Coyocan          It seems like forever ago when Americans were inundated by the daily news with the chaos in the Trump administration’s empowering Elon Musk and his DOGE, Department of Governmental Efficiency, to slash and burn their way through federal agencies and federal workforce.  Almost a year later, it’s becoming possible to get an approximate accounting of the real savings, if any, that resulted from all the sound and fury.  Indisputably, despite the failure of the program to actually save taxpayers much money under its stated mission, the pain it caused is real and lingers, especially in situations like the almost complete defunding of the US Agency for International Development (AID).

The Times crunched some numbers, as they have been trying to do throughout this reign of terror.  It still seems impossible to come up with a real, bottom line number for what amount DOGE and Musk really saved, partially because so many of their claims were completely false or exaggerated.  Many times his young, inexperienced techies had no clue how to understand the contracts, whether they were let or not, and how many dollars they represented.

Here’s a sampling of what the Times team found:

• Of contracts and grants reportedly canceled by DOGE, 28 of the top 40 savings claims were inaccurate, including 13 of the largest.
• Despite claiming they would reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up. Partially this is because they didn’t calculate the real costs of their retirement-buyout program and replacing workers.
• Two of the biggest claims of contract cancellations in the Defense Department for almost $8 billion were not only not cancelled, but are alive and well. These two false claims are larger than 25,000 smaller DOGE claims.
• Some of the errors may have been inadvertent, others were likely deliberate deception. They came from double-counting, timeline confusion, misclassifications, and exaggeration.
• The examples of DOGE errors are legion, but one stands out. It was a claim of cancelling an $8 billion Department of Homeland Security contract that was wrong by a factor of 1,000. The contract was worth only $8 million.

This is all the stuff of flimflam.  Even Musk now expresses regret and says he wishes he had kept to his own knitting with his companies, rather than DOGE.  Governmental spokespeople are hiding out, but some simply say, there were some savings.  The White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has now publicly said that the destruction of US AID was a mistake, because they did good work.  Experts say the elimination of nearly all assistance provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development will result in an estimated additional 14 million dead worldwide by 2030.  The lives of many federal workers and their families have been irreparably impacted, as well as their communities.  This is a huge failure, hidden in plain sight, yet totally obfuscated, rather than transparent.   The DOGE website has not been updated since early October.  What a travesty.