It’s all such a bummer. Government efficiency is undeniably a good thing, and we could stand to trim our budget by a trillion dollars or so. But this just isn’t the way to do it.
On the other hand, that galvanized steel construction wire DOES look pretty sweet.
Whether DOGE saves as much as they claim is beside the point. DOGE is doing a few important things.
1) Disrupting and killing the Democrats' taxpayer-funded political largesse of government funded NGOs which spend their grants advancing Democrat politics.
2) Eliminating the activists in government who will try and sabotage Trump's Presidency
3) Goading Democrats to take the 20% side of 80/20 issues and defend trans operas in South America.
The savings is just a scoreboard. Leftists who say the savings are overstated are completely missing the point here.
But a scoreboard puts up true information. It doesn’t display random numbers to make the team look good. Do you honestly have no preference for honesty here?
It's odd, then, that you care enough to constantly come in the comments section for Jeff's articles and say obnoxious, outlandish shit to try pick a fight with people.
This is the Russian strategy, when accused of lying, to just say "well, everyone lies." No attempt at all to even argue that what they're saying is the truth.
The fact that they're randomly fucking with people's lives while spewing false and misleading information has zero meaning to them as long as they "own" the libs.
well, neither side has an ounce of credibility. But if we cut spending by disarming the left's use of taxpayer funds to advance their ideology, I am all for it.
Imagine what the left would do if it turned out that USAID was funding a bunch of pro-life and Christian outfits to proselytize about abortion and fund subscriptions to the Daily Wire. The left would go crazy. Same thing.
It also seems like, per your description, *DOGE* is lying about what DOGE is up to. It claims to be an attempt to save a lot of money for the government, but what you’re describing is an ideological/partisan project that doesn’t even have cost savings as a goal.
In Dante's Inferno, the deeper you get into Hell, the worse the punishment. Dante reserved the eighth circle of Hell, Malebolge, for Liars. Flatterers. Fraudsters. Corrupt businessman. False Councilers... leaders and advisors who lead others to ruin.
So many great punishments there. Drowning in a river of shit. That's for flatterers! Being forced to swim in a pit of burning tar. (Corrupt businessmen.) Being forced to march around wearing robes that appear gold but are made of lead. (Hypocrites) And last but not least, just igniting and burning forever. That one is for False Councilers.
Pretty cool huh? Sometimes when times are tough it helps to go to your happy place.
I’ll add that anybody who has actually worked with CBO scores and other government budget estimates for years also knows they are made up bullshit numbers with no bearing on reality. Just look into many claims of the savings from the IRA and they are easily verifiable frauds.
I'm surprised that DOGE didn't threaten to sue the NYTimes for hacking for looking at the source code. That was S.O.P. 20 years ago.
I remember the FTX trial when the website had a running meter of how much collateral or insurance they had. In court we saw the server code, and it was just set to increment it by a random number each day. (They put work into the random number, too! To make it look plausible, it was based on the prior day's volume, and even had a chance of being negative, 2 or 3 days out of every 365. They weren't going to get caught using a flat RNG like Dan Ariely was.)
Jeff’s complaints about how professional the site looks just makes me think that the real tech villain of our age isn’t X, Facebook, or TikTok, but Squarespace.
I wouldn’t believe anything they post - they are not auditors- they are kids w computers and over sized egos egged on by a Nazi - who promised huge savings and needs the savings to justify his existence
Further if they are hiding the facts so it can’t be verified- that’s a HUGE tell it’s not real.
Hey DOGE if the savings are real and you have actual support why hide it?
There are certain appeals that come with their own sorting mechanisms; if you are inclined to ask the question "why would a Nigerian prince be contacting me through email?" then you aren't the target audience.
I think there are a whole bunch of successful people that have gotten ahead by becoming cheaters that don't get caught. Its an open secret and people hate it, but its hard to stop, because they are in power and control all the rhetoric. This is like performance art lampooning those actions, whether intentional or not. Everyone knows that Musk is trying to level the institutions that are entirely too liberal, and have excluded any centrist or conservative members. Its not like they are hacking a part the NSA, FBI, CIA, NSA and all the other letters that do vague things for national security.
So the complaint is that DOGE cuts equate to probably $40 BILLION in nonsense expenditures? Rather than the claimed $117BILLION?
And that POSSIBLY, these cuts might have adverse effects? But their continuation of bloat definitely had zero consequences?
