Summary
$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his DOGE team are “expecting” to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts.
To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15% of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash.
In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden.
“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”
“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”
So, mission accomplished then? I never believed for a moment it was ever about reducing waste / increasing efficiency. At best, it was scrounging the government couch for change to pay for tax breaks for the rich.
Well, yeah. He should have named it the Department of Dismantling the Administrative State, but that’s not a meme.
Hey, I just realized that the Department of Dismantling the Organized State could be DoDOS, or DDOS, both of which work too
The only waste in government is corruption. “Inefficiencies” are actually resiliency—a crucial trait of any social system.
Underappreciated fact.
I was listening to conservative AM radio (combo of morbid curiosity and masochism), and they talked about a social security warehouse full of documents and how inefficient that is in 2025, and we should get rid of it.
I’m just like:
First of all, there’s no way that’s their primary data source. So if you’re crying for modernization, that already happened a long time ago.
But if you’re saying we shouldn’t preserve paper copies, then you’re opening the door to all sorts of terrible things.
Like, saying we should just trust whatever the government says and not have to prove it in a court of law, or making our systems vulnerable to hackers, or making it so certain government actions can never be undone.
But uh… I guess all three of those things have become hallmarks of this administration anyway, huh?
The amount of money it’ll take to fix all this will dwarf the $150B. By several factors at least.
He did the absolute reverse of saving. He destroyed and cost the US TRILLIONS of dollars. The IRS alone will not collect an additional +$500 billion in revenue this year and every year going forward. Over ten years, that’s $5 trillion in extra uncollected revenue, and I’m sure this is a conservative estimate.
You mean the IRS alone will not steal an additional +$500 billion from the poor, helpless billionaires this year, right? /s
for half a second I thought this comment was just poor because of how late the billionaires part came in the sentence.
Actually, I’m not sure he does mean that. Is he taking about destroying the IRS’ efficiency collecting taxes from billionaires, or is he talking about destroying the entire US economy so the billionaires never earn capture that money in the first place? It genuinely could be either.
150 billion
Yeah and if you actually believe that to be true then I have a bridge to sell you. These dumb fucks sold 8 million as 8 billion
I’d be surprised if it’s even close to 15 billion
Also they lost like 500Bn according to the IRS due to cutting IRS staff alone, not including revenue lost as a result of cutting services that the government provided and revenue lost as a result of other nations no longer doing business with the USA such as arms sales, energy, rocketry, hospitals, and other transactions.
By all accounts DOGE is losing money.
It also completely ignored the cost of the consequences, which is likely going to easily outpace any money “saved”.
It’s probable that it’s way less than that, and that’s not factoring in whatever it’ll cost to unfuck everything he’s done. Not that that’s likely to happen anytime soon.
Also not counting in the brain-drain that is already happening.
I hope it’ll be better for all you normal human beings in the US at some point in the future, I really do, but fuck me if this shit isn’t scary all the way on the side of the Atlantic, and that’s coming from someone living right next door to Russia. I’m way more scared of what’ll happen when the US goes full 4th Reich.
I guess one could argue you’re already there to be fair, but I still hope it went too far too fast and a backlash is incoming.
The goal was never to save money but find ways to enrich himself.
That’s not true at all, even if you want to restrict yourself and only consider direct democracies as true democracies, you have at least Switzerland as an example.
In Sweden and Denmark, workers can even choose representatives to sit on the board of directors of the companies where they work (however, only for companies with more than 25 or 35 employees).
