BOMBSHELL: DOGE’s mass federal workforce CUTS WILL COST TAXPAYERS $135 BILLION THIS FISCAL YEAR ALONE
By md tawbar aliPublished about 6 hours ago • 3 min read
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Some workforce and policy experts believe DOGE may be losing the government money in the form of lost productivity and revenue.
Although DOGE asserts that it has saved the government $150 million from waste, fraud, and abuse, some federal workforce and policy experts believe that Elon Musk's efforts to cut costs have cost taxpayers money. The chaos of personnel changes have tanked productivity, one expert claims, costing the government billions in wasted payroll. Another person argued that fired IRS employees are no longer able to conduct audits that generate significant revenue.
As Elon Musk prepares to step back from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his goal to rout out government waste, fraud, and abuse may have fallen short. DOGE initially promised to identify and eliminate $2 trillion in the first months of President Donald Trump's second term, but Musk drastically cut that figure down to $150 billion—only 7.5% of his original estimated savings.
Some experts warn that his efforts may actually be costing the government billions in lost labor and revenue. According to calculations made by Reuters, these spending cuts have affected 260,000 federal employees who have been fired, given buyouts, or retired early since Trump's return to the White House.
The Internal Revenue Service may lose up to a third of its 100,000 employees through resignations and layoffs, according to a report in The New York Times earlier this month. About 22,000 of these employees may accept Trump's most recent offer to resign. According to Max Stier, chief executive of the government efficiency and workforce nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, "We do need to have our government work better, but the approaches that have been adopted so far are taking us in the exact wrong direction."
The mass exodus of federal employees may result in the government paying out fewer salaries, but it also may severely limit the amount of work that it is able to carry out, including collecting revenue from tax audits. “The end result will be that the American public will be holding the bag as Elon Musk goes back to his private enterprises.”
The Partnership of Public Service estimated DOGE could be costing taxpayers roughly $135 billion. With the 2.3 million people in the federal workforce receiving a total $270 billion in annual payroll, Stier believes the cost of firing, re-hiring, and putting workers on paid leave—as well as the losses in productivity as a result of the personnel changes—has cost the government about half of that total payroll.
A Yale University Budget Lab report from March found additional evidence that DOGE’s intended saving may be costing the government. The Budget Lab estimated that the IRS would lose $8.5 billion in net revenue in 2026 if 22,000 employees left, primarily due to fewer personnel available for audits. It is unknown how much of the IRS's workforce will be cut. The report says that this loss would be equivalent to nearly $198 billion in revenue over ten years.
Interestingly, these calculations do not take DOGE's claimed $150 billion in savings into account. Some of DOGE’s claimed savings were found to be erroneous, including calculating savings from contracts that had been expired for years. Harry Kraemer, an executive partner with Madison Dearborn Partners and a clinical professor of Leadership at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told Fortune last month DOGE-related savings could be overstated by up to 80%.
The White House and DOGE did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment, but White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told the New York Times, “It’s important to realize that doing nothing has a cost, too, and these so-called experts and groups are conveniently absent when looking at the costs of doing nothing. |