I’m a fan of austerity, which seems to be DOGEs driving factor. I am by no means anywhere close to the right but at the end of the day, I would like to see the pentagon audited, something that’s never happened.
Seriously what percentage of the $40 billion is cancer research? Stop cherry picking random 0.012% funding stats to justify bloat. All that can be added back later since it’s vital
You're right, cancer research is a small fraction of a small fraction of the federal budget, which only highlights why it is exceptionally stupid to cut it.
> Unfortunately, DOGE is just savvy enough to make their website look real. The design is fine, even though in a just world, this would be a hot pink Geocities page with purple Jokerman text. There would be cheesy GIFs of dancing frogs and pop-up ads for herbal Viagra — the site would scream “NOT CREDIBLE” to anyone who sees it. As it stands, the “NOT CREDIBLE” message is only obvious if you do a little bit of digging. And many people won’t do that digging, which is why we’re in a golden age for bullshitters in government.
No website that slick is credible. Not even joking, I don't trust any site that looks too fancy. You know how long the ArXiv archive has had a yellow smiley face over crossbones with a neon green background as its favicon? If there ain't a little jank, they're trying to sell you something.
Hang on, now: Is the DOGE website really horseshit? Are you sure it’s not bullshit? There’s even a valid argument to be made for apeshit or batshit. If you’re going to call someone’s contribution to civil society “shit”, please put more effort into identifying its species of origin.
DOGE can't simultaneously be doing nothing and doing all the bad things. So which is it? Are they practically doing nothing, or are they saving billions? Even Jeff basically said both.
If DOGE ousted every Air Traffic Controller in the country tomorrow, the nominal savings wouldn't even amount to a rounding error in the federal budget *and* would be totally swamped by the downstream costs imposed by the resulting disruptions. And DOGE *actually tried to do that* without realizing it at the outset of the administration!
So yes, it's actually quite possible for DOGE to accomplish nothing while doing lots of bad things, and you need only look at what they're actually doing to find myriad examples of how.
This sort of thinking is what makes no sense. I’m not even a DOGE defender here, but we can’t simultaneously talk about how many vital programs are cut and say they aren’t saving any money. I believe they are operating a complete hatchet job, but given the amount of crying, someone isn’t getting paid. That means government savings.
Then the argument is that $100 million isn’t enough to even count. You have to start somewhere, and it’s quite clear that USAID is pretty wasteful. Again, I think they are going about this in a terrible way, but given the hysteria, you can’t simultaneously say they are doing nothing and ruining everything.
Imagine there was a recall on a certain brand of clam chowder. And rather than collecting and disposing of those cans, the store just had some guy go to the aisle and chuck a bunch of soup in the trash. He knows clam chowder is white, so he’s getting some of it, but he’s also tossing a lot of cream of mushroom. And he doesn’t like to use a ladder, so any clam chowder that’s on a high shelf he just ignores.
That guy is DOGE. They aren’t getting rid of the bad stuff, but they are making sure nobody has a casserole for dinner.
You just said they got rid of the bad clam chowder. I agree 100% that these morons just tossed any soup that was white. So again, you can’t say at the same time that they’ve done nothing and get agitated that they’ve ruined everything.
Indeed, they are ruining some really worthwhile things, and getting rid of some waste. Anyone who sees this any other way is blinded by their partisan bias. Anyone who sees it as 100% failure or success is in an echo chamber.
You can "save" money by firing a bunch of workers that you weren't allowed to fire and then they return to work several months later with all their backpay.
Apparently Vivek Ramaswamy was pushed out because he wanted to cut programs based on efficiency and determining which could be done without congressional approval, two checks that seems to be only tacked on as excuses afterwards when Musk decided based on the criteria of the programs offending him.
I admit to some confusion, given the minimal changes in expenditure how they could be doing all the funding freezes and firing/'disruption' they're doing? Where is the money going?
Here's the thing. You can improve a lot of people's lives without spending that much money relative to the size of the federal budget. So removing those things can have substantial negative impacts on people's lives and not save us much (if any) money. That's why it's such a stupid, cruel thing to do.
Retirees and soldiers, mostly. Nearly half of federal expenditures are just Social Security and healthcare programs like Medicare/Medicaid, with another ~15% going to DoD and the VA. Given that Trump insists he isn't going to touch entitlements and wants to beef up defense spending, it's mathematically impossible for DOGE to accomplish anything meaningful.
