DOGE is Dead

The Department of Government Efficiency promised revolution. It delivered embarrassment.

Not with a bang but a whimper.

The Department of Government Efficiency is no more. In a Reuters interview earlier this month, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor confirmed what many had suspected: “That doesn’t exist,” he said when asked about DOGE’s status. The agency that once promised to revolutionize federal spending, led by the world’s richest man wielding a literal chainsaw at conservative conferences, has quietly shuttered eight months ahead of schedule—a spectacular failure that reveals fundamental truths about Donald Trump’s second term and the hollowness of MAGA’s small-government rhetoric.

Remember the spectacle? Elon Musk, brandishing that chainsaw on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, promising to carve waste from the federal bureaucracy. The imagery was perfect for a movement built on performance rather than substance. Musk claimed the initiative would save at least $1 trillion, a staggering figure that captivated fiscal conservatives who had long dreamed of dismantling the administrative state. The promise was intoxicating: finally, a businessman who would run government like a business, cutting fat and delivering efficiency.

The reality proved embarrassingly different. DOGE’s website claims it has saved $214 billion at the federal level, but multiple reports show the department inflated, rewrote, or overstated these savings. Analysis by Politico found that the agency achieved only about five percent of its claimed savings by using misleading accounting tricks, most notably by calculating the maximum possible spending under contracts as baselines rather than actual expenditures. The Partnership for Public Service noted that even these exaggerated cuts came with related costs that resulted in minimal net savings, not counting legal expenses from numerous lawsuits or lost tax revenue from IRS staff layoffs.

And, of course, you all remember the countless stories of federal employees having to be back paid and hired back in areas where we couldn’t afford to lose specialized talent. Like those in charge of securing our nuclear arsenal.

The Republican Party’s rhetoric about smaller government is a sham. A crock. A ruse for grifters to wrap themselves in the American flag and call themselves patriots. It’s a sad tale really, about a people so wholly empty in a country so fat with largesse that they need to cos-play as patriots rather than do the real work of trying to help their fellow countrymen.

The most telling aspect of DOGE’s demise is how quietly it happened. An initiative that dominated headlines for months, that was supposed to fundamentally transform how government operates, simply evaporated. Its end slipped under the radar and came with eight months still left on its charter, going out not with the bang of revolutionary change but with the whimper of bureaucratic absorption. Its functions were quietly folded into the Office of Personnel Management, its personnel scattered to various agencies, its website left to gather digital dust while still falsely claiming massive savings.

It was a lie all along.

This quiet death speaks volumes about the Trump administration’s priorities. For all the bombast about fiscal responsibility, the federal government is actually spending more during Trump’s second term, not less. The administration managed to pass only a modest $9 billion rescission package—a rounding error in the federal budget—primarily cutting foreign aid and public broadcasting, easy political targets that generated headlines without meaningfully addressing spending.

What DOGE did accomplish was chaos and human suffering. At the Social Security Administration, DOGE cutbacks in the name of efficiency led to severe delays in processing claims. The U.S. Agency for International Development, credited with saving tens of millions of lives through vaccine programs and disease prevention, was effectively shut down. Real people died because of DOGE’s reckless approach—not efficiency, but destruction masquerading as reform.

Meanwhile we sent Argentina a $40 billion aid package to rescue their economy.

Tens of thousands are dying and America’s diplomatic soft power lies in shambles but at least a Latin American sycophant will be able to attend dinner parties at the White House. Spare me the ‘America First’ jingoism and the Constitutional Conservative facade.

Perhaps most revealing was the fraudulent nature of DOGE’s supposed discoveries. Musk suggested that 20 million people received Social Security past age 100, which he later called “the biggest fraud in history”; that claim rests on a misunderstanding of the database. Karoline Leavitt asserted that DOGE discovered $2.7 trillion in improper Medicare and Medicaid payments to people overseas—a claim that was thoroughly debunked. Two judges rebuked the administration for alleging fraud without evidence. Yet Trump repeated these falsehoods in his Joint Congressional Address, showing either ignorance or indifference to truth. Fox News trumpeted the fake stories endlessly for weeks and the hoople heads lapped it up.

The failure of DOGE exposes what Donald Trump actually is: neither a fiscal conservative nor a small-government conservative, but a statist who views government as a tool for advancing his political objectives and personal interests. Vice President JD Vance observed that DOGE matters less for saving money than for “making the bureaucracy responsive to the elected president.” This admission reveals the truth: DOGE was never about efficiency or savings, but about consolidating executive power and punishing perceived enemies in the bureaucracy.

It’s about greater government power not less. It always has been. Trumpism is a trojan horse lilted in faux gold spray paint bought from Home Depot.

Musk himself abandoned ship in May, his 130-day contract expiring after accomplishing a fraction of his promises. His departure came amid a public feud with Trump over tax-and-spending legislation, exposing the transactional nature of their relationship. The world’s richest man, who donated an estimated $250 million to Trump’s campaign, couldn’t even maintain influence for a full year.

For the MAGA movement, DOGE’s failure should prompt soul-searching. The movement marketed itself as a populist rebellion against wasteful government, yet when given the chance to actually reduce spending, it produced only theater. The chainsaw was just a prop. The promises were just marketing. The revolution was just rebranding.

What remains is a Trump administration increasingly comfortable with big government. Hosting and capitulating to the ideas of socialist mayors, pursuing massive spending bills, and using federal power to reward allies and punish enemies. DOGE is dead, and with it dies any pretense that this administration represents genuine fiscal conservatism. What Trump offers is not smaller government, but government repurposed for his personal benefit—a truth that DOGE’s quiet demise makes impossible to ignore.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

But the red-hat wearing mob will march on because as P.T Barnum, who is now America’s second most famous huckster, declared: There’s a sucker born every minute.