Government efficiency was never supposed to sound like a meme. Yet in 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, turned a joke about Dogecoin into a real experiment in dismantling bureaucracy, with consequences Washington will be unpacking for years.
According to Britannica, DOGE was created by executive order on Trump’s first day of his second term, repurposing the United States Digital Service to “modernize federal technology” and slash waste, regulations, and staff. Elon Musk was the driving force, promising at first $2 trillion in savings, later downgraded to $1 trillion, and warning of mass layoffs and even agency closures.
Those promises collided quickly with reality. Reason magazine reports that while DOGE talked big about gutting spending, its “Wall of Receipts” was riddled with accounting gimmicks, including counting the full value of already half-spent contracts as “savings.” A Politico analysis cited by Reason found that of $145 billion in claimed savings from canceled contracts through mid-2025, only about $1.4 billion were real, verifiable cash savings.
Yet DOGE’s bark did have some bite. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data, summarized by Reason and Fortune, show a historic purge of federal workers. Under pressure from DOGE’s “fork in the road” resign-or-leave offer, more than 200,000 federal employees exited in less than two years, with Fortune noting a 162,000 drop in federal workers hitting the October jobs report alone. The Trump team projected up to a 12 percent cut in the civilian workforce by the end of 2025.
Those cuts came with human and policy costs. Government Executive details how DOGE-driven defunding abruptly terminated hundreds of Justice Department grants for violence reduction and victim services, including $95 million for intermediary nonprofits that helped small-town police and grassroots groups navigate federal grants. Instead of efficiency, local agencies saw chaos and lost lifelines.
Axios reports that Musk now calls DOGE only “somewhat successful,” conceding it stopped some obviously wasteful funding but left behind confusion, lawsuits, and a data-centralization push that alarmed privacy advocates. In November, the head of the Office of Personnel Management said bluntly: “DOGE doesn’t exist,” even as he insisted its deregulatory spirit lives on, as Britannica notes.
DOGE set out to be the DOGE coin of bureaucracy: fast, disruptive, crowd-pleasing. It ended more like the meme stock of governance—loud, volatile, and leaving listeners wondering what, in the end, was really gained.
Thank you for tuning in, and don’t forget to subscribe. This has been a Quiet Please production, for more check out quietplease dot ai.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
続きを読む
一部表示