What Has Elon Musk’s Doge Actually Achieved?

While Doge’s website claims $170bn in savings, an FT investigation shows that only a sliver of that figure can actually be verified. Instead, there is evidence of inflated valuations being used to boost the numbers, while contracts that were already lapsing have been claimed as new savings. At the same time, US Treasury data has so far shown no drop in government spending.

But the [initial] goodwill began to rapidly erode, as young coders recruited by Musk and Silicon Valley venture capitalists began appearing at numerous government departments, demanding access to sensitive data.

The seemingly random suspension of tens of thousands of “probationary” government employees, a category that includes experienced civil servants who have recently been promoted into senior positions, caused chaos in constituencies far away from Washington DC.

Doge’s emissaries appeared to have little appreciation of what branches of government they were targeting actually did, alarming some inside the White House, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Trump administration had to halt the firing of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which guards the nation’s nuclear stockpile. Musk’s allies in the media were reduced to begging for reversals of rash decisions.

Calculating Doge’s impact, analysts say, is complicated by its deliberate opacity.

Musk repeatedly claimed that Doge is operating with “extreme transparency”. Yet even as it faces dozens of lawsuits, the initiative has refused to provide the most basic information about its inner workings, including the number of staff it has hired, the number of agencies targeted, and the amount of criminal referrals it has made for “tremendous fraud”.

When a handful of Doge’s now notorious young coder recruits finally appeared in the media last month, sat around a table for a Fox News interview, their full names were withheld.

“I think that some people, particularly on the right, felt that maybe Doge would be just kind of a catch-all solution,” says Cato’s Dominik Lett.

But he adds that “if you want to reassure bond markets, if you want to put the budget on a sustainable path, you need to make spending reductions to Medicare, Medicaid and social security. And for the administration, Doge was never really intended to make significant benefit reductions to those programmes.”

Whatever cost-cutting measures Congress ultimately passes, Doge seems set to live on, at least as a concept.

“When you have a Doge effort going on in Washington, and an administration that really wants to see the waste disappear, it allows for those people who are really forward thinking . . . to come forward and say ‘Hey, we are going to do this ourselves’,” says Katherine Boyle, a partner at venture capital firm a16z, whose members have filled Doge’s ranks. 

For his part, Musk last month seemed unsure of how consequential Doge would be without him at the helm. Questioned by reporters about whether the initiative would remain effective without its spiritual leader, Musk mused: “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism?” 

Lambert here: In this supposedly hardhitting piece, data exfiltration goes unmentioned.