How Much Have Elon Musk and the DOGE Boys Cost Us? |
Photograph Source: Myotus – CC BY-SA 4.0
Back when Elon Musk was just getting his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) off the ground, he was boasting that he would eliminate $2 trillion in annual spending that was waste. That’s almost one-third of the federal budget. Needless to say, this was not a serious target, but Elon Musk is also someone who claimed that 20 million people over the age of 115 are getting Social Security benefits. Numbers are not Elon’s strong suit.
Anyhow, he quickly backed away from his $2 trillion, saying this figure might have been too high, but he would save us $1 trillion a year. More recently, Musk lowered his DOGE savings to $150 billion a year. That would be a bit more than 2.0 percent of annual spending, but still a considerably chunk of change.
However, even this $150 billion figure looks to be a huge overstatement, as a New York Times article documents. When it came to actually documented his savings, $92 billion — more than 60 percent of the claimed savings — are not even itemized. That gets us down to $58 billion, about 0.7 percent of the federal budget (and 2.9 percent of his original target) that Musk can actually identify.
But even here there are all sorts of exaggerations and errors. The largest single item was a $2.9 billion contract for housing migrant children. But this was not a firm commitment, and the money would likely have never been spent even without DOGE. The second largest item on the DOGE list is a $1.9 billion contract with the I.R.S. that was actually cancelled under Biden. The third largest item was a $1.75 billion grant to a vaccine non-profit. This grant was already paid in full, so Musk didn’t save us a penny.
As the Times piece shows, Musk’s “Wall of Receipts” is shot full of these sorts of ridiculous errors, claiming savings on money that was already paid, and hugely exaggerating the expected cost of cancelled commitments. This sort of error-ridden accounting may past muster........