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... The reality fell far short of Musk's goals, with DOGE ultimately reporting it saved $214 billion"an amount that may be overstated by nearly 40 percent, critics warned earlier this year.
How much talent was lost due to DOGE cuts?
Once Musk left, confidence in DOGE waned as lawsuits over suspected illegal firings piled up. By June, Congress was drawn, largely down party lines, on whether to codify the "DOGE process""rapidly firing employees, then quickly hiring back whoever was needed"or declare DOGE a failure"perhaps costing taxpayers more in the long term due to lost talent and services.
Because DOGE operated largely in secrecy, it may be months or even years before the public can assess the true cost of DOGE's impact. However, in the absence of a government tracker, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, Elaine Kamarck, put together what might be the best status report showing how badly DOGE rocked government agencies.
In June, Kamarck joined other critics flagging DOGE's reported savings as "bogus." In the days before DOGE's abrupt ending was announced, she published a report grappling with a critical question many have pondered since DOGE launched: "How many people can the federal government lose before it crashes?"
In the report, Kamarck charted "26,511 occasions where the Trump administration abruptly fired people and then hired them back." She concluded that "a quick review of the reversals makes clear that the negative stereotype of the paper-pushing bureaucrat'" that DOGE was supposedly targeting "is largely inaccurate."
Instead, many of the positions the government rehired were "engineers, doctors, and other professionals whose work is critical to national security and public health," Kamarck reported.
About half of the rehires, Kamarck estimated, "appear to have been mandated by the courts." ...
"It's not the money. It's not the wealth of the donor"
The wealth of the donor is measured in money, my sweet summer child.