Elon Musk’s cost-cutting and fraud-finding apparatus, the Department of Government Efficiency, came out swinging in recent days.
The result? Two stunning strikeouts.
A series of announcements by DOGE as well as claims by Musk and President Donald Trump about the agency’s efforts have crumbled under scrutiny even as they’re broadly repeated by conservative pundits, sympathetic media and the White House.
Two of the most notable claims — around Social Security fraud and $8 billion savings found in a Department of Homeland Security contract — have been debunked. Meanwhile, Trump’s agenda is set to add to the federal government’s deficit well in excess of what DOGE is cutting.
“It’s amateur hour in their federal government,” said Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who ran the Social Security Administration under President Joe Biden. “There’s unelected people that are being given powers to go through and rummage through our personal data for reasons that nobody can quite figure out yet. It’s not for efficiency.”
Cutting government waste and hunting for fraud are perennially popular topics for politicians across the political spectrum. Federal agencies each have their own internal watchdogs — known as inspectors general — meant to hunt for misuse of taxpayer dollars. More than a dozen of them have been fired by the Trump administration.
In their place, DOGE has worked to make sweeping cuts, most of which appear to be focused more on Trump’s politics than anything else,...
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