Elon Musk’s ‘Doge’ wasn’t actually that efficient after all

The Doge, the "department" for the Efficiency of the US public administration conceived by Elon Musk, has made ruthless and ideologically driven cuts to federal spending – as demonstrated by the humanitarian damage caused by slashing the budget of the international aid agency USAID – claiming to have thereby achieved efficiency gains worth many billions. However, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has thoroughly examined the so-called results of the Doge – which, fortunately, was shut down last month – says that the figures for the savings are often “incorrect” or “unverifiable”.

The most striking example cited is that of the "Wall of Receipts", a sort of noticeboard that the Doge used to show online how much each American taxpayer was saving thanks to the department’s work (it isn’t a real ministry; it was Musk’s playground, run by his "scissor-handed" team). The noticeboard showed savings of $110 billion, but the GAO says that, as there is a lack of transparency in the figures reported, that figure cannot be trusted. Musk, the world’s richest man, had initially promised to save up to two thousand billion dollars a year by cutting jobs and closing government programmes deemed inefficient.

The Doge himself had to admit that this ambitious target had not been met: it indicates total savings of 214 billion dollars, a tenth of the grandiose promises made. But even this figure is inflated: it includes cuts that were never actually made (such as the Pentagon’s IT department) and contracts that were already due to expire and would not have been renewed before the Doge took office. It does not, however, include the legal costs incurred by those who lodged appeals, nor the emergency rehiring that took place when it became clear that without air traffic controllers, aeroplanes would collide with one another, or that without avian flu experts, poultry farms would go to ruin. Not to mention the humanitarian costs around the world, which certainly do not matter to the Trump Administration, but which are measured in lives lost.