Why DOGE failed

It was a crime, but not a particularly successful one

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I have to admit that DOGE took me a bit by surprise. Before the administration started, I thought it was going to do even less than it turned out that it did.

Washington has seen many budget-cutting commissions come and go without having much effect, and I assumed DOGE would end up like the rest of them - feeding ideas into Congress which Congress then ignored. When Elon Musk started dispatching teenagers to access sensitive IT systems and unilaterally firing people and cancelling contracts, I was surprised.

One of the reasons I was surprised is because doing that is illegal. Congress controls the power of the purse, and the president doesn’t just get to decide whether to spend money that Congress has allocated to an agency. Since DOGE began its firings and contract cancellations, numerous judges have pointed this out and ordered workers and contracts to be reinstated. More such rulings are probably to come.

Nevertheless, DOGE did manage to fire a lot of civil servants - at least temporarily - or to create such chaotic conditions that they chose to take buy-outs and leave. This has been a great personal tragedy for many people and created a sort of funereal atmosphere in Washington, D.C., whose economy was still reeling from the pandemic and the subsequent shift to remote work.

DOGE was also more aggressive in trying to shut down whole departments than I expected. The U.S. aid agency was particularly badly hit. Musk seemed to take particular glee in attacking USAID, which I think might be because of fringe conspiracy theories about its activities in his homeland of South Africa. And because some of the most vulnerable people in the world rely on USAID, the cuts there have been catastrophic. People have died.

This has all been awful and unnecessary. But what it doesn’t amount to is any sort of victory for DOGE.

The purpose of DOGE was supposedly to save a lot of money on the federal budget - one to two trillion dollars, according to Musk. As of today, it looks like it has maybe saved about $8bn, with a few billion more to come in September when the money being paid to workers who took buy-outs expire. It is hard to comprehend how small a part of the federal budget $8bn is. It’s about 0.1% - literally a rounding error.

But what DOGE hasn’t achieved is any kind of revolution in the way that the federal government operates or is financed. The biggest areas of federal spending - defense, interest payments, and welfare - were basically completely unaffected by DOGE’s activities. Five years from now, if you look at historic graphs of U.S. government spending, you won’t even notice that DOGE existed.

Congress is also showing zero appetite to enshrine DOGE’s cuts into law in the long term. This matters a lot because as things stand, all of the spending that DOGE has cancelled this year will just restart next year when Congress passes a new budget. Many of the people it fired will have to be rehired, or more expensive contractors will be brought in to do their jobs.

The White House wanted Congress to make the cuts this year permanent by passing what’s called a rescission, which is basically Congress saying “hey, don’t worry about spending that money we told you that you have to spend”. This would amount to Congress giving its stamp of approval to some of DOGE’s cuts, including deep ones to USAID. But Congressional Republicans are showing no interest in doing it. And if they don’t do it, the likelihood is that DOGE will keep losing in court - and the Trump administration will be ordered to resume yet more spending.

So why did DOGE fail? The reasons are many. Let’s talk about three - Silicon Valley arrogance, the fact cuts are politically unpopular, and bureaucracy doing its thing.

The first explanation is that the people running it just didn’t know much about how government works but thought they knew everything. That’s the Silicon Valley arrogance.

What was really curious about watching DOGE work is how Musk seemed to have no interest in drawing on the expertise of people who actually know about the federal government. There is a cottage industry of conservatives in Washington, D.C. who have dedicated their lives to understanding the federal budget and how to cut it. They can be found in think tanks, Congressional staff offices, and bars. Like, just walk into enough bars and you will find one.

Rather than talking to them and saying “hey, how can we make the federal government more efficient?”, Musk instead brought in a bunch of teenagers with names like “Big Balls” and set them loose with ChatGPT. The result was a massive list of mistakes and a squandering of the few months of time they had to act before political opposition forced them to stop.