A government is not a balance sheet.
In 2025, "efficiency" got a department. This wing looks at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk's run at it — what it was, what it claimed, and what independent analysts actually found — and then makes one argument: you cannot compute a person's worth, so you can't optimize a people by deleting them. Sourced commentary. Facts are cited; the argument is labeled opinion.
The record (look it up)
Created by executive order on January 20, 2025, DOGE wasn't a real cabinet department — it was the existing U.S. Digital Service, renamed the "U.S. DOGE Service," set up as a temporary organization scheduled to end July 4, 2026. Its stated goals: modernize federal IT, cut regulations, cut spending. Its people were embedded across agencies to cancel contracts, push AI tools, and drive workforce reductions.
Sources: DOGE (Wikipedia) · Britannica · USAFacts.
DOGE pushed mass exits: probationary workers fired (fewer protections, often with no explanation) and thousands more paid to leave via "fork in the road" buyouts. The federal workforce fell roughly 3.2% — from a recent peak near 3.1 million (January) to about 2.9 million (August 2025). Real jobs, real people who answer the phones at the VA and Social Security.
The numbers, honestly
Musk first floated cutting $2 trillion. The figure DOGE later claimed was closer to ~$180 billion — and even that has been dogged by accounting errors, omissions, double-counts and overstatements, per journalists and independent analysts. Triangulate, don't inflate — the house rule applies to governments too.
Sources: Wikipedia (savings disputes) · USAFacts.
Here's the catch with cutting the people who collect taxes, run programs, and prevent fraud: it can cost more than it saves. The Partnership for Public Service and Senate analysts separately estimated DOGE imposed billions in costs (lost revenue, rehiring, lawsuits, disruption). An invoice doesn't disappear because you fired the person who reads it.
Musk left Washington at the end of May 2025. By November 2025, the OPM director said DOGE no longer existed as a centralized entity — its functions folded into OPM and OMB. Musk himself later called the run only "somewhat successful," and said he wouldn't do it again.
Sources: NPR · Federal News Network.
The argument (this part is opinion)
Cutting genuine waste is good government — nobody's defending duplicate licenses and zombie contracts. But "efficiency" is the machine's only value, and a country run purely on it stops being a country. You can make a spreadsheet greener by deleting the clerk at the VA, the inspector at the plant, the voice on the Social Security line — and the cost doesn't vanish, it just moves onto humans who never see the invoice.
That's the whole thesis, pointed at policy: a machine optimizes; only a human can decide what's worth keeping that a number can't justify. A veteran's wait time. A kid's school lunch. A nurse's job. Those aren't inefficiencies to delete — they're the point. See the Civil Service Pledge, Why I Support UBI, and Where the Money Goes.