DOGE Is a Massive Scam—Even on Its Own Terms

Imagine, if you will, that some supercharged fledgling government task force—call it the Committee to Call Out State-backed Bullshit (CCSB)—took a close look at the handiwork of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during its first month in action. A rough and partial executive summary of its findings would go something like this.

• In targeting the purported Leninist excesses of the United States Agency of International Development, DOGE apparatchiks lied about basic USAID outlays, including an apocryphal $50 million worth of condoms sent to the Gaza strip. (The funds in question concerned a province in Mozambique also named Gaza, and were meant to curb the spread of AIDS, an eminently worthy humanitarian goal completely aligned with USAID’s mission.) Musk also asserted that USAID burned through nearly $40 million in bloated celebrity junkets to Ukraine, a claim fabricated whole-cloth from the perfervid imagination of a right-wing fabulist site called “I Meme Therefore I Am.” Another key lie Musk told about USAID, that just 10 percent of its disbursements reached its designated recipients, comes from simple innumeracy: The 10 percent figure denotes direct transfers of support, versus in-kind contributions of material like malarial nets and HIV treatments, which make up the remaining 90 percent.  A whole other tranche of Musk-promoted lies about the agency come from Mike Benz, another unhinged social media darling of the MAGA right who’s also an enthusiastic white nationalist. Meanwhile, the DOGE team’s ignorant assault on AIDS prevention has also produced a suspension in funding, and a possible death sentence, for PEPFAR, by almost all accounts the most successful international aid initiative of the past generation. Other aid groups say that losing PEPFAR would result in millions of otherwise preventable deaths. Trashing USAID spending has also placed patients participating in clinical trials offering experimental treatments in immediate peril. 
• The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) fielded a similar agitprop attack from the Musk team, which got laundered into a White House letter alleging that the agency had been “weaponized” by its faithless left leaders. The sins itemized in the letter include directing a “slush fund” to left-leaning nonprofits like DC Legal Aid, pursuing claims against banks on behalf of “illegal immigrants,” and “unilaterally bury[ing] $50 billion in medical debt”—things that, when stripped of incendiary MAGAspeak, are mostly evidence of CFPB fulfilling its mandate. Small wonder that the acting head of the agency, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, very nearly upended the housing market when, high on DOGE fumes, he almost axed the division of the agency charged with keeping mortgage rates stable. Meanwhile, the most salient DOGE-related data point in the CFPB inquisition is one that Musk somehow failed to put on blast in his Twitter feed: In its efforts to regulate the migration of tech monopolies into finance, the CFPB stands directly athwart Musk’s plan to launch a digital payment app called X Money. Indeed, Musk’s status as a recipient of billions in federal contracts is a textbook illustration of self-dealing corruption, but he would much rather have you focused on nonexistent “woke” crusades at the agency. 
• Musk has claimed that Social Security fraud is so flagrant that millions of supposed 150-year-olds are collecting benefits. As ever, the excitable DOGE titan appears to have mangled a basic data point: Social Security, like many government payment systems, operates on old-school COBOL coding, and when a missing date surfaces in COBOL, it tends to plug in the birthday of the still-older Bureau of Weights and Measures—May 20, 1875, which would make the subject in question verge on the 150-year benchmark. According to the Social Security Administration’s own publicly available data, the actual number of people over the age of 99 drawing benefits is 89,000—pretty much what you’d expect in a nation of 300 million. What’s more, the names entered into the Social Security system without a birthdate do not, in all likelihood, belong to people bilking the system—quite the opposite. In many cases, these would be workers who are undocumented immigrants, meaning that they need to enroll in, and pay into, Social Security in order to get hired, but can’t ever draw down actual benefits. In other words, Musk has marshaled unusable data to malign people who are actually granting an enormous subsidy to the country’s Social Security reserves.
• As Musk and his DOGE bros train their sights on Americans’ personal IRS data, the Beckett-level futility of their project moves into especially high relief. The IRS has long been the bête noir of the tax-slashing right, which is why Trump has said he wants to abolish it under his new tariff regime. Short of that, Trump has issued a hiring freeze at the agency after the House GOP reversed the Biden administration’s plans to expand its ranks and enforcement mandate—a move that would have netted major increases in federal revenue by punishing tax cheats. Now, Team DOGE has secured unprecedented access to sensitive taxpayer data under the vague directive to purge the defanged IRS of “waste, fraud, and abuse, and improve government performance to better serve the people,” as a Trump administration flack told The Washington Post. It’s the same rote nonsense that Musk spewed about Social Security fraud, with the same practical mission: to discredit a key government service that inconveniences and angers Musk and his fellow billionaires. Plans are already afoot to fire thousands of probationary workers at the IRS just as tax season kicks into high gear, again raising the question of what government efficiencies are being achieved by DOGE’s slapdash scan-and-memeify model of federal auditing.

As even this partial account of DOGE’s doings makes painfully clear, the swashbuckling coders in Musk’s employ would have to be considered failures even by the most credulous believers in their supposed mission to root out and reform massive government fraud and waste. The evidence strongly indicates that the scale of financial abuse in the government, while always worth tracking and correcting, is by no means an epidemic scandal. Indeed, the watchdog functions within the executive branch’s regulatory nexus had been carried out by designated inspector generals, who actually did the work that Musk and DOGE are now pretending, quite badly, to do. The only problem, of course, is that one of Trump’s first acts in office was to illegally fire 17 inspector generals across the government; he later made it a round 18, by dismissing the inspector general at USAID for documenting the harms wrought by the agency’s dismantling. (And yes, there’s another Muskian irony to underline here, since the DOGE chieftain long ago derided the CFPB as a useless and “duplicative” federal agency; DOGE would stand in precisely that relation to the inspector-general system—if, that is, it were competent enough to duplicate the work of genuine government watchdogs.)

Yet there’s no chance that Musk and his data lapdogs will be yanked from their posts, since the point of DOGE is not really to reform government spending and accountability at all. That’s evidenced by both the steady increase of federal spending on Musk and Trump’s watch and the doubling of DOGE’s own budget, in yet one more instance of right-wing institutions mimicking the myopia and excesses they obsessively ascribe to the demonized public sector.

Rather, the agency is there to whip up the same bogus frenzy that Musk sought to inflame with his ballyhooed release of the Twitter Files—a cache of dreary bureaucratic communiqués from the platform’s prior ownership regime. To hear Musk tell it, the files documented rampant ideological bias in the moderation of comments on subjects like Hunter Biden’s laptop and Covid public health strictures. In reality, as data researcher Joan Donavan wrote at the time, the archive mostly showed a heightened solicitude to keep big-name celebrities supplying content on Twitter. As for the alleged bombshell revelations in play, she noted that “to pretend that the ‘Twitter Files’ illustrates internal political bias on behalf of the old regime is to ignore the reality that Musk’s new regime is much more politically motivated.”

Or, as the COBOL-era class of computer programmers used to say, “garbage in, garbage out.” But now that Musk’s brand of garbage has the full power of the MAGA state mobilized behind it—and a group of faux-savvy Democrats are echoing the logic behind DOGE’s phony mandate—his Twitter Files reveries are coming to pass. America is careening toward failed-state status in order to keep Elon Musk’s truth-mangling parables of mogul power afloat.