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.”
Doesn’t matter to the supporters. They believe he has streamlined government and saved gazillions. And if you don’t like DOGE there must be something wrong with you. Why wouldn’t you want a more efficient government without fraud and waste? Do you want waste?
“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.
should have named it the Department of Dismantling the Administrative State, but that’s not a meme.
At least if you read the acronym backwards, SADD, it’s fitting.
DODAS or just DODS
Department Engaged in Actively Dismantling the Administrative State Structure.
Hey, I just realized that the Department of Dismantling the Organized State could be DoDOS, or DDOS, both of which work too
Department of Destroying Our Dedicated Operational State
DDOS the government
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.
The CFPB people he cut were saving citizens - i.e. the very taxpayers Musk claims to represent without a mandate of any kind - $21 billion already.
He was selling our dollars for pennies.
It doesn’t count unless it goes to the government. Taxes and exploitation are good as long as they come from private companies instead of the government because freedom is a vibe rather than an actual set of circumstances.
Good thing the US is trashing all their trade agreements, then. That’ll make paying for it so much easier.
Also losing 500Bn in tax revenue due to DOGE cutting back IRS staff.
I feel I’m doing Me-lon a favor by comparing him to this amazing piece of internet history but there we are.
$150 billion
Does this even take into account all the extra work and thus spending doge’s flailing caused?
In addition to that cutting NOAA staff only saves money until the next hurricane hits, cutting the CDC only saves money until the next outbreak hits, cutting the FDA only saves money until the next foodborne contamination etc. etc.
One would think the US already has enough experience in how it does not work like that, but it seems the guys in power are determined to walk that road til the end. What’s the end though?
What’s the end though?
Hopefully, the collapse of America into several smaller states, with the most powerful blocs (again hopefully) being less shitty than America was.
More likely, the collapse of America into chaos
I don’t think these two options are exclusive to each other. And it’s sad.
But globally!
FDA only saves money until the next foodborne contamination etc. etc.
We’ve already had an e. coli outbreak that the FDA tried to keep quiet.
And lawyer time
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
These dumb fucks sold 8 million as 8 billion
Even aside from stuff like this, things they claim to be saving tend to be cut contracts. Contracts that have already been paid, but will no longer have to provided what they’d been paid for.
It also completely ignored the cost of the consequences, which is likely going to easily outpace any money “saved”.
Oh inwasnt even gonna go there. Once you start pulling those threads it just becomes an absolute Avalanche of shit
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.
Same answer as the other reaction: if i start pulling on those threads then there is no end
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.
Just enough to get the libertarians frothing before the scowl.
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
earncapture that money in the first place? It genuinely could be either.
Heard of the whistleblower related to DOGE who claims the tech group hired by Musk had already trying to breach government for years or so?
And how with each DOGE visit to a given department it always followed tactics of distraction and getting stored data, then suddenly leaving?
And how there’s suddenly many breach attempts by suspicious hackers linked to Russia right after DOGE visits?
Or how the biggest culprit of government bloating by hecking far, the Department of Defense, same department who has failed several audits, was never a target of DOGE?
Hm… Not suspicious at all. Sadly I can’t recall the source, but I think it was on YouTube.
To put it into perspective…if Elon Musk were working paycheck-to-paycheck, he found enough money in the couch the night before payday to buy a pack of smokes.
With the damage done, it would be like he got a hernia while looking for the change only to find out how shitty his health insurance is.
he found enough money in the couch the night before payday to buy a pack of smokes
Relatively speaking, did he even find that much? I live in a poor, red state and cigarettes are almost $10 a pack (which is only a bit more than what they cost in NY in 2005). If I hadn’t quit
almostover a decade ago, I’d for sure be quitting now.Edit: I quit in 2013 and am now realizing that’s over a decade.
When a friend of mine told me a pack of Marlboros cost like $15 in RI I was amazed. How the fuck are people paying almost $1/cig?
Speaking from experience, it’s a hard habit to break. But you’d think the mental image of rolling up a $1 bill and lighting it on fire would push some people away.
…honestly, I probably should buy some cigars or cigarettes from Wish or something. The way America is going, those will buy a lot of food and things when the American Dollar implodes from all of the fuckery.
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.
7.5%. He promised $2 trillion in cuts.
People don’t understand that a state isn’t a private company, and you can’t manage the state like in the private sector.
