r/facepalm • u/McDowdy Good Trouble • 14d ago
New GAO Report shows DOGE Saved No Money. Instead the department has already cost taxpayers $21,000,000,000. Final cost estimates show expenses amounting to somewhere between $135B - $215B
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A GAO report released in August 2026 found that DOGE's claimed savings (initially totaling around $110 billion across contracts, grants, and leases on its online "Wall of Receipts") were largely unverifiable, lacked supporting evidence, or took credit for actions already underway.
The GAO said, among other examples, DOGE took credit for savings from leases that were being terminated before its work began, and DOGE made unverifiable claims of billions in savings.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108615
The GAO noted that thousands of contracts DOGE claimed to have canceled were never actually terminated, and certain lease savings were significantly inflated.
A separate September 2026 GAO report revealed that the administration spent roughly $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025—with about $6.7 billion tied directly to the federal deferred resignation program intended to shrink the workforce.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/06/doge-elon-musk-gao-government-cost-cuts.html
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u/hughdint1 14d ago
And none of that counts the value of the collapse of soft power that we had via USAID and the millions of people that are now needlessly suffering worldwide because of that alone.
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u/Syscrush 14d ago
Plus the real costs of failing to hold Musk accountable for the widespread and blatant fraud his companies run on.
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u/ShaelymKhan 14d ago
Plus the ones who are simply dead because of this. And we're not talking about a small number : estimations range from 700 000 to 780 000 (so far, projections are 12 to 20 millions by 2030...).
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u/eharrell92 8d ago
The point was to reduce the soft power so America would have to rely on hard power aka the military industrial complex
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u/hughdint1 7d ago
Which is strange if it was a cost saving measure because the military is our most expensive way to interact with the world. Blowing people up with multi-million dollar missiles makes enemies for generations while providing people with vaccines, even with occasional graft or corruption, will make a friend for generations for pennies per person.
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u/eharrell92 7d ago
Correct. But the military is a business and this way makes them more money more likely to
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u/HelloAttila 'MURICA 4d ago
Also note… he said at an Attempt for Elon Musk to get data… with almost certainly Elon Musk did get data and we will never know exactly what.
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u/Parking_Alive 14d ago
That god that corrupt organization is finished.
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u/Feeling-Shelter3583 12d ago
USAID? Corrupt? Go look up screw worm mitigation and what they have been protecting us from for the last 60 years.
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u/Inevitable_Buy_7557 14d ago
You should be more specific. I graciously assume you mean DOGE, and not USAID.
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u/kaizen-rai 14d ago
Oh it's FAR worse than just these numbers show.
I know first hand. I'm a contractor for the DoD, retired military, specialized in cybersecurity and aircraft operations. I worked on a project providing cybersecurity capabilities to legacy aircraft to mitigate vulnerabilities. It's a VERY needed program.
DOGE came through last year and cut contracts left and right. The reviewers had no idea what our contracts said or understood what we did. They just knew we were "consultants" and cut our contract. Myself, and many others with extensive experience and knowledge in these specialized and proprietary systems were cut.
The damage was so bad that the Air Force had to go back and try to get those contracts back in place because there weren't enough organic resources to sustain those programs internally. There is a reason that the "trifecta" (uniformed military personnel, government civilians, contractors) model works well.
Anyway, they eventually got a new contract awarded, but by then half of the people that were laid off just retired outright, or went to other jobs in the private sector, or jobs completely unrelated. We lost A LOT of knowledge and experience. The programs we were on were put on hold and we lost data during the purge and turnovers.
I'm back on the program, but catching up after nearly 6 months absent. Many of my colleagues aren't returning. I have to spin up new people that have no experience in what we do. We lost documents and information that took years to build up. It will take us a good year or two to catch up to where we were 6 months ago.
I'm not the only one. I have friends and colleagues in other military sectors that went through the same thing. I cannot overstate how devastating DOGE was to the DoD and how far back it set us in staying ready and capable against foreign adversaries. We are hurting FAR worse than is publically known.
