Summary
$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his DOGE team are “expecting” to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts.
To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15% of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash.
In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden.
“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”
Which is what Putin has tasked him with.
The amount of money it’ll take to fix all this will dwarf the $150B. By several factors at least.
Also losing 500Bn in tax revenue due to DOGE cutting back IRS staff.
Good thing the US is trashing all their trade agreements, then. That’ll make paying for it so much easier.
Doesn’t matter to the supporters. They believe he has streamlined government and saved gazillions. And if you don’t like DOGE there must be something wrong with you. Why wouldn’t you want a more efficient government without fraud and waste? Do you want waste?
Heard of the whistleblower related to DOGE who claims the tech group hired by Musk had already tried to breach government for years or so?
And how with each DOGE visit to a given department it always followed tactics of distraction and getting stored data, then suddenly leaving?
And how there’s suddenly many breach attempts by suspicious hackers linked to Russia right after DOGE visits?
Or how the biggest culprit of government bloating by hecking far, the Department of Defense, same department who has failed several audits, was never a target of DOGE?
Hm… Not suspicious at all. Sadly I can’t recall the source, but I think it was on YouTube.
I’m possibly more worried about what he didn’t destroy at this point. What’s gone will at least be rebuilt largely from scratch by people that care about restoring those institutions.
My huge worry now is what backdoors are now in systems like social security that impacts us all and we may not find out about for a long time. How much identity theft and scamming will go on now that outside actors likely have access to some or all of that data?
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security
Every. Fucking. Thing that doge touched has been backdoored to Russia. Doge is a front to get sensitive information to the Kremlin. Elon is a fucking traitor.
Yes, exactly, and once I read this yesterday I allowed myself to rule out that I was just thinking the worst.
Daniel Bertulis appeared on The Lead, joined by his attorney Andrew Bakaj, and explained the details of how he apparently uncovered a massive amount of missing data from the NLRB following DOGE’s efforts. He ostensibly mocked a White House statement touting the transparency at play, noting that none of the code used by DOGE technicians has been shared publicly.
But the most shocking allegations came from Bakaj, who not only claimed that accounts based in Russia were using newly created DOGE usernames and passwords to access sensitive data, but also directly tied the effort to Elon Musk and his Starlink concerns, which has a relationship with the Kremlin.
“There are two data points that I wanna point out that should give everybody pause,” Bakaj said. “The first thing, what Dan witnessed was that within 15 minutes of DOGE employees creating user accounts, i.e. Usernames and passwords, within 15 minutes of those accounts being created, somebody or something from Russia tried to log in with the right username and right passwords — that is to say — the right credentials. And that happened over 20 times.”
“The second data point, which is really critical, is that DOGE has also been using Starlink as a means to exfiltrate data,” he continued. “What that means is that, from our understanding, Russia has a direct pipeline of information through Starlink, which means that anything going through Starlink is going to Russia.”
I think I got this link from some Lemmy post yesterday, and I don’t like that I don’t know the source, but it seems to fit what is being talked about in regular mainstream reporting.
The whistleblower and his lawyer were on Rachel Maddow if you want a more reputable source. He also said that they taped a picture of him walking his dog to his door that was taken via drone as a sort of threat.
Appreciate that! Was good to hear it right from them.
THAT was not the point
The destruction of the Nation, was.
He saved all of our personal and national security information to give to the kremlin
I’m also concerned with the “fraud, waste and corruption “ that was the infrastructure bill. It’s becoming more and more clear we’re sitting on a timebomb of infrastructure built over a century ago and that we’ve ignored for at least half a century. It’s going to keep getting worse and worse , keep getting more expensive to repair: we’re way past time to invest in infrastructure and that was only the start toward getting back in a decent state of repair.
… just watching a video where they were debating whether it’s worth to rebuild a 137 year old tunnel in heavy use. How is that even a question?
The US budget is $7 trillion. Even if we pretend he saved $150 billion, that’s 2% of the budget.
Yes but he was able to direct the blank checks to himself and his buddies so the day is saved actually.
Same as he did with Twitter. What is new?
It was always about accomplishing the decimation, and he got trillions in the process. It’s idiotic as fuck to still be taking these things at their word and acting like they just didn’t succeed at it.
Yes, and……
Here’s a message to all people who let this happen:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The only people who thought he was “saving money” or “making things more efficient” were fooling themselves or others.
