The new regime arrived speaking in ledgers. It promised numbers like charms: billions saved, fat cut, waste erased—as if government were a barn full of old rope to be sold by the kilo. In that first surge of declarations, the Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE—announced a grand arithmetic of purges, cancellations, and efficiencies under the showrunner's tutelage of Elon Musk, styled as special government employee and de-facto tribune of austerity. The method was simple: list totals, not trade-offs; exhibit speed, not care; claim victory, then amend the footnotes later. Beneath the showy numerology lay something older than any spreadsheet: the permanent contest between institutions (slow, redundant by design) and appetite (impatient, performative). Ten months in, the balance sheet is legible. What looks like subtraction is often scorched ground; what looks like reform is frequently a breach of law or basic administrative hygiene; what looks like savings—on contact—shrinks to rounding error next to the fiscal choices made elsewhere.
I. What, exactly, is DOGE?
DOGE is not a cabinet department in the constitutional sense. It's an executive creation that burst into being on Inauguration Day with companion orders to revive Schedule F-style firing authorities, end most remote work, and subject the civil service to rolling "productivity" rituals (the infamous "five things you did last week" emails). The legal posture is unsettled: courts have already blocked parts of DOGE's access and actions, and judges have flagged likely constitutional defects when private actors exercise state power without Senate confirmation or statutory warrant. The policy posture is clearer: a rapid, centralized campaign to terminate contracts, shutter programs (notably foreign aid), and purge DEI offices well beyond DEI's bounds.
On paper, this arrived as "efficiency." In practice, the early months were defined by contradictory directives from the White House, OPM, and DOGE social accounts, then agencies quietly walking back instructions that would have violated statute or collective bargaining agreements. Within weeks, OPM memos softened hard lines; agencies told employees not to respond to Musk's threats; the Pentagon and others stopped enforcing the "five things" ritual. None of that ambiguity speaks of institutional clarity; all of it speaks of haste.
II. The arithmetic of claims vs. facts
DOGE's public case rests on savings tallies. The trouble begins where it must: at the decimal point. Investigations by Reuters, AP, Business Insider and public broadcasters documented multiple categories of misstatement on the DOGE "wall of receipts": double-counting, counting expired contracts as "savings," pricing off ceiling values instead of obligated spend, and the notorious "$8 billion" cancellation that turned out to be an $8 million contract—off by a factor of a thousand. As analysts forced corrections, DOGE's own web tallies fell by billions within days. Independent reviews estimate that roughly four in ten canceled contracts produced no net savings at all (funds were already obligated or the work had to be redone elsewhere).
Even if one took the largest DOGE figure at face value—north of $50–$100 billion, depending on the press conference—that sum is a small island in the fiscal sea. The enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) adds on the order of $3.4 trillion to deficits over ten years on CBO's score; extending the 2017 tax cuts permanently runs roughly $4 trillion in foregone revenue over the same horizon; dynamic or alternative windows push higher still. Against that scale, even the uncorrected DOGE brag sheet rounds to noise. The math of government is cruel to theatrics.
There's a deeper problem than posture. Many terminations targeted modernization or compliance work—things that don't make headlines but keep agencies lawful and secure. When you stop paying for migrations off magnetic tape—or misrepresent what you're replacing—you don't save; you store risk. When you cancel climate or safety research mid-stream, you don't produce efficiency; you create a missing page in tomorrow's playbook. That is not an accounting issue. That is a state-capacity issue.
III. Law and its abrasion
Efficiency is not a talisman that suspends the law. Courts have already issued injunctive relief against DOGE's access to Treasury systems and against the dismantling of USAID, citing likely violations of separation of powers and statutory limits. The gist: you cannot dissolve or effectively disable a congressionally created agency by executive fiat, nor can you outsource the prerogatives of officers to private citizens with stock tickers. That is civics 101, not legal esoterica.
