Where’s My $5K DOGE Check? – OpEd

Fri, 23 May 2025 23:22:57 +0000
World

Remember back to the early days of DOGE when Elon Musk was telling us he would eliminate $2 trillion in waste in the annual budget? At that time, he suggested that we all might get dividend checks on the order of $5,000 based on the governmental waste he would eliminate.

Based on the latest accounts, it doesn’t look like the check is in the mail just yet. In fact, we have not been hearing much from Musk lately. Perhaps he has gone underground so that he doesn’t have to deal with people constantly asking him about their checks.

It wasn’t hard for anyone even remotely familiar with the federal budget to know that Musk could not possibly find anywhere close to $2 trillion in waste. If we add up spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — the programs Trump said he wasn’t going to touch — we get to $3.3 trillion, almost half the $7 trillion budget.

Adding in the military — an area where Trump wants to increase spending — gets us almost another trillion. Interest on the debt is also close to a trillion. This brings us to $5.3 trillion of a $7.0 trillion budget. That doesn’t leave much room for Elon’s $2 trillion in savings.

And keep in mind, the rest of the budget includes many items that people, including Donald Trump-type people, care about. It’s not just the budget for the air traffic control system, federal support for education and early childhood nutrition, but also MAGA favorites like federal prisons and ICE.

There are always areas where money can be trimmed without damaging important governmental functions, but Elon fired the people who could provide information on that. Specifically, he and/or Trump fired most agencies’ inspector generals on the first day of Trump’s second term. They consciously decided *not* to consult the people who actually had devoted their careers uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse.

Instead, Musk took his chainsaw towards downsizing the federal bureaucracy. Since the pay of federal employees takes up less than 5 percent of the federal budget, simple arithmetic should have told Musk that he was not going to get anyone near his goal through this route.

Instead we got absurdities like the DOGE crew laying off large numbers of people at the National Nuclear Security Administration and then rushing to try to hire them back when they realized what the agency does. The rehiring was made more difficult due to the fact that DOGE had taken away their government e-mails and couldn’t easily contact many former workers.

We also saw Musk dumping people at the Federal Aviation Administration, making an already short-staffed agency even more understaffed. This is undoubtedly a factor in the problems occurring at Newark airport and other airports around the country. The Memorial Day weekend could prove to be exceptionally trying for a troubled system.

We also got the absurdities around Social Security. Musk insisted, and probably still insists, that we have 20 million people over the age of 115 getting benefits. This is obviously absurd as anyone remotely familiar with the program could have toldhim.

He also briefly cancelled phone service for Social Security beneficiaries because he seems to have mistakenly come to believe that 40 percent of phone calls were by people trying to commit fraud. The apparent basis for this view was a report that showed that 40 percent of fraudulent applications were done by phone. Apart from the absurd logical error in Musk’s thinking, this statistic also implies that 60 percent of fraudulent applications do not come over the phone.

Musk then had his team check phone calls carefully and discovered that 0.0018 percent of the calls were by people trying to commit fraud. That doesn’t seem to be a good argument for making it difficult for people to deal with their Social Security benefits.

Musk also fired 5 percent of the staff at the Social Security Administration, an agency that was already seriously understaffed. This has led to much longer wait times for people trying to contact the agency to start getting benefits, correct errors, or report a change of address or bank account.

Incredibly, the response of Trump’s Social Security Administration to this crisis is to ask staff to work 10 percent harder. Undoubtedly everyone will be happy to pitch in after what they have been through in the first four months of the Trump administration.

The MAGA faithful may be disappointed in Musk’s failure, but it is not a surprise to anyone familiar with the federal budget. The story of massive waste in government spending is something that only exists in Republican rhetoric, not in reality.

Musk was supposed to use his keen business eye, along with his “super-high IQ” DOGE boys to eliminate trillions of dollars of government waste. It turns out Elon is just another crazy billionaire running around with a chainsaw.

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