He also is not great at managing companies either.
He saved all of our personal and national security information to give to the kremlin
I’m possibly more worried about what he didn’t destroy at this point. What’s gone will at least be rebuilt largely from scratch by people that care about restoring those institutions.
My huge worry now is what backdoors are now in systems like social security that impacts us all and we may not find out about for a long time. How much identity theft and scamming will go on now that outside actors likely have access to some or all of that data?
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security
Every. Fucking. Thing that doge touched has been backdoored to Russia. Doge is a front to get sensitive information to the Kremlin. Elon is a fucking traitor.
Yes, exactly, and once I read this yesterday I allowed myself to rule out that I was just thinking the worst.
Daniel Bertulis appeared on The Lead, joined by his attorney Andrew Bakaj, and explained the details of how he apparently uncovered a massive amount of missing data from the NLRB following DOGE’s efforts. He ostensibly mocked a White House statement touting the transparency at play, noting that none of the code used by DOGE technicians has been shared publicly.
But the most shocking allegations came from Bakaj, who not only claimed that accounts based in Russia were using newly created DOGE usernames and passwords to access sensitive data, but also directly tied the effort to Elon Musk and his Starlink concerns, which has a relationship with the Kremlin.
“There are two data points that I wanna point out that should give everybody pause,” Bakaj said. “The first thing, what Dan witnessed was that within 15 minutes of DOGE employees creating user accounts, i.e. Usernames and passwords, within 15 minutes of those accounts being created, somebody or something from Russia tried to log in with the right username and right passwords — that is to say — the right credentials. And that happened over 20 times.”
“The second data point, which is really critical, is that DOGE has also been using Starlink as a means to exfiltrate data,” he continued. “What that means is that, from our understanding, Russia has a direct pipeline of information through Starlink, which means that anything going through Starlink is going to Russia.”
I think I got this link from some Lemmy post yesterday, and I don’t like that I don’t know the source, but it seems to fit what is being talked about in regular mainstream reporting.
The whistleblower and his lawyer were on Rachel Maddow if you want a more reputable source. He also said that they taped a picture of him walking his dog to his door that was taken via drone as a sort of threat.
Appreciate that! Was good to hear it right from them.
We will need a whole new SSA computer system, just to kill this question dead. Same goes for EVERY department. Some 20 years from now, I guess DOGE would have fulfilled its original mission of updating American computer infrastructure, in the most stupid and malicious way possible.
SS numbers seemed compromised enough pre-Musk. I feel we should all get a new one that isn’t just tossed blindly onto any form we have to fill out on a daily basis.
They increased the budget of the Pentagon. You should be worried about where the funds are being moved-to
The military budget doesn’t seem to have gone up by anything that hasnt been trending the last decade or 2, and despite all the talk about going to fight other countries, I don’t think there is enough support for anything other than Iran, and even that I dont think would be done directly by the US military.
I do worry more about a more internally agro surveillance state, but with facial recognition and a camera on every doorbell, I think we’ve already long traded privacy for security. I keep learning about previous rebellions and having covert places to gather, plan, and stage have really been crucial, and I don’t know how one does that in the modern world.
You’re being defeatist. There’s not cameras everywhere. There are loads of blind spots, even in major cities.
It’s a fact that the majority of square feet in the US has places where there are no cameras compared to where there are cameras.
There are groups that map this. You can help identity the cameras on OSM.
I don’t feel defeatist. I think my feelings on America as a whole are higher than many I’ve been seeing here. But tech has come a long way since a lot of these types of movements have taken place.
I love getting inspiration from people like the Maroons the bands of people hiding out in huge areas of Appalachia before the Civil War and others, but stuff like thermal optics and night vision and whatever other stuff the military and even local police likely have these days is pretty intimidating. It’s also way quicker and stealthier to deploy. There’s license plate readers that can grab the plates of anyone driving to a protest and databases of faces, etc.
I’m not as tech savvy as maybe a lot of you are so I don’t know real life limitations of all this stuff or how to avoid it, and I just keep it in mind.
$150 billion is the target for FY 2025, not what they’ve actually saved.
And as the article says, we already know that their “receipts” were mostly wrong or bullshit, so even that number will be inflated.
The goal was never to save money but find ways to enrich himself.
End democracy, that’s their true goal.
The working class has never had any form of democracy
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).
This entire post and thread is about the US
