- Doge claims to have saved the government for $ 150 million In waste, fraud and abuses, but some federal workforce of labor and policies believe that Elon Musk cost reduction efforts have proven to be expensive for taxpayers. The chaos of the modifications of the staff sang productivity, says an expert, costing government billions in wasted salary. IRS licensed employees are no longer able to make audits to generate key income, he argued.
While Elon Musk is preparing to step back from the Ministry of Effectiveness of the Government (DOGE), its objective of confusing the waste, fraud and abuse of the government may have failed. Some experts warn that its efforts could in fact cost government billions of labor and lost income.
DOGE initially promised to identify and eliminate 2 dollars billions during the first months of President Donald Trump's second term, although Musk radically reduced this figure to $ 150 billion, or 7.5% of its initial estimated savings. These discounts of expenditure had an impact on 260,000 federal workers, who were dismissed, taken off or have retired early since Trump's return to the White House, Reuters calculated. Between layoffs and resignations, the internal returned service could lose up to a third of its workforce of 100,000 people, of which around 22,000 can take the resignation of Trump, The New York Times reported Earlier this month.
The mass exodus of federal workers may mean that the government has fewer wages to pay, but it could also critically reduce the amount of the work it can carry out, in particular the collection of tax audit income.
“We must better work our government better, but the approaches that have been adopted so far take us in the wrong direction,” said Max Stier, director general of government efficiency and non -profit partnership for the public service, “said Fortune.
“The end result will be that the American public will hold the bag while Elon Musk will return to its private companies.”
Quantify the cost of DOGE
The partnership of the DOGE public service could cost taxpayers around $ 135 billion. The 2.3 million people on federal workforce receiving a total of 270 billion dollars of annual payroll, Stier estimates the cost of dismissal, re -evolution and paid leave – as well as productivity losses following staff staff – cost the government about half of this total pay.
A Budget laboratory report of the University of Yale Since March, additional evidence that Doge's expected economy could cost the government. Although it is not clear what part of the IRS workforce will be reduced, the budget laboratory calculated that 22,000 employees would leave the agency, it would lose 8.5 billion dollars in net income in 2026, largely due to less available personnel to carry out audits. More than 10 years, this loss would represent almost $ 198 billion in revenues, according to the report.
These calculations are not in particular with or do not take into account the DOGE of $ 150 billion in savings. Some of DOGE's claimed economies have proved to be wrong, including the calculation of economies from contracts that have been expired for years. Harry Kraemer, executive partner of Madison Dearborn Partners and Professor of Clinical Leadership at the Kellogg School of Management at the Northwestern University, said Fortune Last month, economies related to Doge could be overestimated up to 80%.
The White House and Doge did not respond to requests for makeshift comments, but the White House spokesperson Harrison Fields, said to New York Times“It is important to realize that doing nothing also has a cost, and these so-called experts and groups are conveniently absent when they examine the costs of doing nothing.”
Where do the losses come from?
What Doge has missed in its savings calculations is the value of work that the federal workforce was hired to finish, experts said.
“Saving on $ 1 of salary is somehow decreases the impact of what this salary does,” said Richard Prisinzano, director of policies analysis in the LAB budget, told Richard Prisinzano Fortune.
The effectiveness of the IRS depends on the fact that the staff is able to finish the audits, said Prisinzano. Although counter -intuitive, in order to increase the efficiency of the agency – which has quantified the amount of income it can report through audits – it is better to hire more staff. THE Wall Street Journal Calculated tens of billions of dollars in tax revenue not collected following recent job cuts.
“For each dollar spent, there is a lot of income that arrives,” said Prisinzano.
But with fewer hands to finish its work, the federal government can also waste money in the form of a loss of productivity, the result of the “chaos” created by the presence of DOGE in agencies, as well as layoffs and workforce, posed Stier. Fortune Calculated that the weekly Musk emails asking workers to list five weekly achievements would cost employees 165,000 hours of their working day to finish.
Doge would therefore waste dollars following a workforce that can no longer do its work effectively, which Stier argued that the Trump administration was actively facilitated. Last year, Russell Vought, director of Trump of the management and budget office, said in private speeches“We want to put them in trauma,” referring to the bureaucrats.
“What we see is a workforce that is traumatized, just as the administration said it as their objective,” said Stier. “And when you traumatize the workforce, nothing produces.”
This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