The civil service angle is equally blunt. Reinstating Schedule F-like authorities and ordering sudden full-time return-to-office without negotiated frameworks triggered chaos rather than clarity. Agencies cycled through contradictory compliance notes; unions prepared litigation; morale cratered. If your goal is output, this is the wrong tool; the evidence base on forced RTO and productivity is, at best, mixed and highly context-dependent, and the federal context is not a software firm on a deadline.
IV. The purge that wasn't narrow
The DEI purge presented itself as budget discipline. Internal documents and subsequent actions painted a broader canvas: the campaign targeted workers well beyond DEI roles, including personnel in offices that investigate discrimination and enforce equal-employment laws. At Defense, the "purge" metastasized into wholesale removal of historical and educational content about minority service members—including the Navajo code talkers and the Japanese-American 442nd—until public outcry forced partial reinstatements. Erasure masqueraded as economy.
Changes to consumer protection moved in parallel. The Senate advanced efforts to hamstring the CFPB's digital payments oversight in a manner that would conveniently remove one of the few agencies with direct regulatory concerns touching platforms like X (owned by DOGE's de-facto leader). Nothing in the record suggests a careful management of conflicts; everything in the record suggests a taste for bulldozers.
V. Conflicts and the vanishing concept of ethics
The Musk problem is not personality; it's structure. A special government employee (SGE) with deep, current financial interests across regulated industries—space, defense, autos, telecommunications, payments—was given sweeping informal authority to cancel, steer, and redesign programs that touch those same industries. In the first quarter alone, watchdogs and Senators flagged missing disclosures, on-premise promotion of Tesla, and Commerce officials touting Tesla stock on television in what ethics groups called blatant violations. Congressional staff memoranda cataloged potential conflicts around Starlink and FAA telecoms infrastructure. None of this would pass an undergraduate class in governance design, much less a serious ethics review. It did pass in practice.
Then the administration fired the Senate-confirmed head of the Office of Government Ethics. An oversight office exists to be inconvenient. When the referee is removed mid-game, it tells you the game the owners want to play.
VI. The cost of breaking things fast
There is a banal truth culled from decades of management literature: most "transformations" fail to deliver projected benefits. Across industries, the success rate hovers near 30%. Government is not immune to that gravity and carries statutory and constitutional ballast that makes speed harder. That's by design. Planes crash faster than trains; institutions are meant to be trains. In this light, DOGE's method—velocity first, validation later—almost guaranteed rework, litigation, and stranded cost. The private-sector playbook it apes has a poor batting average even where CEOs face no constitutional constraints at all.
The hidden costs are already visible: termination fees; re-procurements at worse terms; frozen projects that will cost more to restart; reputational risk premia as vendors reprice "government reliability" into bids; and time lost to injunctions and rewrites. Early academic work on lease cancellations documents measurable ripples through federal real estate markets, and contracting law primers have been forced back into daily use as agencies trigger "termination for convenience" at scale. None of that is free.
VII. The "savings" vs. the fiscal story that matters
Even generous readings of the DOGE tally—tens of billions—must sit next to the fiscal choices that actually set the decade's contour. The enacted OBBBA and a horizon of extended TCJA provisions dominate the ledger. CBO, JCT, and mainstream think tanks converge on the same order of magnitude: multi-trillion-dollar revenue losses and higher interest costs that dwarf any DOGE spreadsheet. When the same political system cuts revenue by trillions with one hand while boasting of "savings" in the low tens of billions with the other, that is not governance. That is branding.
VIII. What was dismantled in human terms
The most consequential DOGE theater wasn't domestic: it was abroad. The campaign to shutter USAID—and, more broadly, to sever longstanding channels of U.S. foreign assistance—hit a judicial wall, but not before deep operational damage was done: staff locked out; pipelines frozen; partners suspended mid-program. Separate from USAID, sweeping cuts to UN bodies and global-health channels compounded a funding crisis that analysts now tie to millions of excess deaths if sustained: UNAIDS estimates that without full funding to 2030, 7.7 million more people will die; broader modeling pegs COVID-era aid shortfalls to ~14 million excess deaths, and the cumulative toll of post-pandemic austerity in global health is now estimated into the tens of millions. The United States is not the sole donor, but its withdrawals escalate a structural failure. The price of "efficiency" here is counted in lives, not invoices.
