With President Donald Trump’s blessings, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been poking around in numerous federal agencies with a mission to cut fraud and waste from government bureaucracy. That’s a worthwhile project.
However, significant evidence is piling up that Musk and DOGE are actually pursuing a different private agenda that not only could cause much damage to the efficient functioning of the federal government but also might endanger Americans’ safety.
Allow me to back up for a second. Prior to the November 2024 election, there was much national discussion about Project 2025, a 900-page conservative manifesto to remake the U.S. government during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. As a candidate, Donald Trump backpedaled away from Project 2025 because many of its directives were unpopular.
But now that President Trump has begun his second term, it seems apparent that Project 2025, which was compiled by pro-Republican think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, is in fact the blueprint for his administration. And Musk’s DOGE is the tip of the spear that is aiming to overturn the federal apple cart.
Musk has dispatched his DOGE lieutenants to scrutinize sensitive personnel and payment information in government computer systems, using this information as the basis for widespread dismissals, layoffs, and salary buy-outs of thousands of federal employees from numerous agencies.
To be clear, it is an admirable goal to cut waste and fraud from government bureaucracy. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog agency, has estimated that the U.S. government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually from fraud and improper payments.
But is it just a coincidence that nine of the government agencies targeted in Musk's crosshairs were highlighted in the Project 2025 report? And that a number of the authors of Project 2025 are now highly-placed Trump administration officials?
Project 2025 repeatedly claims that the targeted federal agencies suffer from bureaucratic bloat. But there is another revealing pattern that has emerged, regarding which agencies are on the chopping block.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office, says the agencies that Musk and Trump have targeted account for a tiny fraction of the $7 trillion federal budget. Instead, warns Holtz-Eakin, “they are going into agencies they disagree with" for ideological reasons. “They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like."
Bill Hoagland, a former Republican director of the Senate Budget Committee for more than 20 years, says, "The playbook has not been for the dollar savings, but more for the philosophical and ideological differences conservatives have with the work these agencies do."
So, it appears that DOGE’s attacks are being driven, not by a good-faith effort to save taxpayer dollars, but by a partisan assault on federal agencies long despised by conservatives. And that’s according to two veteran Republican budget experts. Many conservatives have long seen these targeted agencies as pushing liberal agendas.
For example, Trump and his allies have accused one of their targeted agencies, the Department of Education, of foisting "woke" policies, such as advocating for transgender players on girls' sports teams. Another target, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is a science-based federal agency that has been harshly criticized for allegedly exaggerating climate change threats. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been the principal federal agency extending assistance to countries recovering from natural disasters and engaging in democratic reforms. Not that long ago, it enjoyed bipartisan support, including from Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Suddenly, Rubio is singing a different tune as the Trump administration accuses USAID of sending foreign aid to some countries it doesn’t consider a U.S. ally. Musk has repeated baseless conspiracies that USAID was part of a system involved in "money laundering" taxpayer dollars "into far-left organizations."
Of particular concern is that the partisan wielding of the layoffs axe could cause a number of dangers for everyday Americans. Already there have been large dismissals at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—several thousand employees, about a tenth of its workforce —just as flu cases spike and a potential bird flu pandemic is raising alarms. Large layoffs have hit the Department of Health and Human Services, including half the “disease detectives” at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, who play a crucial role in identifying public health threats.
Also targeted has been the Federal Aviation Administration with hundreds of employees fired, who maintain critical air traffic control, only weeks after the horrific midair collision over Washington, D.C. that killed 67 people. Trump officials also fired more than 300 staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently unaware that this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Additionally, they fired 3,400 workers and paused funding at the National Forest Service, which plays a critical role in fighting catastrophic forest fires even as wildfires grow more frequent and dangerous.
Elon Musk and his DOGE assistants, apparently, have decided to fire as many federal workers as they can without making any effort to find out what these workers actually do and whether dismissing them might actually make the American public less safe.
The precedents for many of these actions were found in Project 2025. The manifesto claimed that many federal government agencies had been taken over by “cultural Marxism” and a liberal elite who were using taxpayer dollars to push a political agenda that is "weaponized against conservative values." So, Musk and DOGE are trying to drain what they see as liberal influences out of the federal agencies, as if preventing forest fires, airplane crashes, and pandemics is a lefty plot. In reality, the actual concealed DOGE goal appears to be the implementation of crucial parts of Project 2025.
Given this bait-and-switch, it should come as no surprise that the cuts made so far constitute a tiny fraction of federal spending. For all the furor, DOGE’s efforts have saved only an estimated $16 billion, which is a small fraction—0.22%—of the $7 trillion federal budget. At this rate, Musk’s efforts will never reach the original goal of $1 to $2 trillion in savings.
Cutting federal waste and fraud is admirable and necessary. But using that goal as a fig leaf for a partisan vendetta may well cause lasting damage and undermine Americans’ safety and security.
Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
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