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Cost versus value. E.g, what kind of soft power did the US lose when they shredded USAID?
What kinds of medical research will not be done because of cuts to NIH:
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-layoffs-budget-cuts-medical...
What kind of tax revenue will be lost because the IRS is even more short-staffed and cannot investigate fraud:
* https://apnews.com/article/irs-doge-layoffs-tax-season-0659e...
For a comparison of DOGE's falsifiable/verifiable claims and reality see:
* https://www.slowboring.com/p/yes-doge-failed-and-it-matters
I have no idea if what is posted on the site is actually valid.
But even if it was, you can "save" money by not doing oil changes for your car, but what do you think will happen to your engine? How much will that cost you eventually?
So whether the (alleged) savings will actually end up costing less (over the long term) is something that will have to be determined over time:
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/penny_wise_and_pound_foolish
People (and nations) need to live within their means.
The Pentagon spends in two weeks what USAID (or NASA) spent in a year. The proverbial oil change is not what is causing the financial issue in the analogical car example: in fact, a bit of preventative spending (oil change: USAID social programs) may be cheaper because it reduces the chances of a large expense (engine rebuild: major war/conflict/attack).
> Staff at the State Department’s Office of Countering Violent Extremism and Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, which led U.S. anti-violent extremism efforts, were laid off, the units shuttered, on July 11, 2025.
> This dismantling of the country’s terrorism and extremism prevention programs began in February 2025. That’s when staff of USAID’s Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization were put on leave.
* https://theconversation.com/trump-administration-cuts-to-ter...
Do you want to spend money on having to deal with terrorist cell attacks, or do you want to potentially not have the cells form in the first place?
* https://www.polisci.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/Foreign%20A...
And if there is concern about deficits/debt, perhaps don't cut revenues (taxes), or lay off IRS workers that can bring in more revenue.
The US debt is going up, and that's because there are sizeable annual deficits: perhaps there should be less cutting of taxes (for the rich, by the GOP)—and maybe even raise them—and see if that helps.
This was something the gov said to us in my country 20 years ago. What came later was recesion for 10 years.
Good luck.
You can stop changing the oil on your car and show a couple hundred dollars of savings on paper over the next year or two ... but you will incur tens of thousands of costs consequentially.
But there is no perfect solution. There always will be a maniac doing stupid shit because their personal benefit is more valuable for them than the greater good of everyone else. We are now in such a phase again, where all kind of maniacs have become loose, wasting societies for fun and giggles... We will have what we will make of it.
Also, the savings are pretty minor overall. If we trust the website, we get $1.3k saved per taxpayer. The vast majority of the programs cut would have to be completely useless for me to think it is worth it to save $1.3k.
Add to that that most of the things cut, for example weather forecasting, has returns to the economy of several times what is spent on it, and the damage to the economy is much larger than any savings.
DOGE has prominently trading long-term-benefits for short-term-gains. Some are already showing today, but many will show their harm in years and decades, too late to fix it, and when it will cost significant more to handle them.
How are you unaware of the multiple controversies about the basic factual nature of the claimed numbers. Never mind the lack of any viable strategy.
To decide if it's a good thing you need to see if stopping the spending benefits BOTH parties.
i.e. doge says they saved some insane amount of money for some program, but most importantly, for many cases:
- most of the money have been paid already, so almost nothing is saved (imagine 5 year program for 10B, but 4 years have passed, 8B has been paid and now it will not be finished);
- program brings more business than it costs;
- or both;
It grinds my gears when musk, trump and the like bring their “run government as a business” attitude. Government is a “meta-business”.
It takes care of things that businesses won’t. Roads, trains, growing and educating new generation of workers and businessmen, army, etc.
thiel’s technofascist libertarian dystopian city states will crumble from lack of infrastructure or if not - more powerful states (China?) will eat them up one by one.
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'
You realize that website has become a national laughing stock because they keep making multibillion dollar errors?
[edit] to explain further - there were lots of different errors, but a big one is that many contracts have high max values because they can't always predict how much they'll need to spend over ten years but they want a contract in place in case they need to spend money quickly (say for spare parts). So in many cases the number DOGE says they cut was just a placeholder, not an actual reflection of money that was ever going to be spent. So if you have a contract for spare parts for MRI machines for VA hospitals with a max value of, say, $1B over ten years, but you actually spend $100M over ten years, then DOGE will say they saved $1B, when actually they will have only saved $100M. That does not include the downstream effects of not having a contract for spare parts for MRI machines. If the MRI machines have more downtime, then the VA has to spend more money sending patients elsewhere, but DOGE has no way to account for that in their wall of receipts.
