Elon Musk promised us a revolution. A leaner, meaner, hyper-efficient federal government. A $2 trillion savings bonanza delivered by his Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, was supposed to be the silver bullet for waste, fraud, and bureaucracy. He made the case with the same swagger he brought to Tesla, Twitter, and Mars. Trust him. He’s the guy who lands rockets backwards. But here on Earth, where workers still need jobs and citizens still need services, the numbers don’t lie. After months of mass layoffs, agency closures, and catastrophic loss of public service capacity, Musk’s DOGE has delivered not two trillion in savings, but $150 billion. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a rounding scandal. And it’s time to call it what it is: a national policy failure of staggering proportions.
$150 billion is not nothing, but in a federal budget that exceeds $6 trillion, it's barely a dent, especially when compared to the devastation left in its wake. Entire agencies gutted. Thousands of career public servants fired. Regulatory infrastructure dismantled. In many cases, the “savings” were achieved not by efficiency but by destruction, like selling off your home to avoid a leaky roof repair. Take the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where nearly 90 percent of the workforce was terminated in one sweeping action. That agency, formed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, exists to protect people, especially the poor and elderly, from predatory lenders and financial scams. It’s now a husk, incapable of performing its basic function.
And the pain doesn’t end at the CFPB. The Department of Education has been decimated, laying off over 1,300 employees and closing field offices that provided critical support for underserved school districts. Environmental enforcement has slowed to a crawl. Veterans’ benefits processing times have surged. Even the National Weather Service, yes, the people who warn us about hurricanes and tornadoes, saw staffing cuts that have impacted regional forecast accuracy. This isn’t abstract budget trimming. This is real suffering, in real time, across the entire country.
For all its bold promises, DOGE’s approach was built on a Silicon Valley fantasy: that a complex, interdependent government bureaucracy could be “disrupted” like a failing startup. Fire fast, break things, let algorithms and private contractors sort it out later. But government isn’t a tech company. You can’t iterate on hurricane warnings. You can’t pivot your way out of a disabled veterans' claims backlog. You can’t A/B test environmental regulations. The result of importing Musk’s techno-libertarian ethos into government has been predictably disastrous, a dangerous overconfidence in the power of market logic and a deep misunderstanding of the public good.
And here’s the kicker: the American people were sold this catastrophe with a straight face. Musk didn't just say DOGE might save $2 trillion. He guaranteed it. That was the figure waved around to justify slashing jobs, defunding watchdogs, and neutering regulatory agencies. That was the number used to silence critics who warned about the dangers of deconstructing administrative capacity. And now, with barely a whisper, that promise has been walked back to a mere fraction of its original figure, $150 billion, roughly 7.5 percent of what was advertised. If a public school district misrepresented their budget projections by that much, heads would roll. If a private company did it, investors would revolt and regulators would launch an investigation. But in Washington, the silence is deafening.
And that silence extends especially to the Republican-controlled Congress. The same lawmakers who spent years grandstanding about fiscal responsibility, who shrieked at every dollar spent on food stamps or renewable energy, have been conspicuously quiet about Musk’s broken promise. Where’s the outrage over the mismanagement of public funds? Where’s the accountability for the people who lost their livelihoods and the citizens now left without essential services? For all the rhetoric about "draining the swamp," this smells an awful lot like protecting your own.
Some have suggested that the $150 billion figure isn’t the final word, that DOGE may yet deliver more savings. But that’s little comfort to the Americans already paying the price. The economic ripple effects of the mass layoffs have already begun to hit local economies, particularly in small towns and red-state regions where federal employment was a cornerstone of stability. Small businesses are suffering. Housing markets are stalling. Public confidence in government is eroding even further. In the name of efficiency, we’ve created chaos.
And make no mistake: privatization is rushing in to fill the vacuum. Many of the functions once handled by federal workers are now being outsourced to private contractors, some with direct financial ties to Musk’s own ventures. The promise of eliminating waste may instead result in funneling public funds into corporate hands with even less transparency and accountability than before. The fox isn’t just guarding the henhouse, he’s selling it off piece by piece to his friends.
It didn’t have to be this way. Real government reform is possible. It takes patience, data, inclusive decision-making, and the humility to understand that governance isn’t about domination or ideology, it’s about service. But this administration wasn’t interested in reform. It wanted a show. It wanted a headline. It wanted a $2 trillion fantasy that could be used to justify gutting institutions that, however imperfect, serve the public interest. And now that the truth is out, we’re expected to move on as if none of it matters.
Well, it does matter. The loss of institutional knowledge, the erosion of civil service, the degradation of trust in our most basic civic systems, these are not things that can be undone overnight. They are the long tail of Musk’s failure. And if we allow this moment to pass without consequence, we will be telling future leaders that it’s acceptable to lie on a trillion-dollar scale as long as the marketing is good enough.
We need more than accountability. We need a reckoning. Because if this is the new model for governance, bombastic promises, reckless execution, and corporate capture, we are not just failing to cut costs. We are mortgaging the future of the country.
Disclaimer: Jim Powers writes Opinion Columns. The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing Company or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.