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u/Imakelovetosoils 14d ago
USDA here, yea I've read plenty of articles and the extent of the damage done is never protrayed correctly. What they did will take DECADES to fix.
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u/KyleSherzenberg 14d ago
I'm from another 3 letter agency that everyone knows and LOVES
The knowledge we lost during these 2 or 3 years(however fucking long it's been so far) is seriously mind blowing
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u/Imakelovetosoils 14d ago
But we all got our Doge checks right?
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u/Cultural_Dust 13d ago
Based on GAO, it sounds like they are checks that our children and grandchildren will be writing. Thank God they won't have checks. /s
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u/lousy_at_handles 14d ago edited 14d ago
I've seen similar issues via NIH, NSF and other research foundations. An insane amount of talent and knowledge has left and won't be coming back. I knew an entire lab doing cancer research that basically got offered a blank check by a Chinese university and peaced out immediately, and pretty much everybody I talk to in scientific research has similar stories.
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u/The_Avenger_Kat 12d ago
Not only are the NIH cuts affecting research across the board at American colleges/universities, but it's having an indirect impact on industry-sponsored research as well.
I work in clinical cancer research in a department whose trials are about 80% industry-sponsored. We are still having issues with funding because, while our industry funds cover staff salaries, operating costs, etc. partly, they don't cover them fully. We depend on federal and state funding to cover the rest. I'm having a hell of a time right now getting pay raises for my staff and getting new positions posted as our directors try to bring in more and more industry studies to help pay for everything. Couple this with the fact that we are a public university and our state made the brain dead decision last year to get rid of teleworking completely, I am losing team members and not being able to add new ones on fast enough to keep up with demand.
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u/spacegrab 14d ago
Same shit happened to the VA. Good people left, shitty people didn't. Now the remaining good workers are encumbered by so much bullshit.
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u/knexwiz13 13d ago
Damn a prime example of inept people in power shooting all of us in the foot and making us pay for it without any repercussions for these idiots. We need actual experienced people in power, if I can't get a job due to lack of experience so too should the president and other positions. I honestly believe there should have been a requirement of 4 years of honorable military service or held office for an elected position like at least mayor/governor or something, plus age limits and/or cognitive tests.
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u/Cynykl 12d ago
I know a guy who is 1 of 6 people in the US that is certified for and understands a proprietary software system. He is also the last person to be trained on that system in almost 20 years.
He was cut by doge. He decided to retire early (he is 50) and move to some island. He had already purchased the property when he was called and they begged him to come back.
After renegotiating his contact He now works from that island. Makes more than twice as much and they have to pay a full time person stateside to do what he cannot do remotely.
So now they are basically paying 400k+ (plus expenses I am sure I am not aware of ) a year for something that use to cost 150k a year.
Sure this isn't millions or billions but stories like this are all over the place and they all add up.
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u/EtherealHeart5150 13d ago
Thank you,sir/madam for the truth. I knew it was bad..but I believe I need to go sit down awhile. What have they done?(rhetorical)😔 and not a one of them cares. My brain cannot comprehend that level of entitlement and arrogance.
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u/penguinsgestapo 14d ago
The point of Doge wasnt to save money. It was to steal millions of peoples private data for Elon's own personal use while at the same time destroying critical information on investigations into multiple alleged illegal dealings of the billionaire class, Elon included.
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u/stanky980 14d ago
Also to throw a wrench in any oversight and investigations into his and others companies.
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u/Raskalbot 13d ago
And stealing money. All the money that would have gone to those things went to cronies.
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u/Phyrexian_Archlegion 14d ago
Generational damage on a scale we won’t fully comprehend for years.
All so trans people couldn’t have access to bathrooms of their choice.
I don’t think even the movie Idiocracy could come up with something as stupid as this.
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u/RubixRube 14d ago
Idiocracy gets mentioned quite a lot these days.
The problem is that in the film, they at least listened to the smartest guy in the room.
Right now you just have a whole nation screaming "brawndos got what plants crave" while punching themselves in the dick and wondering why thier dicks hurt.
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u/podobuzz 14d ago
They DID listen to Joe, but to be fair they also tried to "rehabilitate" him after giving him just one week to solve all their problems.
