Billionaire CEO and White House advisor Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has amassed roughly 30 staffers with the goal of slashing the US government’s budget.
As it’s targeted president Donald Trump’s number one bogeyman — diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — something ironic is happening: even as it’s trying to cut costs across the government, the so-called department’s expenses are ballooning.
As Business Insider reports, DOGE’s spending more than doubled from $6.75 million to $14.4 million between January 30 and February 8, according to its latest financial filings.
While that’s still quite a bit less than the roughly $60 million the Biden administration set aside for the United States Digital Services last year — the department was reincarnated as DOGE — it’s nonetheless a sign that Musk is quickly racking up bills, despite employing underqualified high school grads, drug sellers, and racist shitposters.
Meanwhile, according to DOGE’s dubious back-of-the-envelope accounting, the department is purportedly saving the government “approx. $1 billion/day.”
“A good start, though this number needs to increase to > $3 billion/day,” DOGE’s official X account tweeted late last month.
DOGE has gloated about canceling government subscriptions to news outlets and consulting contracts related to “executive coaching.”
But considering the mountain of legal complaints filed against the nascent entity, DOGE will likely have some much steeper bills to pay in the upcoming months and possibly years.
In just a matter of weeks, Musk’s group of young lackeys — who have torn through sensitive data at lightning speeds without the necessary clearances — have already amassed a litany of lawsuits from district judges, religious groups, teachers’ unions, federal worker unions, the American Foreign Service Association, and 22 attorneys general, to name a few.
And as plenty of experts have since pointed out, DOGE’s indiscriminate combing through sensitive data is likely illegal.
Who will foot the bill for the ensuing legal challenges remains to be seen. Besides, we’ve already seen the Trump administration bristle at the legal blowback, with Trump accusing judges of “intolerable judicial overreach.” If the judicial system will survive Musk’s coup is also a hotly contested subject these days; Congress, meanwhile, has mostly sat on the sidelines.
Apart from ballooning expenses, DOGE at least won’t have to give the richest man in the world a paycheck, as BI points out, since he’s a “special government employee.”
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