements and savings were impossible to verify. Jessica Tillman, associate dean for government procurement law at George Washington University Law School, said: “[A]everything that has been said publicly about [DOGEs] savings are of no use. The last estimated savings figure claimed on the DOGE website on October 4 was $214 billion, but apparently ChatGTP does not believe this estimate.
I suppose someone who understands AI (like the experts employed by DOGE, or even Mr. Musk) can explain these two answers and why all the data available to show confirmed savings with a feature is significantly lower due to data issues. I figured our best and brightest, the ones who go to Mars and give us self-driving cars, could at least do the math on the economy saved by releasing 260,000 federal employees and assessing a possible reduction in government services. Since AI hasn’t helped me much, I looked into the claims of the Trump administration and others based on my brief research on AI.
Based on the figures above, the claimed savings divided by the total number of employees reduced, each person laid off resulted in a savings of $212,000. I guess that seems high, but not too unreasonable considering the additional costs of salaries (such as pensions, payroll, etc.). The savings aren’t just from job cuts, however: the administration admits that contract renegotiation, fraud discovery (so far not revealed in detail), lease renegotiation, and other DOGE actions contributed to the purported $55 billion in savings. The deficit will not be reduced since Congress will have to reduce the appropriations allocated to the agencies concerned in the future.
Various news sources have concluded that the government believes that contract savings in particular are grossly overstated (but then again, we have had significant cutbacks and layoffs at the various government entities that compile government and economic spending statistics, so who knows if the administration’s new DOGE chief is committed to making the administration look good or producing unbiased data).
Speaking of unbiased data, we must remember that Musk first promised to save $2 trillion in a single fiscal year when he first launched DOGE. That claim quickly changed when he promised on March 6 of this year that they would cut $1 trillion in spending by the end of the 2025 fiscal year on September 30, 2025. To date, 45 days after that deadline, they have admitted that only 18% of that estimate was supposed real savings (after giving them the benefit of their significant “data issues” and Musk’s abandonment of his post in May 2025). I guess that makes our current success rate of 18 percent better than the 9 percent we would have had if they stuck to the $2 trillion estimate, although it would be nice if Trump kept his promise to give the American people a 20 percent dividend on DOGE savings and reduce the deficit. But again, if you believe the promises coming from the administration, I have a nice bridge to sell you.
To assess the chainsaw that Musk has wielded (literally and figuratively) against the federal government, we must consider the impact of service cuts on the nation. As Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, said, DOGE does not claim to have improved services in any way. On the contrary, it has deteriorated the quality of certain government services. In other words, the only benefit of his work lies in the real savings in the cost of these services, offset by the possible reduction in their efficiency that results.
Martha Gimbel of the Yale Budget Lab literally laughed when asked if DOGE and Musk have improved government services, responding: No, there has clearly been a degeneration of government services.
There have been longer wait times for appointments at VA hospitals, longer waits when people call the IRS, longer lines at Social Security offices, and the departure of many highly experienced Social Security employees has led to much less trained workers advising on benefits, according to Steven Greenhouse in The Guardian.
The list of affected agencies now facing additional problems is long, including Veterans Affairs, the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the National Institute of Health and Human Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). One staggering statistic concerns the 80,900 employees expected to be cut in the future at the VA, many of whom are health care workers. Cuts to medical research funding will certainly hurt research into cancer, diabetes and other diseases, and cuts to the Department of Education will impact students across the country and increase the burden on local school budgets (the list goes on).
At the end of March 2025, there were approximately 2.3 million federal civilian employees (excluding the Postal Service). The best estimate is that we have lost, or will lose, a total of 260,000 people to DOGE budget cuts and resulting retirements. Civilian employees of the federal government make up about 1.5 percent of the civilian population, a fairly constant percentage over the past ten years. The full consequences of DOGE’s actions have yet to be felt, whether it is the reduction in health care for veterans, the effect of the near dismemberment of USAID, or the elimination of federal aid to education. I believe that our friends and neighbors who work for us in government services are neither less honest nor more crooked like us. The condescending attitude of Musk’s tech bros toward government employees as fungible automatons who should be replaced as a cost-cutting measure, regardless of the effect on government departments (or how the firing process affects them individually), is reprehensible.
If there is fraud or waste in the administration of the federal government, it must be dealt with first through the inspectors general of the various agencies and then through appropriate prosecution. Taking a chainsaw to arbitrarily eliminate jobs and change our government without the oversight of Congress and the courts is to grant the powers of a king to the president, an unelected egomaniac with the attention span of a newt and the philosophy of destroying everything and then replacing it with whatever system he wants. I remember a comment often made in Vietnam: throw away the grenade and let God deal with it. This is not the way to fight a war, nor is it the way to run our government effectively and compassionately.