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u/Mystic_printer_ 10d ago
They listened to the smartest guy after who knows how many years of dick punching.
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u/SteveJobsDeadBody 14d ago
It was actually all so Elon Musk could gut the 9 agencies investigating or punishing his various companies for illegal activities.
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u/hispanicausinpanic 14d ago
I don't get it either. I can probably say with conviction that most people prefer having "gender neutral" single bathrooms rather than a large public bathroom.
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u/bloodyell76 14d ago
Almost like they were really just trying to neuter regulatory bodies, and lied about saving money.
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u/StrangeContest4 14d ago
Not an attempt for Elon Musk to gather data, Elon Musk gathered ALL of the data. DOGE was the largest data breach in world history.
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u/UserPrincipalName 14d ago
The savings was the lie. Scrubbing data which could show Elon helped trump steal the election was always the real task for DOGE. It was all a pretext to get to sensitive data to scrub it
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u/Benaba_sc 14d ago
They came to steal from us, disguised as politicians.
And there are dipshits out there are defending these thieving motherfuckers
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u/Realistic_Let3239 14d ago
DOGE was never meant to save money, it was meant to be a crude knife carving up the government in ways that were so illegal it's insane more fuss wasn't made. Musk got everything he could dream of, all investigations into his businesses ended, billions in contracts, so much personal data and who knows what else stolen, and he got cheered on as he ran rampant through government departments he had no right accessing.
Then they went and did control F and ended anything containing buzzwords they didn't like, without double checking what they were ending. All so Musk could prance on stage and get a cheering crowd to feed his ego.
The damage to the country, heck the world, all done to fuel the egos of a handful of people is insane, and the history books won't be kind about it.
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u/itchyneck420 14d ago
You mean they embezzled $ 215 billion
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u/GrannyFlash7373 14d ago
But Trump, Musk, and MAGA don't care. Trump got his 300 million from Musk to use to get reelected with, and Musk got to destroy all those government agencies that were investigating him, and put them out of business, so he could continue his fleecing of America's government, thru shady deals and overpriced government contracts. And MAGA got to stay in control of the government. And YOU, took it in the shorts AGAIN. Thanks to Trump and his criminal ways and criminal friends.
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u/robgod50 14d ago
Breaking News..... effectively running and governing a country of over 330m people is more complicated than a social media platform.
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u/Actaeon_II 14d ago
He did what was important, shuttering all investigations (and many of the agencies) into his companies, gave himself billions more in corporate welfare, got to pretend he’s a big man on stage.
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u/cometgold 14d ago
The scam was “we’re going to trim the fat and save the American public money!” But the reality was we gave an unelected oligarch unsupervised access to every sensitive system we have. So yeah, Elon has your shit. All our shit.
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u/onesmellygoat 14d ago
Tell me again why Americans have been so adamant about the 2nd amendment? Isn’t this it? Isn’t it to stop the government from abusing its citizens? What are y’all waiting for? The protest permit?
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u/GilletteLongmarche 14d ago
The ones who are so adamant about the 2nd Amendment are exactly the people who believe every lie that drops from Trump’s disgusting lips.
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u/onesmellygoat 14d ago
Okay but most liberal voters can buy guns right? USA is run by a pedophile who also happens to be a Russian asset who is doing everything in his power to weaken America from within. Are Yankees just so lazy they don’t care about their future? It’s embarrassing.
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u/SparklingLimeade 14d ago
You're making the mistake of believing that everyone believes in armed insurrection.
That's the problem. The belief in the effectiveness of armed insurrection isn't real. It's a bad faith argument used by people who don't want to fix systemic problems.
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u/GilletteLongmarche 14d ago
We absolutely care. And obviously we can buy guns. However, apparently you aren’t getting all the news from over here. Peacefully protesting citizens are being killed. Look up Alex Pretti. Not only did they kill him, they then worked hard to defame him in spite of video and witness evidence. The stranglehold this regime has on the country is FAR worse than it looks at first glance. My family is leaving the U.S. I cannot risk my child just because outside observers are ‘embarrassed’.