Sure, but again, spending is going up, while we are hearing about somewhat serious funding freezes in various places. Entitlements aren't going up this year compared to last year.
Now maybe it's just that termination of contracts for convenience doesn't actually save much (if any) money? But I do think there's something that I want explained where there's simultaneously news stories about gutting of federal agencies and spending remains flat...where is USAIDs money going now? Maybe it's all such small sums it just doesn't show up in the graphs...but it worries .e about our argument (and about potential graft/waste).
It's a question of scale--you can click through to the source graph from Brookings, where it shows $1.68T (as in Trillion-with-a-T) in expenditures through March 14, 2025, and $1.58T through that same date a year ago. Meanwhile, even taking Musk's "savings" at face value, they amount to 7% of that amount (though it's not really apples-to-apples, since Musk is also claiming savings *now* for spending that wouldn't have gone out the door for months or possibly years under long-term contracts and grants, so more realistically he's saved us less than 1% year-to-date).
In other words, the programs that Musk actually has permission to screw with amount to the functional equivalent of spare change in the federal budget picture, so he's never going to actually dent the deficit. But a lot of those programs very cost-effectively keep society running smoothly (air traffic controllers, food safety inspectors, etc) so Musk has the mandate to cause massive disruptions in the meantime.
It’s all such a bummer. Government efficiency is undeniably a good thing, and we could stand to trim our budget by a trillion dollars or so. But this just isn’t the way to do it.
On the other hand, that galvanized steel construction wire DOES look pretty sweet.
Whenever I have an argument about this or that credulous belief, someone eventually asks why I care what other people believe.
Because they vote. They vote and we all suffer.
You live in f*cking Detroit. Admit it, you enjoy suffering.
Silence.
Whether DOGE saves as much as they claim is beside the point. DOGE is doing a few important things.
1) Disrupting and killing the Democrats' taxpayer-funded political largesse of government funded NGOs which spend their grants advancing Democrat politics.
2) Eliminating the activists in government who will try and sabotage Trump's Presidency
3) Goading Democrats to take the 20% side of 80/20 issues and defend trans operas in South America.
The savings is just a scoreboard. Leftists who say the savings are overstated are completely missing the point here.
But a scoreboard puts up true information. It doesn’t display random numbers to make the team look good. Do you honestly have no preference for honesty here?
Here's the rub. DOGE is lying about the savings, and the left / media is lying about what DOGE is up to.
Do I care enough to figure out which party's spin is closer to the truth? Not really.
It's odd, then, that you care enough to constantly come in the comments section for Jeff's articles and say obnoxious, outlandish shit to try pick a fight with people.
So ignore me. It isn't hard
This is the Russian strategy, when accused of lying, to just say "well, everyone lies." No attempt at all to even argue that what they're saying is the truth.
The fact that they're randomly fucking with people's lives while spewing false and misleading information has zero meaning to them as long as they "own" the libs.
well, neither side has an ounce of credibility. But if we cut spending by disarming the left's use of taxpayer funds to advance their ideology, I am all for it.
Imagine what the left would do if it turned out that USAID was funding a bunch of pro-life and Christian outfits to proselytize about abortion and fund subscriptions to the Daily Wire. The left would go crazy. Same thing.
What lies about Doge are you referring to?
It also seems like, per your description, *DOGE* is lying about what DOGE is up to. It claims to be an attempt to save a lot of money for the government, but what you’re describing is an ideological/partisan project that doesn’t even have cost savings as a goal.
It is both an ideological / partisan project, and a cost savings exercise.
The left can spend its own money to advance its ideology. It doesn't get to use taxpayer funds, at least not during Republican administrations.
I'm sure the left will happily own the ideology of preventing infant aids.
If it’s a cost savings exercise, then obviously it’s important whether they’re truthful about how much is being saved!
In Dante's Inferno, the deeper you get into Hell, the worse the punishment. Dante reserved the eighth circle of Hell, Malebolge, for Liars. Flatterers. Fraudsters. Corrupt businessman. False Councilers... leaders and advisors who lead others to ruin.
So many great punishments there. Drowning in a river of shit. That's for flatterers! Being forced to swim in a pit of burning tar. (Corrupt businessmen.) Being forced to march around wearing robes that appear gold but are made of lead. (Hypocrites) And last but not least, just igniting and burning forever. That one is for False Councilers.
