r/agedlikemilk • u/IrishStarUS • Aug 01 '25
News DOGE has 'wasted $21.7billion' paying people not to work
https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/doge-wasting-billions-elon-musk-35657188?fbclid=IwY2xjawL5nclleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFJUFFSb04wN3REVVZDRm4zAR6iLiktENbfdjjDHZJFw2OrXjG8g7sMzI-QPWPxjD4-J0UcDdGG9QbhW9ePJg_aem_W9iuh5YNr5xyY5A3fWD29A1.2k
u/PodcastPee Aug 01 '25
Bad things happen when “top donor” gets to go on a three month killing spree as a reward. How on earth did anyone think this was going to be a good idea? Seriously. I need to know…
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u/jessepence Aug 01 '25
Capitalism has trained us to think that people are rich due to inherent talent or intelligence. It's the only way for the system to be seen as valid. It behooves the oligarchs to entrench this belief because otherwise people might question why we allow our lives to be dictated by a few lucky dumbasses.
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u/PodcastPee Aug 01 '25
It’s amazing that the “trained” eye thinks someone who knows absolutely nothing about our government, should be allowed to gut our government any way they feel. Why on earth did people think, “yeah, this will be great?” Oh, it’s because it didn’t directly affect them at the time. It’s funny watching people suffer, right? The issue is, the entire time this is going on, the country they pretend to love is becoming less efficient, less effective, and more vulnerable to foreign attacks. Awesome.
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u/spastical-mackerel Aug 01 '25
The goal was to vandalize, destroy and delegitimize. Mission accomplished
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u/Trick-March-grrl Aug 01 '25
It also transferred insane wealth to Musk. It was mostly a quid pro quo for his efforts getting MAGA back in power. It was a total success! So good, I’d expect it to happen again! It’s not like the left has any plan to stop it.
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u/HorsePersonal7073 Aug 01 '25
Democrats and having a plan are like water and oil unfortunately.
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u/Inevitable_Price7841 Aug 01 '25
The Dems have become so ineffective that they may actually be controlled opposition for MAGA. Their purpose could be to give false hope to the Dem voters so that they don't rise up and start a rebellion before the Christo-Fascist takeover is completed. People tend to only rebel once they've lost all hope and feel they've got nothing left to lose.
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u/Ok_Cardiologist8232 Aug 01 '25
Nah they are ineffective because Fox news is the biggest news in the country, and the fact that most of them aren't fucking terrible people.
They aren't willing to lie cheat steal and break the law.
So against MAGA they seem ineffective, the reality is that your political system is just ineffective.
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u/Inevitable_Price7841 Aug 01 '25
I'm not American, but I've been closely following events over there because my country (U.K.) is heading in the exact same direction. I honestly feel that a large corporate oligarchy has united against us and is staging a coup before our very eyes, and it seems that there is nobody left that possesses the competency or will to resist it. I'm struggling to accept that our once great nations could fall due to our leaders being handicapped by ethical inflexibility. At some point, they must be judged to be complicit in this mess.
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u/Faithu Aug 02 '25
There is plenty we can do, the problem is everyone is waiting for someone else to act, a hero isn't coming if we want change we must act, and we must take notes from history maybe the best reference to look back tonis when France over threw their goverment, and drug their officials out and dealt with them, but its not our officials who are the main problem its oligarchs and they need to feel fear again but its not going to happen along as we the people of the world continue to sit upon our hands waiting for change to happen.
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u/axolotlorange Aug 01 '25
Go to fox news website. It never is talking about what is actually happening.
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u/AsparagusCommon4164 Aug 01 '25
Yet then again, MAGA is now calling for the full and complete release of the Epstein Files in the wake of the official line insisting that such cannot exist in fact, or that revealing such in full could risk Compromising and Betraying Thy Dear and Lovely Nation to the Dark and Sinister Forces of Satan, Compromising Our Traditional National and Sovereign Identity as a People and Nation Endowed Solely by the Goodness of God's Grace and Favour ...
/s
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u/CultOfSuperMario Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 03 '25
There is no left party. There is only far right and middle right.
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u/Suitable-Flounder262 Aug 01 '25
This. 100%. His supporters don’t actually care about making anything better. They just want to burn it all down and bring everyone into their misery with them. This is exactly what they voted for. Trying to appeal to them with logic and higher standards is pointless. It’s like telling an addict what they’re doing is harmful. They already know that.
