Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has spent nearly $21 billion in taxpayer funds on employees who’ve been paid not to work, according to a new Senate report.
Compiled by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s staff on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the report accuses DOGE — the entity Trump and Elon Musk ginned up to gut federal programs under the guise of “efficiency” — of generating “at least $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government” in just the first half of this year. It notes that this total is more than twice the amount of the Trump-backed rescissions package Republicans recently passed to codify DOGE-backed cuts to federal programs.
The report reads:
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has been used since the start of the second Trump Administration to effectuate the President’s agenda of agency closures, mass layoffs, the halting and termination of funds, increased bureaucracy, and the spread of misinformation. With Elon Musk at its head for its first four months, it is unsurprising that DOGE modeled itself on a defunct corporate motto, seeking to “move fast and break things.” Yet DOGE seems to have stopped there, never taking the time to fix—let alone understand— the things it had broken. By prioritizing disruption over governance and failing to identify solutions for any of the problems it purported to solve, DOGE has created its own forms of waste.
Blumenthal also sent letters to inspectors general across more than two dozen federal agencies asking them to assess any negative financial impact caused by DOGE’s activities.
Of the alleged $21.7 billion in waste generated by DOGE, the report says the bulk of that — $14.8 billion — went toward the “Deferred Resignation Program” that is “paying approximately 200,000 employees not to work for up to eight months.” It says another $6.1 billion of that waste was designated “for over 100,000 employees” who have been fired or are in the process of being fired, “many of whom were paid to not do their jobs for weeks or months.”
How’s that for efficiency? Other reported losses include $253 million in fees and interest the government was slated to collect but didn’t after the administration froze loans for energy projects, and $110 million in food and medical aid the Trump administration allowed to spoil in warehouses rather than distribute. Back in April, when Musk was rounding out his time at DOGE, polls suggested that a majority of Americans disapproved of the organization’s work. Needless to say, this new evidence that the organization has been a tremendous waste of time and money — with likely devastating long-term consequences — probably won’t make folks feel better about it.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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