Everything abut DOGE has been a disaster. The constant walking back of claims (two trillion in savings, then one trillion, then 150 billion), the muddled "transparancey", the controversies- it's all been extremely sloppy, not that I expect anything different from a Musk-related project. And now Musk is leaving because saving money in the government is "really difficuly" (no shit, Sherlock) and because of harassment he brought entirely on himself by being a showboating, egotistical jackass. There's a great Reason article on all of this: https://reason.com/2025/05/07/elon-musk-discovers-that-serious-spending-cuts-are-really-difficult/
But all of that aside, the real probelms with DOGE are going to be seen in the long-term. Next time someone comes along with a new government efficiency initiative, it's going to be met with extreme skepticism. If that initiative is anything like DOGE, that's a good thing. But if someone genuinely wants to reduce waste and spending in the government, they'll be fighting an uphill battle because of Musk's disaster.
And here's the thing- government efficiency programs don't have to be shitshows. Al Gore's National Preformance Review (NPR) was largely succesful- not perfect, mind you, but it reduced federal spending a good deal. The difference is that the NPR was done with discipline, while DOGE's stated strategy was, "move fast and break things." I'll give them this- they certainly broke a lot of shit.
Posted by Quite_the_enigma
1 Comment
They’ve straight up damage the cause of limited government. They put all these non political employees out of work under the guise of cutting spending. Now those on the left will be more close minded to it because of this experience.
Those on the right already believe they cut spending, but we’re still increasing spending with things like a trillion dollar defense budget.
Musk did damage to the brand by turning it into one big meme parade and making it out to be a crusade. He’s not a serious leader. I’m all for reducing spending, but it needs to be thorough and methodic. Do it so it doesn’t shock people or the economy, because then we’re just setting ourselves back.