If one insists on comparing "savings," then compare like with like. A paper "savings" line of, say, $55 billion cannot be set against the cost of extinguished malaria nets, delayed HIV treatment, or halted vaccination campaigns in countries where dollar multipliers are brutal and immediate. Those cancellations do not save; they convert taxpayer dollars into human scarcity at extremely high exchange rates.
IX. Rights, privileges, and the slow work they protect
The American public's rights and practical privileges are not slogans; they're the flicker of ordinary reliance: that a federal grant program will pay the second tranche because it paid the first; that anti-discrimination offices will accept and process claims; that historical records about minority service won't vanish from official sites overnight; that consumer finance cops can police new payments schemes; that civil servants won't be coerced into loyalty pageants to keep their jobs. Ten months in, each of those relies on caveats. Where courts intervened, the damage is partial and reversible; where erasures occurred, restoration is lumpy and incomplete; where personnel fled, capacity takes years to regrow. Institutions are lossy rebuilds.
How long to repair, in best case? USAID's technical pipelines—procurement, partner vetting, local staff, security protocols—take 18–36 months to meaningfully re-constitute after mass disruption; multi-year research contracts canceled at mid-term often require re-competitions that can stretch another 12–18 months; rebuilding civil-rights enforcement shops after mass departures is measured in hiring cycles, not press releases. The timeline is not speculative; it's baked into federal HR and procurement law. (The injunctions that halted the worst of it spared irreparable losses; they did not erase delays.)
X. The shakedown thesis, examined
Defenders argue a cleansing "shakedown" was necessary—that every institution holds 10–20% of slack, and a hard purge is the only way to find it. Several problems present themselves:
- Slack is not waste. Some redundancy is the premium a republic pays for due process and continuity. You wouldn't rip fire doors off a courthouse to speed foot traffic.
- Method matters. Change programs run with threats and viral emails don't alter process; they bleed talent and invite litigation. The empirical base on transformation success is unsentimental: most fail; the rest take time.
- Opportunity cost is real. Many DOGE cancellations hit modernization, safety, and science—low-glamour domains where today's cuts bake in tomorrow's overruns.
- Scale mismatch. Even best-case DOGE savings do not remotely offset the fiscal impact of the concurrent tax program. Austerity sold as morality while delivering regressivity as policy is not a shakedown; it is a shell game.
XI. Corruption, concentration, and the political physics of the era
The novelty here is not graft; it's permission. A President publicly empowered a private magnate with an active balance sheet before the state; agencies with live matters touching that balance sheet were targeted for neutering; the nation's ethics cop was removed; the Senate moved to declaw a regulator with jurisdiction over the magnate's payments ambitions. Even if every act were technically lawful (several were not), the design amounts to institutionalized conflict. Republics rot less from scandal than from normalization.
XII. What should have been done—if "efficiency" were the point
If the brief were genuine efficiency, the toolkit exists and is boring:
- Publicly score major programs with GAO/OMB-aligned cost-benefit frameworks
- Enforce staged, randomized audits of large vendors with clawback clauses
- Expand "wrong-pocket" pilots that let one agency fund changes that save money in another
- Mandate pre-mortems on any contract termination above a threshold, including re-procurement risk
- Keep a rolling, public dashboard that ties "savings" to statutory mission metrics (backlogs cleared, days-to-decision, response times), not just dollars
None of this requires a doge. All of it requires administrative respect.
XIII. The human page—what these ten months feel like from inside
Imagine being a career air safety engineer and receiving a Saturday email demanding five bullet points of your week's accomplishments—under the implied threat that silence equals resignation—while your program's multi-year contract is tagged "savings" on a website that triple-counted expired instruments. Imagine being a USAID health officer urgently locked out of systems while your implementing partner in a conflict zone texts that a cold chain just failed. Imagine being a DoD historian who watches a page on the Navajo code talkers go dark in a political purge of three-letter keywords. Efficiency is a word for architects. For the people inside, this is the sound of something coming loose.
