We’ve watched as DOGE chief Elon Musk’s promised pot of savings from his “efficiency” operation has shrunk from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to what he now claims is $150 billion, or 7.5% the amount initially promised. Now new estimates suggest that the way Musk has gone about his cost-cutting crusade might cost nearly as much as — if not more — than what he claims to have saved taxpayers.
As The New York Times reports, DOGE hasn’t been cheap for the federal government:
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity, and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University.
Put those two figures together and you’re approaching $145 billion in costs. And that’s not counting, as the Times notes, the legal fees the federal government is incurring to defend against dozens of lawsuits contesting DOGE’s authority.
A White House spokesman defended the cuts in a statement to the Times, saying, “It’s important to realize that doing nothing has a cost, too, and these so-called experts and groups are conveniently absent when looking at the costs of doing nothing.” It should be noted that DOGE’s costs up front might be more expensive than in subsequent years.
Even so, the estimates raise serious questions about DOGE's net savings — and that’s assuming Musk’s quoted savings numbers are reliable, which they often haven’t been. Moreover, the estimated lost revenue from the IRS cuts would be a recurring phenomenon. Musk’s degrading of the administrative state and social services while potentially saving nothing helps underscore how scammy the DOGE enterprise, and sheds light on how this whole operation is at its core not about fiscal discipline.
Musk and his team were perversely creative in devising ways to fire workers en masse. But as a group of cocky political outsiders who confused speed with efficiency, they weren’t equipped to anticipate the legal restrictions on what they could do. Their rash approach has resulted in lots of rehiring and back pay for people wrongly fired — and lost productivity along the way. Musk and his team put their faith in a kind of “shoot first, ask questions later” strategy, but that resulted in administrative whiplash. “Accidentally” canceled programs have had to be re-assembled. And blanket firings of “probationary workers” resulted in the squandering of expensive hiring and training processes for hyperspecialized positions that could cost up to $1 million for positions like spies, the Times notes.
There is a possibility that Musk is delivering the opposite of taxpayer savings — a worse government at roughly the same cost. Social Security is under siege, foreign aid has been eviscerated, and the IRS is less equipped to stop tax cheats (which in turn means less government revenue). But, according to the estimates reported by the Times, no significant sum of money is being saved, and there’s no way the “savings” from what we’ve seen so far will net out to massive “DOGE checks” for the American public.
One would hope Musk is slightly humbled by this experience. As an adversary of organized labor, he may have been surprised to find that it’s a bit harder to treat government workers as entirely dispensable. And as someone who has flippantly described the government as nothing more than a corporation, he may have been forced to think twice about the unique logistical, social and ethical obligations and challenges of running a state. If his own conscience and the courts didn’t do that for him, maybe the apparent backlash against Tesla will.