DOGE’s “Efficiency” Theater: Wasted $21.7 Billion While Destroying Life-Saving Programs Based On Conspiracy Theories

Failures

from the the-department-of-gullible-elon dept

We’ve talked plenty about how Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was always more about performative cruelty than actual efficiency. But a new Senate report reveals just how spectacularly DOGE failed at its supposed core mission while causing immeasurable human suffering in the process. The entire concept blew up more spectacularly than one of Musk’s Starships.

The numbers are damning. The report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations shows that DOGE wasted at least $21.7 billion in just six months—between January 20 and July 18, 2025. But hey, at least they got to feel like they were “draining the swamp,” right?

As Senator Richard Blumenthal put it in the report’s release:

“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims. At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars.”

To recap the “efficiency”: Musk promised to save trillions, actually wasted over $21 billion. That’s some galaxy-brain efficiency right there.

To be fair, much of that “waste” comes from Musk’s Twitter-style “resign now and we’ll pay you for many months” plan to rid the government of employees. As the report notes, that cost the government $14.8 billion in salaries of people who couldn’t actually do any work and then another $6.1 billion from people DOGE fired. And I’m sure that DOGE-supporting MAGA types will try to claim that this is fine, because it’s a one-time cost and will lower government expenses going forward.

But that is untrue. Part of the problem here is that—contrary to the popular belief in MAGA circles—most people in the government were actually doing important work that the government needs to do. Firing all of them doesn’t change that. Every few weeks there are another set of stories about how the Trump admin has to scramble to try to rehire the people that DOGE fired.

Doing things that way almost certainly increases costs, because of the level of painful inconsistency and the need to convince workers to come back to this shitshow after being treated so horribly. And, when they won’t come back, then the government has to go out and find new people to fill those roles, which is also a very expensive proposition—and one the report didn’t even explore.

Not only was much of this wasteful, it was wasteful for the stupidest of reasons: much of this destruction was based on conspiracy theories that Musk found on social media.

As Don Moynihan documented in his analysis:

The destruction of USAID was remarkable in that it did not reflect any sort of broad-based consensus. While other actors in Trump’s political environment—such as the Project 2025, or the budget blueprint from the Center for Renewing America, led by Trump’s budget chief Russ Vought—called for reductions in USAID spending, they did not seek to eliminate it. The assault on USAID seemed disproportionately driven by the beliefs of one person, Musk. And those beliefs were largely disconnected from the reality of what USAID did.

For example:

• Musk said that 90% of USAID spending never reaches communities, implying that most funding was wasted. But this claim demonstrates a misunderstanding of the budget. While 10% of the budget goes to direct payments to local organizations, another 46% goes to funding to multilateral agencies and 31% to American companies and nonprofits, much of which goes to direct provision, such as HIV programs, anti-malaria products, and emergency food services.
• Musk claimed that $50 million was spent to send condoms to Hamas. Trump repeated this false claim, as did members of Congress. The organization that receives the funds does provide family planning, but its USAID funds were providing emergency health support to refugees in Gaza.
• Musk has repeated other conspiracy theories about USAID found online including that it helped to create COVID-19, is rigging elections, and manufacturing media consent.
• Musk elevated claims that USAID was protected by journalists because it had been secretly funding the media, based on government subscription services to media outlets.

Musk was not atypical of the broader Trump movement, which held conspiratorial worldviews about other parts of government it labeled as “the deep state,” but the effect on USAID was the most immediate and consequential. Such views could have been easily debunked, had DOGE been willing to talk to and trust career officials. But Musk displayed deep distrust of civil servants, labeling USAID “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” and “a criminal organization.”

Musk elevated these conspiracy theories to the mainstream on his social media platform X, reposting a small group of fringe accounts on X and promoting posts from Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official and key voice behind USAID conspiracy theories. Benz has argued that “USAID is notorious for funding the darkest, most controversial, most horrifying projects known to all of mankind” and Musk believed him. In the space of a year, Musk engaged with or elevated Benz’s messaging 160 times. Unsurprisingly, Benz has also embraced white supremacy politics.

The richest man in the world, put in charge of government efficiency, made life-and-death decisions based on conspiracy theories from fringe social media accounts. What could go wrong?

Well, everything, as it turns out.

DOGE’s crown jewel achievement was completely destroying USAID based on—and I feel the need to repeat this—conspiracy theories. A study published in The Lancet found that USAID had prevented 92 million deaths between 2001 and 2021. The agency’s destruction is now projected to cause 14 million avoidable deaths over the next five years, including 4.5 million children under age 5.

This is blood on the hands of Musk and the ridiculous nonsense peddlers he believed, rather than talking to actual experts.

Reports from the ground show the immediate human cost. As ProPublica documents:

In the southeastern African country of Malawi, U.S. funding cuts to the United Nations’ World Food Programme have “yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking” within a large refugee camp, U.S. embassy officials told the State Department in late April.

[….]

“We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025,” Landis said. On a recent visit to a facility treating malnourished children younger than 5, she said she saw kids who were “walking skeletons like I haven’t seen in a decade.”