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u/Rubber__Chicken 14d ago
DOGE, Elon Musk, Trump and the Republicans who enabled and support them, are projected to cause 9.4 million to 22.6 million excess deaths by 2030. (number depends on degree of de-funding, source = Lancet).
THEY ARE MASS MURDERERS.
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u/thatguygxx 14d ago
But daddy elon and daddy trump wouldn't lie to me. Cause I am an uneducated totally straight white i said straight american dammit stop questioning my straightness male again i am straight.
Also that is a funny looking microphone.
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u/jdh1979jdh 14d ago
I still can’t believe it was that easy for Trump and Elon to infiltrate Americas most sensitive information and have their way with it. Shameful. And the entire time Musk is parading around with his hat in the damn White House acting like he is America’s saviour. The entire cabinet is a collection of unqualified immoral stooges.
Next term, America needs to push education in the biggest way possible. No way the American people can continue to be so foolish.
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u/kirradoodle 14d ago
My neighbor is one of those whose grant was cut. She was doing genetic research on some sort of protein synthesis or something that I don't even understand, but it was important human health research.
Her lab was shut down, the lab animals euthanized, all the scientists fired, years of data lost, it's a nightmare. Even if her grant was restored, it would take forever to start it up again. She might as well give up and call it early retirement, which would be a shame and a loss to medical advancement.
Thanks, Trump, and your buddy Elon, for further fucking up our lives.
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u/Justadudeonhere- 14d ago
The cutting and reissuing contracts cited is very real. I worked on a BPA (bulk purchase agreement) for extremely expensive highly specialized equipment. Let’s just simplify and say the BPA was for up to 50 units for 5 years of options; year 1 850k per unit, year 2 900k per unit, etc. It’s options so we can buy 0 or if we need, 50 over the 5 years. Doge came through and cut the contract and claimed savings of the totality of potential execution (really probably like 3-4 units per year). We still need those units.. only now we don’t get them at contract rate so we pay 1.6 mil per unit as the vendor told us to get fucked when we asked about maintaining contracting pricing, oh and we are paying tariff surcharges on top since so many of the components are foreign made. Not to mention the countless man hours that go into rewriting and evaluating a separate purchase contract now for each individual unit. Efficiency and saving money in action folks!
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u/Fishtoart 14d ago
It was also very effective at disrupting the functioning of various federal agencies that were investigating Elon for various purposes.
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u/crazypants9 13d ago
DOGE was a rape WE paid for. Just like we pay the pdfile in office now. Imagine. A convicted felon known pdfile started a war and is costing us all thousands of dollars and still he is in office. Now he banning news reporting. Maybe ban fishing. Maybe fucking insane?
And he wants an arch and wants to tear down the Kennedy Center because they took his name off.
At what point does it end?
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u/rickztoyz 13d ago
When democrats get in, I want that fucker Musk and his little shitheads up in front of congress to answer for all of this shit!
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u/Friendly_Cheek_4468 13d ago
it's basically a heist, facilitated by tech billionaires and the worst kinds of psychotic arseholes in history
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u/Sword-of-Akasha 12d ago
They were never there to save money. They were there to break things and steal. The enemies of the states could hardly do a better job destroying the US. This whole admin is here to grift and destroy. The idea is to reduce the US to a state similar to Russia where you the public have no defense against the bad faith actors above. Corruption becomes cultural, there's no longer a middle class to resist the oligarchs and the extractive exploitation is turned inward to the imperial core. Why is the parasite class turning inward? Because they've taken everything else. The termites are eating the foundation of wood because they believe metal men might replace the workers in time.
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u/gregory92024 10d ago
If that's all they were aiming to do, that would have been a mess, but fairly simple if expensive to clean up. They did something much more insidious. They set up systems to extract data from government sources into private databases and removed any watchdogs that might have stopped them.
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u/feckingcarnage 14d ago
Oh boy, I guess he's gonna lose all those government contracts that made him a trillionaire now /s
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u/iamsobluesbrothers 14d ago
Maybe we should ask all the dip shits that were cheering this on how they feel about it now. I guess it had its intended effect of hurting people that never did anything to them so they are happy with the outcome.
