DOGE torched nearly $10 billion trying to root out waste, fraud and abuse: watchdog

Elon Musk (Photo by Hamilton Handke for Reuters)

DOGE Paid Billions to Manufacture Government Failure

The Price of “Efficiency”

The Trump administration spent an estimated $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave while dismantling the federal workforce. According to the Government Accountability Office, leave usage rose 435 percent from 2023, with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency responsible for much of the increase. Its deferred-resignation program put more than 144,000 employees on leave and cost an estimated $6.7 billion.

That is enough context. The political substance is simpler: officials claiming a mandate to eliminate waste deliberately paid federal workers not to work so they could advertise a smaller government.

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Management Made the Decision

The workers did not design this arrangement. DOGE promoted it, the Office of Personnel Management administered and defended it, and the Trump administration made workforce reduction the governing objective.

Blaming employees for accepting an offer created by political appointees would be an obvious misdirection. Agencies even offered multiple rounds as workers recognized the scale of the planned purge. The institutional actors controlled the terms, the money, and the consequences. Employees were responding to an administration telling them their jobs—and potentially their agencies—were disposable.

Waste Was the Instrument

DOGE was marketed as an attack on “waste, fraud and abuse.” Yet its signature personnel initiative generated billions in immediate costs by keeping employees on payroll while removing their labor from public service.

This was not an accidental contradiction. The administration chose workforce reduction as its visible measure of success, then accepted extraordinary costs to produce that result. “Efficiency” became a label attached to fewer workers, regardless of whether the method saved money, preserved expertise, or allowed agencies to perform their statutory duties.

The waste was not merely tolerated. It was instrumental: public money financed the spectacle of government retreat.

The Savings Claim Cannot Audit Itself

OPM Director Scott Kupor called the spending a one-time expense and claimed that eliminating 270,000 positions would save $40 billion annually. He had previously cited annual savings exceeding $20 billion.

But OPM does not know the program’s true leave costs, and the GAO warned that unreliable agency data may distort even its own estimate. That gap matters. An administration cannot credibly declare a 400 percent return on investment while lacking dependable figures for the investment itself.

Kupor’s arithmetic also narrows the ledger to payroll. The source provides no evidence that his savings claim accounts for lost capacity, interrupted services, depleted expertise, or the costs of work shifted elsewhere. Treating headcount reduction as self-validating is political branding, not demonstrated efficiency.

Sabotage Disguised as Accounting

Senator Patty Murray described the program as an expensive way to make government worse. The sharper point is that worsening government can serve the project.

An administration committed to shrinking public institutions benefits politically when those institutions become slower, thinner, and less capable. The resulting failures can then be presented as proof that government never worked. That interpretation is an inference, but it fits the disclosed sequence: remove employees, pay billions to keep them idle, and defend the operation through projected savings that the responsible office cannot fully verify.

The framing of bureaucratic confusion is therefore too weak. This was a chain of decisions made by identifiable officials with institutional authority.

The System Rewards the Demolition

This episode reveals a durable pattern in anti-government politics: destruction is counted immediately, while capacity disappears off the balance sheet. Positions eliminated become a headline number. Services degraded, knowledge lost, and public money burned during the purge become secondary complications.

DOGE did not expose a government incapable of managing resources. It demonstrated how political leaders can manufacture incapacity and call the wreckage reform. The people with power made the policy; the public absorbed the cost; and “efficiency” supplied the camouflage.

Thanks to Raw Story

Source: DOGE torched nearly $10 billion trying to root out waste, fraud and abuse: watchdog

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