Pretty cool huh? Sometimes when times are tough it helps to go to your happy place.
I’ll add that anybody who has actually worked with CBO scores and other government budget estimates for years also knows they are made up bullshit numbers with no bearing on reality. Just look into many claims of the savings from the IRA and they are easily verifiable frauds.
997 *linear* feet? Hot damn.
I'm surprised that DOGE didn't threaten to sue the NYTimes for hacking for looking at the source code. That was S.O.P. 20 years ago.
I remember the FTX trial when the website had a running meter of how much collateral or insurance they had. In court we saw the server code, and it was just set to increment it by a random number each day. (They put work into the random number, too! To make it look plausible, it was based on the prior day's volume, and even had a chance of being negative, 2 or 3 days out of every 365. They weren't going to get caught using a flat RNG like Dan Ariely was.)
Jeff’s complaints about how professional the site looks just makes me think that the real tech villain of our age isn’t X, Facebook, or TikTok, but Squarespace.
I wouldn’t believe anything they post - they are not auditors- they are kids w computers and over sized egos egged on by a Nazi - who promised huge savings and needs the savings to justify his existence
Further if they are hiding the facts so it can’t be verified- that’s a HUGE tell it’s not real.
Hey DOGE if the savings are real and you have actual support why hide it?
There are certain appeals that come with their own sorting mechanisms; if you are inclined to ask the question "why would a Nigerian prince be contacting me through email?" then you aren't the target audience.
I think there are a whole bunch of successful people that have gotten ahead by becoming cheaters that don't get caught. Its an open secret and people hate it, but its hard to stop, because they are in power and control all the rhetoric. This is like performance art lampooning those actions, whether intentional or not. Everyone knows that Musk is trying to level the institutions that are entirely too liberal, and have excluded any centrist or conservative members. Its not like they are hacking a part the NSA, FBI, CIA, NSA and all the other letters that do vague things for national security.
Morons leading morons. :(
Then again 98% of the Left’s stories end up being activist bullshit, amiright?
Oh Lord. We've got a delusional Trumpust in here.
Your subscriber must be glad you caught.
Speak English, child.
“Trumpust”
Okay, maggot. Better?
So the complaint is that DOGE cuts equate to probably $40 BILLION in nonsense expenditures? Rather than the claimed $117BILLION?
And that POSSIBLY, these cuts might have adverse effects? But their continuation of bloat definitely had zero consequences?
I’m a fan of austerity, which seems to be DOGEs driving factor. I am by no means anywhere close to the right but at the end of the day, I would like to see the pentagon audited, something that’s never happened.
Only if you consider cancer research to be a nonsense expenditure.
Seriously what percentage of the $40 billion is cancer research? Stop cherry picking random 0.012% funding stats to justify bloat. All that can be added back later since it’s vital
You're right, cancer research is a small fraction of a small fraction of the federal budget, which only highlights why it is exceptionally stupid to cut it.
Do you think possibly, the cancer research was possibly, maybe, not targeted but just a consequence of cleaning the budget
That doesn't make it better.
"they're incompetent, not malicious" isn't all that comforting.
> Unfortunately, DOGE is just savvy enough to make their website look real. The design is fine, even though in a just world, this would be a hot pink Geocities page with purple Jokerman text. There would be cheesy GIFs of dancing frogs and pop-up ads for herbal Viagra — the site would scream “NOT CREDIBLE” to anyone who sees it. As it stands, the “NOT CREDIBLE” message is only obvious if you do a little bit of digging. And many people won’t do that digging, which is why we’re in a golden age for bullshitters in government.
No website that slick is credible. Not even joking, I don't trust any site that looks too fancy. You know how long the ArXiv archive has had a yellow smiley face over crossbones with a neon green background as its favicon? If there ain't a little jank, they're trying to sell you something.
Hang on, now: Is the DOGE website really horseshit? Are you sure it’s not bullshit? There’s even a valid argument to be made for apeshit or batshit. If you’re going to call someone’s contribution to civil society “shit”, please put more effort into identifying its species of origin.
Great post. Not surprising that the man who made much of his fortune on government subsidies has a knack for finagling numbers.
It's their attempt at higher math.
DOGE can't simultaneously be doing nothing and doing all the bad things. So which is it? Are they practically doing nothing, or are they saving billions? Even Jeff basically said both.