Meanwhile, Science magazine’s reporting from affected HIV programs shows medical professionals watching decades of progress collapse in real time:

Makwindi says the termination of funding “was a shock” that baffles him to this day. He takes a generous view of the U.S. motivation: “I still believe that someone didn’t do due diligence and just terminated us.” Nuha Ceesay, Eswatini country director for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), has a harsher assessment. What the Trump administration has done is akin to saying, “I am going to unplug this life support machine from you,” he says. “It is up to you to find an alternative, and whether you perish or not, that’s not my business.”

The “efficiency” here is breathtaking. Rather than deliver emergency food supplies to starving people, the Trump administration chose to incinerate them instead. According to the Senate report, $110 million worth of food aid and medical supplies are spoiling in warehouses, with some literally being trucked to France to be burned at taxpayer expense.

The waste caused by lost investment is perhaps most starkly illustrated by supplies purchased by USAID sitting in warehouses around the globe that sat rotting rather than supporting their intended recipients. In February, the USAID Office of Inspector General warned that hundreds of thousands of tons of goods were at risk of spoilage as a result of DOGE’s attempt to shutter the agency. By May, 66,000 metric tons of food valued at $98 million remained warehoused at multiple facilities in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai and Houston. Recent reporting indicated that a portion (approximately 622 metric tons) of the 1,100 metric tons of food aid stored in Dubai was spared from destruction in June but the remaining 496 metric tons valued at $793,000.00 are to be “turned into landfill or incinerated” at a cost of $100,000.00 to taxpayers. Additionally, as of June, USAID had abandoned approximately $12.4 million worth of “contraceptives and HIV-prevention medications” in Belgium and Dubai. Approximately $9.7 million of these contraceptives stuck in Belgium were being “trucked to France” to be incinerated at a cost of $160,000.00 because USAID allegedly refused to sell or otherwise transfer them to a third-party distributor at anything less than “full market value.”

But wait, there’s more! The report details how DOGE’s bureaucratic “Defend the Spend” initiative—supposedly designed to eliminate waste—actually created massive new forms of red tape. NASA employees were forced to write “several detailed paragraphs, across multiple rounds of emails” just to purchase simple fastening bolts. The FAA required written justifications for window-washing and buying pens and pencils.

Efficiency!

And let’s not forget the comedy gold of forcing nearly a million federal employees to send weekly “5-things” emails justifying their existence. The Senate report estimates this pointless exercise wasted $155 million in lost productivity. The best part? OPM had no intention of actually reviewing these emails and eventually sent auto-replies saying its mailbox was full.

The demand for weekly accomplishment reports was an unnecessary waste of time, primarily because OPM, as an external agency outside the management chain of command, is ill-equipped to meaningfully assess the work of other agencies’ employees. Moreover, employees would be forced to redact or omit any specific details to avoid confidentiality concerns, further diminishing the utility of these reports. Beyond what should have been immediately apparent, the pointlessness of this exercise was underscored when OPM briefed agencies that it intended to do nothing with the emails, and then a few weeks later, sent automatic replies back to employees stating that its “mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now.” Although the project continued through May, approximately 13 weeks in, news emerged that this project was “dying a slow, quiet death” across the government with agencies no longer requiring weekly reports.

Want to see a bunch of inefficient waste created by DOGE?

This is what happens when you put conspiracy theorists in charge of complex systems. DOGE didn’t just fail at its stated mission—it actively made government less efficient while causing humanitarian catastrophes on a massive scale. And that’s just with USAID. We’re not even looking most of the other cuts. And the report only briefly mentions the likely impact on the economy of some of these slash and burn efforts:

The full extent of the waste and harm caused by DOGE’s disruptive activities is difficult to quantify because costs remain hidden and many of the consequences have yet to fully materialize. While some analyses, such as an independent review of DOGE’s cuts at just seven agencies—CFPB, NIH, USDA, USAID, IRS, ED, and DOJ—determined that these actions could result in over $10 billion in lost economic activity in the U.S., these figures only scratch the surface

They also note that they’re not even counting the legal costs incurred from the long and ever-growing list of lawsuits DOGE’s cuts have spurred, many of which have already resulted in losses for the federal government in court.

The broader lesson here is one we’ve seen repeatedly: when you prioritize performative cruelty over actual governance, you get neither efficiency nor effectiveness. You get waste, chaos, and suffering.

DOGE should go down in history as one of the most grotesquely incompetent government initiatives ever attempted. An agency supposedly created to eliminate waste that managed to waste billions in six months, create tremendous inefficiencies in the workforce, while destroying programs that actually worked and saved lives.

The only thing it efficiently accomplished was proving that putting conspiracy theorists and tech bros in charge of life-and-death decisions with no oversight, guardrails, or expertise is a recipe for disaster on an unprecedented scale.

But hey, at least Musk got to feel important for a few months while millions of people faced death and suffering. Efficiency!

Filed Under: doge, donald trump, elon musk, usaid