Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has been as controversial as the president who created it. The mission: to shine a light on government waste and cut spending wherever practical, saving US taxpayers their hard-earned money.
But those on the left– as well as the progressive arm of the Fourth Estate – who oppose Donald Trump and all that he does, portray the agency and its billionaire leader as corrupt, a rogue group of MAGA meddlers skulking in the shadows between government regulations to help an authoritarian president consolidate power. Where does DOGE actually exist between shadow and light? And will it help or hinder America?
A Narrative of Secrets
Allegations of recklessness, corruption, and everything in between against DOGE abound. One NBC News headline from February 7 declared: “Secrecy is becoming a defining trait of Elon Musk’s DOGE.” Another from February 27 reports that “Pressure Mounts on DOGE to provide more transparency into its inner workings.” On March 7, ABC reported on a lawsuit against the agency, asserting that “DOGE’s secrecy to be tested in court with sworn testimony, depositions.” And that’s just a couple of mainstream options. Slate ran headlines like “What Trump and Musk are Really Doing to This Country,” and “Nazi-adjacent DOGE kids are overruling the secretary of state.” Another story, titled “I just figured out what Elon Musk’s DOGE really is,” compares the agency to the mafia, saying, “[I]t’s how things worked when you went to the Cosa Nostra to ask for protection.”
When the leftist papers aren’t calling Musk and DOGE corrupt or even criminal, they’re suggesting incompetence instead, lamenting the reckless cutting of federal programs and jobs without regard for how the government actually works. Most recently, the news has focused on the dangers of unvetted DOGE people gaining access to national secrets and sharing them in unsecured ways.
Democratic lawmakers have also pressed the agency to become more transparent, and a lawsuit filed Thursday, March 6, seeks to force the Department of Government Efficiency to follow the same rules that apply to many other federal agencies. This particular suit (DOGE has faced more than 20 others already) was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, a non-profit devoted to protecting endangered species. The Center argues that the agency’s work with the EPA will affect the environment and that it’s important to learn how it really operates.
What Is DOGE Doing?
To see what Musk’s crew has really done lately – at least according to them – one can visit doge.gov. The main page highlights the waste revealed – and cut – every day. The most recent entry details a $56,000 VA contract to water eight plants for five years. That’s about $1,400 a plant per year. “The contract has been canceled and DOGE will water the plants free of charge,” reads the announcement. Another highlights how two contractors allegedly spent nine years and $200 million working on a modern provider enrollment system for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS. They missed 14 deadlines and never delivered a usable product. Concurrent audits from DOGE and HUD found tens of thousands of paid software licenses that weren’t being used – including 35,855 ServiceNow licenses, of which just 84 were being used, and 11,020 Acrobat licenses with zero users. A DOGE pilot program was recently expanded from 14 agencies to 16 to audit unused or unneeded credit cards, resulting in the deactivation of roughly 146,000 unnecessary accounts. On Wednesday, March 5, the NIH canceled seven grants for transgender experiments on animals, which included $532,000 to “use a mouse model to investigate the effects of cross-sex testosterone treatment” and “$83,000 to test “feminizing hormone therapy in the male rat.”
All this and much more adds up quickly. On the “Savings” page, the DOGE site declares it has already saved an estimated $105 billion, or about $652 per taxpayer. And these cuts didn’t come from Medicare, Social Security, public education, or highway maintenance. How many Americans would willingly spend $600 or more in a single month to learn about transgender rats, water plants in some government office somewhere, buy software licenses that no one actually uses, or for any number of other ridiculous things on which some bureaucrat finds important enough to spend other people’s money?
The “Workforce” tab shows the current headcount of executive branch employees and how much their payroll is costing us. There are presently 2,252,162, with a total payroll of $211.3 billion a year. The average worker has been employed for ten years and makes $93,828 a year.
Perhaps the most interesting page, however, is the “Unconstitutionality Index,” which falls under the “Regulations” tab. How many federal laws and regulations are there, exactly? Well, nobody knows. Really – as Liberty Nation News previously explained in an analysis of the 118th Congress, even the government doesn’t know how many there are in total. When tasked with counting them all in 1982, Ronald Gainer of the Justice Department finally gave up and said that a person could “have died and been resurrected three times and still not have answered the question.”
That said, it is possible – practical, even – to trace how many federal laws and regulations are enacted in a given year in the digital age. In 2024, there were 3,250 rules created by unelected bureaucrats to just 176 laws passed by Congress and signed by the president, or 18.45 rules per law. It was 3,020 regulations to 68 laws in 2023, for a ratio of 44.38. DOGE tracks this interesting metric of unconstitutional rulemaking going back to 2010, and the average unconstitutionality index (the ratio of regulations to laws) is 18.5.
DOGE also tracks how many new sections of regulation and how many words are made up by these unelected Swampers. A whopping five million words of regulations were added in 2024 alone, bringing the tracked total up to 98.68 million words across 215,230 sections of code.
Will the Department of Government Efficiency actually help in the long run? Is it a shining light exposing and eliminating government waste – like a more effective version of Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) annual Festivus Report? To find the true answer, as the old saying goes, follow the money.
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