Those "savings", if they are correct (serious doubts have been raised about that) looks to me like a set of short-term gains for long-term pains.
It's like if I stop commuting by car to work every day and rent a helicopter. I'm going to save a ton of money by selling the car and not buying gasoline. Of course I spent a ton of money with the helicopter method but we're not going to list _new_ expenses on the website are we?
Spending massively more than you make is just fine, until the repo man shows up.
Tax enforcement is a trivial and almost immediate example. Spending $X on compliance seems to recover about $5X in evaded taxes. On top of that, there are knock-on effects: if it becomes easier to cheat on your taxes, more people may cheat.
Vaccines and other forms of preventative healthcare fall into this bucket too. Even completely ignoring the moral aspect of letting people (mostly kids!) fall unnecessarily ill, it often makes economic sense to pay a little bit to avoid having to potentially pay much more down the road. One ER visit can cover a lot of flu or COVID vaccines; a few nights in the ICU even more.
Research grants are maybe less obvious, but they have a huge multiplier too: the human genome project had something like a $120x return(!). This is not just big breakthroughs, but also all the work along the way. A lot of grant money goes to training people or supports small businesses making their equipment. I saw an interesting article claiming that the Air Force essentially bootstrapped the use of more exotic materials: military contracts covered the initial investment in (e.g.,) machinery for working with titanium, and once those fixed costs are covered, it was feasible to dip a toe into the consumer space and see if there's demand. Thus, titanium golf drivers.
There are many documented instances of DOGE cutting things that they later realized were needed -- leading to unnecessary switching costs and other consequential costs.
Second: deferring costs in the short term are often a bad choice that can cause higher costs over the long term.
Third: some cuts can exchange monetary costs for non-monetary costs. These will make a number look good but can cause impacts that are bad.
Junk food can be cheaper than healthy food, it's not good to save on money now at the cost of spending thousands on medical care and insulin in the future.
Or to paraphrase Terry Pratchett: "boots at $10 dollars that last a month are more expensive than $50 dollar boots that last a year" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
It's the difference between being cheap and being frugal...
There's also the allegation that Elon's Doge cuts were to prevent various agencies from pursuing legal action against him.
But often, "you get what you pay for". I addressed that also in my short comment.
For these savings to be good, they need to be good for everyone. And that's not clear.
[1] https://www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/annual-economic-rep...
If we as a society choose to stop investing in ourselves, we'll have bad outcomes in the end.
As a thought experiment ad absurdum, we can save 100% of the cost of government by shutting down the entire government.
... but then what happens next? This trivial exercise demonstrates how on-the-surface positive metrics can hide costs that either aren't being tracked at all or aren't tracked here.
On this topic: some fascinating research recently out of Yale https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-reveals-stark-diffe... investigated the known discrepancy in life expectancy in the American South vs. other states. Their conclusion is that likeliest cause is weather. The reason it didn't show up is that metrics weren't tracking the secondary effects of a region being smashed by one or two hurricanes a year; immediate death tolls are in the low dozens and wouldn't move the needle, but the shared cost of infrastructure rebuilding puts local and state governments perpetually in a reactionary mode, which means they set up welfare programs that they can never fund. It's those on-paper-existing but perpetually-emergency-drained programs that are likely accounting for the difference in life expectancy; it's not about dying in a hurricane, it's about a mother three years down the line losing her newborn to preventable illness that wasn't caught in time because she can't afford pediatric care and her county doesn't have enough money to subsidize it, they're too busy rebuilding all the bridges that got torn in half by floodwaters before that newborn was even conceived.
This is an interesting thought, but where is that concluded? Is that the right link?
Research on cause of gap: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07945-5
For instance, $3 billion saved from cancelling "Increasing Community Access to Testing, Treatment and Response (ICATT). The ICATT program provides access to no-cost COVID-19 testing in U.S. communities to people that are uninsured and no-cost COVID-19 vaccines to people that are underinsured and uninsured."
That is shortsighted, evil, inefficient (better to keep pandemics from not happening), and idiotic to cancel.
Again, anyone supporting DOGE is not a serious thinker or actually cares about what is "waste"