Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has slashed thousands of federal jobs and decimated entire departments and agencies, leaving a trail of chaos and dysfunction in its wake. One thing it hasn’t done, however, is meaningfully cut spending.
At the end of January, as he deployed strike teams made up of inexperienced coders, some of them barely adults, across the federal government, Musk boasted that by cutting $4 billion in spending a day he could reduce the federal deficit by $1 trillion—without causing inflation. Musk’s January 30 tweet now looks quaint: The “no inflation” promise was tied to optimistic growth forecasts that President Trump has since trashed with two and a half months of economically suicidal policies. But it’s also now obvious that DOGE has caused a lot of devastation—cutting jobs and slashing federal aid that literally saves lives—without doing anything to actually cut spending.
Musk has already decreased his $1 trillion forecast to just $185 billion, but even reaching that number by his September 30 deadline—the end of the 2025 fiscal year—seems unlikely. On Monday, The New York Times’ David Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine reported that even the $150 billion DOGE claims to have cut so far is wildly inflated. “Musk is finding out what every government streamlining effort that came before him discovered,” concluded another Times writer. “Shrinking government, and cutting its costs, are really hard.”
Perhaps. One possible conclusion from Musk’s and DOGE’s work so far is not just that cutting costs is hard but that government fraud and abuse aren’t nearly as pervasive (and thus easy to ax) as they claim. Most of the spending cuts thus far have been based on highly subjective determinations of “waste”—a definition that DOGE typically uses to apply to spending that goes to help non-Americans or work done in “liberal” fields like humanitarian aid or corporate oversight.
But what’s most notable about DOGE’s work thus far is what it hasn’t touched. If Musk really wanted to cut the deficit, he would dramatically slash defense spending. He hasn’t—which can only suggest he was never serious about reducing the deficit in the first place.
What is abundantly clear from what DOGE has done so far is that its main goal isn’t to cut the deficit but to benefit tech oligarchs like Musk. Far from meeting its mandate to reduce fraud and abuse, DOGE is best understood as an effort to defraud Americans themselves. Now there’s evidence that the group has stolen sensitive personal information.
On Tuesday, NPR published a shocking report based on testimony from a whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Department, Daniel Berulis. In early March, DOGE showed up at the NLRB’s door. Soon after, technical staff grew “alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It’s possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets.”
A spokesperson from the NLRB has denied the whistleblower’s explosive report, which has been shared with Congress, saying a subsequent review “determined that no breach of agency systems occurred.” But Berulis’s report contains forensic data pointing toward a breach—and 11 of his colleagues have backed him up, telling NPR they have “seen other evidence that DOGE is exfiltrating sensitive data for unknown reasons.”
It’s worth underlining the caveat that no one quite knows where the data allegedly pilfered from the NLRB is going—if indeed it has left the agency at all. But the information allegedly leaving the NLRB would be extraordinarily valuable to corporate titans like Musk looking for a leg up on rivals, as well as a window into the inner workings of the labor unions they despise. It would also explain why Musk is involved with DOGE to begin with. As a number of his companies, especially Tesla, struggle, the government systems DOGE now controls could provide invaluable information.
The theft of personal information also points to another more nefarious motivation for Musk and DOGE. It’s already abundantly clear that the group will not reduce the deficit. It likely will not even decrease federal spending, which is already $100 billion higher under Trump than it was under Biden at this point in his term. Instead, the group’s slashing of regulations and bureaucracy is aimed not at reducing “waste” but at cutting the many governmental layers that exist to fight risk—and fraud.
In another sense, it really doesn’t matter if this information is being used for nefarious corporate reasons at all. What matters is that unaccountable coders with close ties to the world’s richest man have their mitts on the personal information of millions of Americans—that’s bad no matter what they’re doing with it.
Far from being a massive scam, as Musk is fond of labeling it, the federal government’s numerous bureaucratic layers often function as safeguards. Musk is seeking to transform the government into something more like a tech company. In Silicon Valley, companies are instructed to “move fast and break things.” Musk’s own companies often take this a step further: They have few employees devoted to things like compliance or communication and often take massive, possibly existential risks. This is what Musk wants the federal government to look like.
But it’s also clear that Musk—like Trump, for the record—disdains the idea that the government exists to protect people from rapacious corporations. Instead, it’s increasingly clear that he may see his time as the president’s right-hand man as a business opportunity.
The post Elon Musk’s DOGE Isn’t Stopping Fraud. It’s Making It Easier. appeared first on New Republic.