If DOGE ousted every Air Traffic Controller in the country tomorrow, the nominal savings wouldn't even amount to a rounding error in the federal budget *and* would be totally swamped by the downstream costs imposed by the resulting disruptions. And DOGE *actually tried to do that* without realizing it at the outset of the administration!
So yes, it's actually quite possible for DOGE to accomplish nothing while doing lots of bad things, and you need only look at what they're actually doing to find myriad examples of how.
This sort of thinking is what makes no sense. I’m not even a DOGE defender here, but we can’t simultaneously talk about how many vital programs are cut and say they aren’t saving any money. I believe they are operating a complete hatchet job, but given the amount of crying, someone isn’t getting paid. That means government savings.
Then the argument is that $100 million isn’t enough to even count. You have to start somewhere, and it’s quite clear that USAID is pretty wasteful. Again, I think they are going about this in a terrible way, but given the hysteria, you can’t simultaneously say they are doing nothing and ruining everything.
It is just mind blowing how fucking retarded trumpers are.
What are you talking about? They can absolutely be doing many, many bad things and still ACCOMPLISHING nothing with regard to their stated goals.
Imagine there was a recall on a certain brand of clam chowder. And rather than collecting and disposing of those cans, the store just had some guy go to the aisle and chuck a bunch of soup in the trash. He knows clam chowder is white, so he’s getting some of it, but he’s also tossing a lot of cream of mushroom. And he doesn’t like to use a ladder, so any clam chowder that’s on a high shelf he just ignores.
That guy is DOGE. They aren’t getting rid of the bad stuff, but they are making sure nobody has a casserole for dinner.
You just said they got rid of the bad clam chowder. I agree 100% that these morons just tossed any soup that was white. So again, you can’t say at the same time that they’ve done nothing and get agitated that they’ve ruined everything.
Indeed, they are ruining some really worthwhile things, and getting rid of some waste. Anyone who sees this any other way is blinded by their partisan bias. Anyone who sees it as 100% failure or success is in an echo chamber.
You can "save" money by firing a bunch of workers that you weren't allowed to fire and then they return to work several months later with all their backpay.
Apparently Vivek Ramaswamy was pushed out because he wanted to cut programs based on efficiency and determining which could be done without congressional approval, two checks that seems to be only tacked on as excuses afterwards when Musk decided based on the criteria of the programs offending him.
I admit to some confusion, given the minimal changes in expenditure how they could be doing all the funding freezes and firing/'disruption' they're doing? Where is the money going?
Here's the thing. You can improve a lot of people's lives without spending that much money relative to the size of the federal budget. So removing those things can have substantial negative impacts on people's lives and not save us much (if any) money. That's why it's such a stupid, cruel thing to do.
Retirees and soldiers, mostly. Nearly half of federal expenditures are just Social Security and healthcare programs like Medicare/Medicaid, with another ~15% going to DoD and the VA. Given that Trump insists he isn't going to touch entitlements and wants to beef up defense spending, it's mathematically impossible for DOGE to accomplish anything meaningful.
Sure, but again, spending is going up, while we are hearing about somewhat serious funding freezes in various places. Entitlements aren't going up this year compared to last year.
Now maybe it's just that termination of contracts for convenience doesn't actually save much (if any) money? But I do think there's something that I want explained where there's simultaneously news stories about gutting of federal agencies and spending remains flat...where is USAIDs money going now? Maybe it's all such small sums it just doesn't show up in the graphs...but it worries .e about our argument (and about potential graft/waste).
You don't have to pour that much sand in a machine to break it.
It's a question of scale--you can click through to the source graph from Brookings, where it shows $1.68T (as in Trillion-with-a-T) in expenditures through March 14, 2025, and $1.58T through that same date a year ago. Meanwhile, even taking Musk's "savings" at face value, they amount to 7% of that amount (though it's not really apples-to-apples, since Musk is also claiming savings *now* for spending that wouldn't have gone out the door for months or possibly years under long-term contracts and grants, so more realistically he's saved us less than 1% year-to-date).
In other words, the programs that Musk actually has permission to screw with amount to the functional equivalent of spare change in the federal budget picture, so he's never going to actually dent the deficit. But a lot of those programs very cost-effectively keep society running smoothly (air traffic controllers, food safety inspectors, etc) so Musk has the mandate to cause massive disruptions in the meantime.
Maybe it’s up from inflation? I’m sure the armed forces use up a lot of eggs.