XIV. What remains after the slogans
Strip away the branding and you are left with three durable facts:
- Capacity is cumulative. You keep it by tending it; you lose it quickly by performative cuts; you rebuild it slowly and expensively.
- Savings must survive reconciliation. If a "cut" increases downstream costs, triggers legal damages, or reduces mission performance, it isn't savings—it's pre-spending.
- Scale governs honesty. Any serious fiscal plan confronts the multi-trillion impact of tax policy; anything else is theatre.
And there is the foreign page: a nation that calls itself efficient while breaking the sinews of global health and development is not efficient; it is prodigal in a different currency. The literature now has numbers to name that cost. They are not small.
XV. The rebuild
What would it take to restore what ten months eroded, assuming political appetite and judicial space?
USAID: An emergency authority to rehire specialists; rolling 24-month re-competitions to restart suspended pipelines; a standing "continuity fund" to prevent cold-chain failures and pay retention differentials for field staff who endured the lockouts. Timeline: two fiscal years to stable.
Civil service: Repeal or cabin the revived Schedule-F mechanisms; codify guardrails on SGE roles with live conflicts; restore hybrid work via agency-level MOUs and outcome metrics rather than edicts; require OPM to publish annual productivity-and-attrition surveys to separate morale from myth. Timeline: one contract cycle for MOUs; longer for culture.
Knowledge base: A restoration protocol for federal web content with public version control and an appeal process for removals; DEI-related materials treated as historical record, not ideology. Timeline: months.
Consumer protection: Shield digital-payments oversight from targeted carve-outs; require conflict-screening when owners of regulated platforms hold government posts with relevant scope. Timeline: legislative session.
Ethics: Re-empower OGE, make SGE disclosures mandatory before access, and require recusal walls enforceable by civil and criminal penalties. Timeline: immediate on statute.
That is the pragmatic route back to normal. It lacks romance because reality does.
XVI. A closing image
In Renaissance Venice, the doge was a figurehead strapped to a ritual barge, marrying the sea each year to prove dominion over the waves. The ceremony didn't move the tides. Our modern Doge arrived in a different barge—tweets and dashboards, lists and threats—and promised to drain an ocean with a spreadsheet. Ten months later, the water is still there. The channels we cut into the bed—courts, civil service law, procurement rules, ethics offices, even a rickety foreign-aid pipeline—are the only reliable instruments for shaping the flow. You can smash them and claim efficiency in the debris. Or you can do the hard, slow, untheatrical work of governing.
The tide keeps its own books.
XVII. Epilogue — The Dissolution (November 2025)
In late November, Reuters confirmed what many had suspected: the Department of Government Efficiency officially disbanded, eight months ahead of its mandated timeline. The announcement arrived not as a press conference but as bureaucratic fact—DOGE employees dispersed, most reassigned to the very agencies they had been tasked with cutting, a few absorbed into a vestigial "National Design Studio" charged with making government websites more attractive. The irony of the arc is almost structural: an entity created to erase redundancy became, in its final form, a rounding error in the org chart.
The human toll is now quantifiable. Data from the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, current as of November 18, documents that over 211,000 civil servants left federal service during DOGE's operational window. Not all departures trace to DOGE alone—retirements, voluntary exits, and natural attrition always occur—but the scale and velocity point to more than seasonal churn. When combined with forced return-to-office mandates, "five things" loyalty rituals, and mass contract cancellations that stranded projects mid-stream, the exodus reads as symptom, not coincidence. Institutions are not liquid; when a fifth of the talent walks out, capacity does not redistribute smoothly. It evaporates.
The savings mirage hardened into measurement. A POLITICO analysis from August placed DOGE's realized savings at less than 5% of its public claims—a figure that aligns grimly with the earlier AP finding that roughly 40% of canceled contracts would produce no net savings at all. Even within that narrow band, the "savings" often represented funds already obligated, contracts already expired, or work that had to be re-procured at higher cost after termination fees and delays. The arithmetic was never opaque; it was simply ignored in favor of performance. By November, the performance had no stage.
