Blog de Dunlap: DOGE quietly deleted itself

DOGE quietly deleted itself over the summer — saying its mission had come to an end.

Here’s the kicker: Elon Musk’s pet project that promised to cut trillions in “waste” actually put our government in EVEN MORE debt.

Did DOGE make our government work better?

No.

It pushed out 300,000 federal workers and now agencies are struggling to try to hire them back.

Did DOGE cut waste?

Nope.

A Senate investigation found out that DOGE generated $21.7 billion in waste in six months alone.

So what DID DOGE accomplish?

It let Elon Musk dodge more than $2 billion in liabilities while his company sat under federal investigation.

It gutted the IRS, risking losing hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes that wealthy tax cheats may never pay.

It tried to weaponize social security — a whistleblower said DOGE planned to mark 2.7 million living people as dead to force immigrants out of the country.

While he was operating under the veil of “rooting out waste” in our government, Musk was cutting funding for cancer research, veterans programs, and aid for American farmers, all while making $8 million a day from government contracts.

He got to act as co-President of the United States, sitting in the Oval Office, joining Cabinet meetings, and making official decisions, all while making $8 million a day on government contracts while he’s at it.

He cruelly halted humanitarian aid efforts in real-time — costing lives.

And he and his band of weird 22-year-old programmers were gaining access to the private financial information of millions of Americans.

Look, I agree that the federal government can waste a lot of money. I’ve spent years trying to squeeze that waste out of the budget: Going after defense contractors who overcharge taxpayers, going after insurers gaming Medicare for billions of dollars, and going after billionaire tax cheats who dodge the taxes that everybody else pays.

But DOGE was never about cutting waste. Instead it served the interests of the rich and the powerful and it left the American people far worse off.

Elon Musk, Trump, and this administration need to be held accountable. They lied. They took a chainsaw to lifesaving programs that taxpayers paid for. They think they can just get away with it. But I’m going to stay on this.

Elizabeth