Even among those errors and exaggerations, of the claimed “waste and fraud” it appears to be largely just cuts:
“I’m excited to announce that we anticipate savings in ’26 from reduction of waste and fraud by $150 billion,” Musk told Trump in the meeting.
According to DOGE’s website, the savings are a combination of “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud, and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”
Let’s fire a bunch of people who do unnecessary work. And by unnecessary, I mean sufficiently important that we need to pay other people to do that work, and quite likely pay them more as the current employees probably had some previous familiarity and didn’t need to get up to speed. This is a great way to run an important agency.
I think there was some language around getting rid of Federal workers so they could be more productive in private industry in the emails firing them. I take it, by more productive Trump meant giving corporate contractors the opportunity to take a slice off the top when charging the government more to get the same work done as before when it was being done by Fed employees.
Some added cruelty from the mass firings. It likely makes it harder for these people to get future federal jobs as they’re forced to declare that they’ve previously been fired from a federal job (last paragraph or two).
I expect a lot of MAGA types envisioned DOGE job cuts would primarily affect Washington-based bureaucrats. Will be interesting how red states react when thousands of their own residents lose their jobs.
Beyond that, the cuts to the agriculture budget are hurting locally. I’m ~30 miles west of KC and I support a local food bank (Just Food, website below), and they have reported a loss of appx 30% of their revenue due to the cuts. Edit: maybe not revenue, maybe loss in donations of food, maybe some combination. They put out a statement that the recent actions have cost them 30% or whatever. Just Foods not only provides food to people in my community with food insecurity, they also teach people how to cook, how to garden, and they provide pots/pans/utensils to folks who need them but cannot afford them.
Interestingly, it’s painfully obvious to me that DOGE has been a disaster and the tariffs are a terrible idea crushing the economy. And I assumed that was obvious to anyone. I was in a different echo chamber this weekend, and the narrative is that DOGE is doing great work and the tariffs are a great idea. These things spoken by otherwise very intelligent people.