The internal collapse mirrored the external one. After the widely reported falling-out between Musk and Trump in the spring, DOGE's young staff—many imported from Musk's private ventures—found themselves adrift in a succession struggle. Rival factions formed; a top operational lead was fired and, in a spectacle fitting the era, refused to leave. Eventually, the administration brought in a veteran General Services Administration official to restore basic managerial order. That such intervention was necessary says more about DOGE's design than any audit could. You do not need a crisis manager to shut down a well-run project; you need one to prevent a controlled demolition from becoming a collapse.
What remains is modest and symbolic: the National Design Studio, a nod to user experience in the .gov landscape, and a scattering of personnel now embedded in agencies they once targeted. The rest is archive—court injunctions, clawback litigation, and a digital "wall of receipts" whose numbers fell by billions under scrutiny. The broader fiscal picture has not changed. The multi-trillion-dollar tax extensions and the enacted OBBBA still dominate the ten-year outlook; DOGE's maximal, uncorrected claims would not move that needle even if every dollar had been real.
The story of DOGE's dissolution is not a morality play; it is a stress test. It tested whether velocity could substitute for legitimacy, whether performance could replace process, whether a republic designed to be slow could be reengineered by impatience and spectacle. The results are in. Courts blocked the overreach; agencies quietly ignored the unlawful directives; staff fled rather than participate in loyalty theater; and the savings—once you subtract the accounting errors, the double-counts, and the obligations that were never discretionary—rounded to noise. The dissolution confirms what the structure predicted: government is not a startup, efficiency is not a synonym for speed, and the tide does keep its own books.
If there is a lesson encoded in ten months of DOGE, it is this: the hard, slow, untheatrical work of governing cannot be shortcut by dashboards and threats. Institutions are cumulative; you keep them by tending them. You lose them quickly. You rebuild them slowly, expensively, and—if you are lucky—with enough residual trust to begin again. DOGE spent that trust like currency. The bill is now due, and it will be paid in time, talent, and the opportunity cost of years spent restoring what a few months dismantled.
Sources & Further Reading
- Reuters, "DOGE website offers error-filled window into Musk's government overhaul"; "DOGE contract cuts worth $8.5 billion so far…" (documenting inflated/incorrect savings claims and their scale vs outlays); Reuters exclusive on DOGE's official disbandment (November 2025)
- Associated Press, "Nearly 40% of contracts canceled by Musk's DOGE are expected to produce no savings"
- Business Insider, "DOGE savings estimates fall by $9 billion in 48 hours" (the $8 billion vs $8 million ICE contract)
- NPR affiliate analysis, "DOGE released data about federal contract savings. It doesn't add up"
- POLITICO analysis (August 2025): DOGE realized savings at less than 5% of public claims; Sophia Cai and Daniel Lippman reporting on internal succession drama and dissolution
- Partnership for Public Service: data on federal workforce departures (211,000+ civil servants departed through November 18, 2025)
- Salon, "Elon Musk's beloved DOGE has closed, but its legacy is deadly" (November 25, 2025) — comprehensive reporting on DOGE disbandment, workforce exodus, internal dysfunction, and remnants including National Design Studio
- OPM/DoD memos and coverage of "five things" emails and forced RTO
- Reuters, Time, and HRDive on Day-1 orders: return-to-office, hiring freeze, creation of DOGE
- Washington Post DEI coverage (targeting beyond DEI staff; removal of historic content)
- Court actions: injunctions against DOGE access to Treasury systems and against dismantling USAID
- CBO, JCT, BPC: fiscal impact of OBBBA and TCJA permanence (scale comparators)
- Ethics/Conflict documentation and watchdog letters on SGE status, Tesla promotion, and related concerns
- Global consequences: Nature, CGD, Reuters on aid shortfalls and projected excess deaths when funding collapses
- Management literature on transformation failure rates (for the "shakedown" critique)