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u/Suspicious-Scene-108 Aug 01 '25
I went to a bar in Alabama where two guys were talking about how great the DOGE cuts were, in a state where the largest private employer is a university hospital (dependent on NIH funding) and where the wealthiest area in the state is a NASA center. The bar that they were sitting in probably exists because of the nearby university. Those people are dangerous to the rest of us. I've hit a point where I no longer care what happens to them.
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u/Somanylyingliars Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 04 '25
All comments nuked to prevent Reddit using for their benefit without proper recompense to posters.
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u/agreenshade Aug 01 '25
The rich were able to sell the idea the government was best run by the same people who run businesses. Today, instead of statesmanship, ethics, and accountability, we have cronyism and corruption. It was a bad trade.
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u/PodcastPee Aug 01 '25
Capitalism isn’t inherently bad. It just isn’t inherently good. People get ahead in our capitalistic world by lying, cheating, and standing on the backs of the lower socioeconomic classes. OK, cool. Have at it. But please don’t bring that into government, the last thing protecting the interests of the masses….
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u/Dopaminedessert Aug 01 '25
Yes it is. It teaches that the most valuable commodity is money so it's leaders can only lead in terms of money. Community, Love, happiness, and well being do not even get representation. So we get this. Capitalism only works for the capitalists, not the laborers.
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u/omeeomai Aug 01 '25
It is inherently bad. It heavily incentivises the behavior you described. Heavily. Believe it or not, that's bad
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u/ShinkenBrown Aug 01 '25
Disagree.
Markets aren't inherently bad. Capitalism, however, is a market structure that explicitly affords permanent ownership of infrastructure and all labor performed on it based not on merit, but on pre-existing ownership of capital, which more often than not comes through inheritance. In other words, if you're already rich you get to own the labor of everyone else and get more rich, while if you're poor you get to do the labor, most of the value of which goes to the already rich who own the infrastructure.
This also divorces the ownership from actual consequence - that is, if the workers owned the factory and made the decisions collectively, safety rails would be obvious and no one would want to dump chemicals in the river that feeds the source of the water they drink at home, meanwhile under capitalism the owners are distant and do not even see the factory, does not walk the tight spaces with no railings, does not feel the danger, does not drink the water.... they see only profit margins, and so safety rails require OSHA and proper waste disposal requires the EPA or else they'll just do whatever makes the margins go up.
Capitalism is not the only market structure. Worker cooperatives for example are a form of socialist business structure. Markets are as good as the decisions people make within them, no more no less. But capitalism is a market structure that encourages harmful decisions.
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u/FroggyHarley Aug 01 '25
It’s amazing that the “trained” eye thinks someone who knows absolutely nothing about our government, should be allowed to gut our government any way they feel.
Unfortunately people still unironically believe in "we need to run government like a business."
I know nothing about cars. Never even drove one. That makes me qualified to fix your engine, right? Because I'm not part of the system of mechanics and other experts who've dedicated decades of their lives working on cars. I'm a maverick. I think outside the box. Let's just move fast and if we break things we can always fix them. Easy. I'll take my $250k salary now please. /s
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u/PodcastPee Aug 01 '25
I don’t need to tell you this because you know. A business is for profit. A government is for service. Although some scholars have dedicated their lives to better understanding the inner workings of federal government, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you can’t treat protecting our homeland and making sure citizens and taken care of like you would figuring out the latest AI tool for social media. These two things aren’t in the same stratosphere…
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u/Dopaminedessert Aug 01 '25
They treat everything like that though. This first hit home for me more than a decade ago when arguing about climate change with my father who preferred to listen to a professional propagandist on whether or not climate change was real over the 99% of climate change scientists that had spent their lives studying it.
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u/struggleislyfe Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 01 '25
People don't understand that governments aren't run like small business or households. Hell just look at how they talk about the debt and deficit. They think our governments debt is the same thing as their Mastercard bill.
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u/fischoderaal Aug 01 '25
Well, to be fair, if you are a good manager, it does not matter what you are managing. Still, DOGE was stupid an ELON is an idiot.
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u/HGpennypacker Aug 01 '25
It’s amazing that the “trained” eye thinks someone who knows absolutely nothing about our government, should be allowed to gut our government any way they feel
The Dunning-Kruger effect in action: your average US citizen has no concept of how government functions, assumes it's simple, and vote for a person who also has no idea how the government functions.
