The Promise. Within hours after his November election, Donald Trump gave Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, the authority to create DOGE (the” Department of Government Efficiency”). In turn, Musk claimed he would reduce the $6.8 trillion federal budget $2 trillion (later reduced to $1 trillion) by ignoring experts familiar with the agencies and functions affected. Instead, he would deploy “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” using their technical expertise to root out “fraud” and “bloated” government services.

Two Plus Two = Five? In the 2024 presidential campaign, candidate Trump promised that his administration would not cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid benefits and veterans’ programs. But if these agencies are excluded from budget cuts, reducing the federal budget by a trillion dollars would require the elimination of every employee and every non-military federal program. The result would still be less than $1 trillion.

Ending “Fraud”/Cutting Costs? By mid-April, the DOGE web site claimed to have “saved” $150 billion. But Reuters, the Associated Press, Fortune Magazine, ABC,NBC, CNN, NPR, PBS, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the libertarian Cato Institute have shown that the DOGE reports have reported claims of fraud that reflected the ignorance of DOGE employees and are filled with errors and vastly exaggerated claims of savings. There are problems with fraud and waste in government expenditures. During the Biden administration, a GAO study found evidence of hundreds of millions of dollars in improper payments disbursed in the hurried Covid compensation programs and even greater amounts lost each year through over-billing in Medicare, Medicaid and excessive billing by private contractors in domestic and defense programs. But DOGE deals with none of these issues. Instead, it has often fired internal agency personnel assigned to investigate these problems. “Cutting costs,” it turns out, simply means eliminating public services.

The Consequences. The DOGE claims of “savings” are, in reality, billions cut from agency budgets and contracts that weaken the federal government’s core responsibilities in health, disease prevention, food and housing assistance, support for our veterans, services for children and the elderly, education, the protection of our national forests, air safety, consumer protection, basic scientific research (particularly involving climate research) and foreign assistance through AID. The 90 percent reduction in the AID budget has had a particularly devastating impact on the world’s most vulnerable population. A Boston University team specializing in monitoring world-wide death rates concluded that, in the absence of a reversal of the Trump administration policies, the end of AID food assistance and medical prevention programs during the coming year will lead to nearly 900,000 additional deaths in the world’s poorest countries, more than half of them children. Measuring the impact of DOGE reductions here in the United States is difficult given the chaos of the current administration’s directives, but the burden of these reductions inevitably will fall upon lower income Americans. For example, the current GOP House budget proposal calls for slashing $880 billion from Medicaid and $230 billion from SNAP (food stamps) over the next decade.

Privatization and Crony Capitalism. To a remarkable extent, the Trump administration’s policies reflect the goals of Project 2025, a document pervasively hostile to public institutions and their dedicated employees. Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, and now the powerful director of the Office of Management and Budget, made no effort to conceal his contempt for the men and women who operate critical agencies across America. ‘I want federal employees to be traumatized,” he told a group of far-right supporters. “ I want to put them in trauma. I want them . . . to not want to come to work—because they know that they are increasingly viewed as villains. “ Some of these policies, like replacing public education with private (and often religious) schools, reflect the extremism of Trump’s libertarian anti-government supporters. But this is more than ideological fanaticism. The administration seeks to cripple federal agencies and public institutions created by a democratic government that, however imperfect, are committed to serving all Americans. As they are hollowed out, their inability to perform essential functions will be used to justify their replacement with private corporations whose legal obligation is the maximization of profits above all else. Expanding the privatization of such public needs as health care, public water supplies, infrastructure and transportation, the US Postal Service, prisons, sanitation, libraries, the weather service, etc. will create an enlarged donor class for the governing party, the very definition of crony capitalism. Even as this administration seeks to replace public with private corporations, it has moved to eliminate safeguards against the kind of crony capitalism reflected in the selection of the current administration’s cabinet of billionaires and supportive donors who have billions of dollars of contracts with the federal government. And we should all ask our elected representatives this question. If rooting out waste and fraud has been the goal of DOGE and this administration, why did President Trump fire 12 Inspector generals and three watchdog agencies whose sole task was to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse?

Our Growing National Debt: Cause and Solution. The Trump administration is using bipartisan concern over our growing national debt to justify their radical cuts. And yet, as a percentage of GDP, the federal budget has increased less than five per cent since 1980. The Reagan, Bush and Trump 1981,2001, 2003 and 2017 tax legislation—heavily benefiting the wealthiest Americans—is the fundamental cause of growing deficits. Over the last half century these rising deficits have been interrupted only once by the Clinton administration’s 1993 modest tax increases on high-income Americans. That led to $400 billion in budget surpluses from 1997-2001. Now the Trump administration seeks to extend the 2017 tax cuts for another five years even though the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates this would increase the national debt by a minimum of $4.6 trillion to $6 trillion over the next decade. At the same time, President Trump and the Republican congressional majority have made massive cuts to the Internal Revenue auditing staff and eliminated the Biden administration’s long-term $79 billion increase to the IRS that would have allowed the agency to focus on the $400 billion a year tax evasion by the wealthiest Americans. (Two independent studies concluded that each dollar spent in increased auditing of the top one percent of taxpayers resulted in $12 in increased revenues.)