The illusion of govt efficiency

Elon Musk’s work under the Trump dispensation will be remembered as a cautionary tale.

Elon Musk’s exit from the Donald Trump administration was rumoured amid reports in recent weeks of internal strategic rifts brewing within the administration and the extensive financial strain Tesla endured under his leadership.

With Musk’s exit from DOGE now official, it shifts one’s attention to the institutional legacy he leaves behind through his work at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

First, a little context is vital. Unveiled with considerable political spectacle, DOGE was positioned as the long-overdue fulfilment of the Republican Party’s foundational promise: to curtail the size of the federal government and impose fiscal discipline.

With the federal budget expanding from $5 trillion in 2018 to $6.75 trillion by 2024, DOGE committed itself to eliminating bureaucratic redundancy and delivering $2 trillion in long-term savings. Among conservative circles, the initiative was celebrated as the potential culmination of an ideological trajectory that had been nearly a century in the making.

That trajectory can be traced to the 1930s, when the modern Republican Party emerged in opposition to President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, a transformative expansion of federal authority aimed at combating the Great Depression. For conservatives, the New Deal represented an existential encroachment on individual liberty and free-market principles.

By the 1960s, Ronald Reagan gave this opposition a sharpened ideological and rhetorical edge, famously warning that unchecked government expansion could lead to “a thousand years of darkness” under the spectre of socialism.

His words galvanised a generation of Republicans and etched into the party’s platform a central thesis: that sustained national prosperity depends on restrained governance and robust private enterprise.

However, over ensuing decades, that thesis repeatedly faltered in practice. Republican-led administrations routinely pledged to roll back federal spending and deregulate the economy, only to be stymied by political inertia, entrenched interests and internal contradictions.

DOGE, under the stewardship of Musk was heralded as a decisive rupture from this cycle - a high-tech, efficiency-driven overhaul of the federal apparatus.

Yet, the first 100 days of DOGE’s operation suggest a more complex and problematic reality. The department’s rollout has been marred by abrupt mass layoffs, subsequent policy reversals, legal injunctions and mounting international criticism over the defunding of humanitarian aid programmes.

Tariffs, framed as a key source of non-tax revenue, have instead increased consumer costs and fostered a climate of favouritism.

Simultaneously, critical sectors such as education, infrastructure and veterans’ services remain underfunded, while defence spending and debt servicing, together consuming over 40% of the budget, remain untouched.

In an era of rising public debt, now at $36 trillion, and growing disillusionment with established fiscal models, DOGE’s claims of transformative savings are facing intense scrutiny.

It is here, at the intersection of political promise and fiscal reality, that the cracks in DOGE’s bold narrative become most visible. Let us now examine these fiscal claims in detail. What began as a revolution in governance is fast unravelling into a cautionary tale of political theatre and fiscal distortion.

DOGE, marketed as an antidote to decades of bloated bureaucracy, promised to do what no administration had before: slash $2 trillion in federal spending, eliminate 75% of the federal workforce and purge Washington of “waste, fraud, and abuse”.

By April 2025, DOGE touted $170 billion in savings. The headlines were impressive: $55 billion from contract cancellations, $16.5 million cut by axing outdated Census Bureau surveys.

But beneath the surface of polished press releases and celebratory X threads lay a hollowed-out truth. NPR’s review found that the documented savings were significantly overstated.

A supposed $8 billion ICE contract was actually worth $8 million, an error off by three zeroes. The New York Times found that dozens of contracts, quietly reinstated, had been scrubbed from DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts”, claiming total government savings of $105 billion, up from the $65 billion.

Meanwhile, the Partnership for Public Service estimates that DOGE’s chaotic rollout, emergency rehiring and legal reversals could cost taxpayers $135 billion in 2025 alone. Musk drastically dropped DOGE’s savings goal from $2 trillion to $150 billion for the year.

Musk had previously projected savings as high as $1 trillion. What remains, then, is not a triumph of lean governance, but a $36 trillion national debt now accompanied by dysfunction, disillusionment and a shattered workforce.

That workforce collapse was not incidental; it was central to DOGE’s mission. Laid off en masse, 260,000 civil servants were swept out by April 2025, including 20,000 probationary employees who lacked job protections. The cuts were often ideological, targeting DEI professionals, regulatory staff and scientific experts.

At the Department of Energy, 300 National Nuclear Security Administration workers were abruptly fired, only to be rehired the next day when national security risks became clear. The CDC’s critical research tools went offline due to vendor communication breakdowns.

At USAID, 4,700 employees were placed on paid administrative leave following a federal injunction, only to face re-firing efforts weeks later. These reversals, driven by agency panic and legal pressure, cost millions in administrative waste and underscored DOGE’s lack of strategic foresight.

The unemployment rate edged up to 4.2%, while federal services like Social Security and tax processing ground to a crawl. DOGE’s legacy, far from efficient, is one of disruption and destabilisation.

The chaos sparked by DOGE quickly spilled into courthouses and foreign capitals. Within weeks, federal judges began issuing emergency injunctions.

Rulings across multiple circuits challenged the administration’s authority to dissolve agencies or dismiss employees without due process, often exposing how “performance-based” justifications were hastily manufactured after the fact. Legal experts now warn of a constitutional reckoning, as DOGE’s methods increasingly rely on flimsy legal scaffolding stretched beyond recognition.

Meanwhile, the international reverberations have grown louder. USAID’s paralysis disrupted vaccine delivery and clean water projects in at least 12 countries, with African Union representatives privately warning that the US has become an “unreliable development partner.” NATO officials reported delays in cyber-coordination drills after key US personnel were abruptly laid off. In Brussels, a leaked diplomatic cable from the EU Commission described DOGE’s disruptions as “a self-inflicted unravelling of American statecraft”. The cumulative effect is difficult to overstate. Allies are recalibrating, adversaries are seizing the narrative and America’s bureaucratic whiplash is starting to read less like reform and more like retreat. It is in this vacuum, of predictability, of institutional coherence, of global confidence, that the real costs of DOGE are now emerging.

(The writer is a professor of economics at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, OP Jindal Global University)