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.”
150 billion
Yeah and if you actually believe that to be true then I have a bridge to sell you. These dumb fucks sold 8 million as 8 billion
I’d be surprised if it’s even close to 15 billion
These dumb fucks sold 8 million as 8 billion
Even aside from stuff like this, things they claim to be saving tend to be cut contracts. Contracts that have already been paid, but will no longer have to provided what they’d been paid for.
Also they lost like 500Bn according to the IRS due to cutting IRS staff alone, not including revenue lost as a result of cutting services that the government provided and revenue lost as a result of other nations no longer doing business with the USA such as arms sales, energy, rocketry, hospitals, and other transactions.
By all accounts DOGE is losing money.
Same answer as the other reaction: if i start pulling on those threads then there is no end
It also completely ignored the cost of the consequences, which is likely going to easily outpace any money “saved”.
Oh inwasnt even gonna go there. Once you start pulling those threads it just becomes an absolute Avalanche of shit
It’s probable that it’s way less than that, and that’s not factoring in whatever it’ll cost to unfuck everything he’s done. Not that that’s likely to happen anytime soon.
Also not counting in the brain-drain that is already happening.
I hope it’ll be better for all you normal human beings in the US at some point in the future, I really do, but fuck me if this shit isn’t scary all the way on the side of the Atlantic, and that’s coming from someone living right next door to Russia. I’m way more scared of what’ll happen when the US goes full 4th Reich.
I guess one could argue you’re already there to be fair, but I still hope it went too far too fast and a backlash is incoming.
The goal was never to save money but find ways to enrich himself.
Ending democracy, that’s their true goal.
The working class has never had any form of democracy
That’s not true at all, even if you want to restrict yourself and only consider direct democracies as true democracies, you have at least Switzerland as an example.
In Sweden and Denmark, workers can even choose representatives to sit on the board of directors of the companies where they work (however, only for companies with more than 25 or 35 employees).
This entire post and thread is about the US
People don’t understand that a state isn’t a private company, and you can’t manage the state like in the private sector.
He also is not great at managing companies either.
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.
We will need a whole new SSA computer system, just to kill this question dead. Same goes for EVERY department. Some 20 years from now, I guess DOGE would have fulfilled its original mission of updating American computer infrastructure, in the most stupid and malicious way possible.
SS numbers seemed compromised enough pre-Musk. I feel we should all get a new one that isn’t just tossed blindly onto any form we have to fill out on a daily basis.
They increased the budget of the Pentagon. You should be worried about where the funds are being moved-to
The military budget doesn’t seem to have gone up by anything that hasnt been trending the last decade or 2, and despite all the talk about going to fight other countries, I don’t think there is enough support for anything other than Iran, and even that I dont think would be done directly by the US military.
I do worry more about a more internally agro surveillance state, but with facial recognition and a camera on every doorbell, I think we’ve already long traded privacy for security. I keep learning about previous rebellions and having covert places to gather, plan, and stage have really been crucial, and I don’t know how one does that in the modern world.
You’re being defeatist. There’s not cameras everywhere. There are loads of blind spots, even in major cities.
It’s a fact that the majority of square feet in the US has places where there are no cameras compared to where there are cameras.
There are groups that map this. You can help identity the cameras on OSM.
I don’t feel defeatist. I think my feelings on America as a whole are higher than many I’ve been seeing here. But tech has come a long way since a lot of these types of movements have taken place.
I love getting inspiration from people like the Maroons the bands of people hiding out in huge areas of Appalachia before the Civil War and others, but stuff like thermal optics and night vision and whatever other stuff the military and even local police likely have these days is pretty intimidating. It’s also way quicker and stealthier to deploy. There’s license plate readers that can grab the plates of anyone driving to a protest and databases of faces, etc.
I’m not as tech savvy as maybe a lot of you are so I don’t know real life limitations of all this stuff or how to avoid it, and I just keep it in mind.
Use drones. Use public transportation. Use cash. Use Tor.
The power has always been asymmetric, but many advancements in technology actually help resistance of the oppressed more than the oppressors.
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.
NPR reported on that whistleblower: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security
In related news:
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?
Which is what Putin has tasked him with.
NOT True! NOW that we saved a couple Million we can Afford BILLIONS in Contracts for Elon Musk and El Salvador and Greenland and my Kids is Starving because they Cut his Funding!
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
And we let him. I propose a sea burial. But let him try to explain fir…nah get in the box!
I think we should help him fulfill his dream of going to Mars.
The suit is not finished, but we’ll send the missing parts a few days later! Promise! Wink wink!
I mean I’ve been told this is the year to fudge on your taxes since the IRS is fucked so I mean maybe there’s some silver lining. Frankly Elon isn’t as bad as- hold on someone’s knocking on my door, I’ll be back in a bit.
just FYI, its easier to audit a poor/middle class person because they dont pay 600 lawyers to play with where the money is for tax loopholes. Unless youre a multimillionaire you’ll probably end up regretting fudging anything unfortunately.
Might not be the year to break laws though, considering even judges can’t save you
The US budget is $7 trillion. Even if we pretend he saved $150 billion, that’s 2% of the budget.
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?
Same as he did with Twitter. What is new?