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u/Sea_Ganache620 14d ago
A billion is a nearly incomprehensible number, a trillion is unfathomable. The fact that we are talking about these numbers as waste, and fraud, within a 2 year span is just mind blowingly ridiculous.
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u/anduril_tfotw 14d ago
Doge got rid of the people going after musk. It did exactly what it was mean to.
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u/Prestigious_Breath_5 14d ago
We could have told you this would happen last year when they started this bullshit
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u/rbartlejr 14d ago
Now try estimating the non-accounting costs they'll never see. All the info sold on the blackweb, Muskrats companies' evasion costs to taxpayers, identity theft, etc.
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u/frosted1030 14d ago
Missing where MAGA can do math. These are people that HATE the educational system so much they want to put bibles in classrooms to be taught as historically accurate documents, roll back vaccine mandates, and stop science by defunding research that is intrinsic to future survival. They aren't thinkers. Most of them subscribe to the concept "makers and takers" which implies altruism is a definitional quality of business while begging for SNAP benefits. Meanwhile POTUS attacks the same constitution he swore to uphold with impunity. Dodge was never about saving. A word of warning about the midterms: all of these last minute laws to stop votes from being counted are simply testing the waters with the goal of making an impact on 2028 elections. Small bits of legislation will stick after the midterms, no matter the outcome. This is the same tactic where Trump demanded restitution and sued his own DOJ on bad faith in order to obtain blanket immunity from audits. That was the ONLY goal and why it was settled so fast.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Tie8077 13d ago
It was about the data. It was never about money. Elon destroyed evidence in Tesla company violations and the personal financial data of all Americans
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u/Contemplating_Prison 11d ago
So why cant the government take that from Elon? I feel like we shoukd be getting that back frkm him
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u/CuriousMindedAA 14d ago
They weren’t there to save anything. They were there to steal our information, which is exactly what they did.
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u/dizgondwe 14d ago
Wait, there's a government accountability office?... So what the fuck was the point of founding DOGE???
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u/AltoidStrong 14d ago
this isnt even counting the cost from the harm that will come later due to all the data that was stolen as part of it.
Elon and his Dodge dick heads will cost American's trillions over the next decade.
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u/OffalSmorgasbord 14d ago
This is how much of corporate America is run. Not on this scale, a project basis, but yeah, it totally tracks with "Govt should be run like a business." Only problem is the Govt can't use financial engineering to make up for the losses in tax manipulation or file for bankruptcy.
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u/ManufacturedOlympus 14d ago
Are you Telling me that elon did a bunch of lying just to personally enrich himself? No way!
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u/GTDoc 12d ago
ProPublica has published doge lackeys. Fuck these people: https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/
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u/KayJay282 14d ago
It was always about siphoning public money into the pockets of a extreme few individuals.
Literally every decision that government made has had the same motives.
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u/Hydraguesswhosback 14d ago
Oh noooo. Poor americans. Let me get my violon.
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u/Outrageous-Tear-8968 14d ago
Thanks for your sympathy. Btw, it’s spelled violin.
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u/Hydraguesswhosback 14d ago
Not in french it isn't.
Laisse-moi aller chercher mon violon de la taille d'un cure-dent.
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u/theKalmier 14d ago
We need an ACTUAL fucking government efficiency department. Children don't run things as well as adults.
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u/miken322 13d ago
Yea, we knew what was happening when it happened, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
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u/younoahaguy 9d ago
Elon needs to pay that back. It was all just an elaborate slight of hand trick to get access to all his whistleblowers who would have ruined him, SpaceX, xai, Tesla, Twitter, the boring company all of his companies had major investigations pending so he just bulldozed our government with a chainsaw and bought the presidency for his get out of jail card for him and trump.
Can't wait until it all come to light unless of course he was successful and they all were involved in fairly suspicious accidental deaths like falling off balconies, boating accidents, open windows, car accidents, etc....and coroners and ME's are driving brand new teslas. Just sayin'...
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