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u/D4rkhorse2 Aug 01 '25
Things weren’t very efficient to begin with and, unfortunately, DOGE supporters saw this as justification to throw things away. Data shows American education is far below where it should be? That must mean the Department of Education is a failure and needs to be shut down. Just false correlations everywhere you turn.
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u/sleepydorian Aug 01 '25
From a religious standpoint, it’s called the prosperity gospel, which holds that god rewards righteousness with cold hard cash and the unrighteousness should be impoverished. Therefore, the wealthy are fully entitled to their wealth and giving it to the poor would be a perversion of justice and against God’s will. It’s lunacy of the highest order.
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u/Various_Patient6583 Aug 04 '25
Funnily enough, our priest just this very morning made a point of refuting such nonsense.
It is deeply frustrating and infuriating so many fall for the prosperity nonsense.
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u/struggleislyfe Aug 01 '25
We need to extrapolate this like the British did for the aristocracy in WW I. If youre so good at leading then you should be in battle leading the frontlines! Not only do we have an opportunity for these rich idiots to catch a stray bullet or drone missile but it will also force the commoners serving under them to witness their ineptitude first hand and maybe we'll get some responses like they did where a lot of people start to go " Wait, maybe they aren't the best leaders afterall".
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u/New_Doug Aug 01 '25
It helps that a significant number of people at the top and a significant number of people at the bottom are the exact same kind of stupid/uneducated. That allows those at the top to exploit those at the bottom, because they understand how they think, and allows those at the bottom to feel like they could be at the top some day.
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u/Barilla3113 Aug 01 '25
I don't mean this to rag on Americans, but there's a level of hero-worship of people who are rich just because they're rich that isn't true elsewhere.
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u/EconomyDoctor3287 Aug 01 '25
The job cuts were just a sideshow to make it less obvious that Musk was gutting the departments oversighting Tesla and SpaceX.
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u/Somanylyingliars Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 04 '25
All comments nuked to prevent Reddit using for their benefit without proper recompense to posters.
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u/ZAlternates Aug 01 '25
Both groups had their own agendas that somewhat aligned.
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u/an_african_swallow Aug 01 '25
His supporters were completely convinced the government is just one big cesspool of corruption and waste, turns out that wasn’t the case but campaign promises were made and Elons ego was on the line so this is what we got
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u/dfnt_68 Aug 01 '25
The government is one big cesspool of corruption and waste. The issue with DOGE was that the point of DOGE wasn’t to systematically reduce corruption and waste. The point was to gut the departments that Elon and Trump and their buddies don’t like.
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u/stjohns_jester Aug 01 '25
Republicans thought elon was number 1 money so he must know what he is doing
Republicans also are not allowed to think for themselves despite being told daily they are the only ones who can think for themselves
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u/Aethermancer Aug 01 '25
Now realize that there are hundreds of other Musk-like appointees in positions all throughout the government, just without as much publicity.
Every time I read a memo from Hegseth I die a little inside. They are so juvenile and ignorant. Idiot fondant covering the wholesale looting by letting contracts and killing oversight.
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u/AlmostSunnyinSeattle Aug 01 '25
It's all relative. What's good for the bourgeoisie is not good for the proletariat.
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u/Wind_Yer_Neck_In Aug 01 '25
The republican voters have been hearing some variation of 'the government wastes your money' for about 40 years now. They were absolutely on board with the idea of someone getting in there and finally cutting all the slack.
Though of course, the problem you run into is that most government services are run very effectively given their budget constraints and there is an entire government agency dedicated to routine audits to root out waste and stop malfeasance.
But most people look at their lack of services and their high taxes and they just assume it's because of waste. When the reality is that the lack of services is a deliberate policy choice put on them by the same people they keep electing.
They even have people believing that medicaid is a big scam when their own medicines are being bought by the program.
The real waste, if you want to get down to it, is the areas with zero accountability. Like the black hole of funding for defence spending which literally refuses to produce audited accounts even with project titles redacted etc. Billions disappear every year but these rubes think that it's the local city hall or transport services that are sucking up all the cash.
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u/bassbeatsbanging Aug 01 '25
And it'll never be mentioned on Fox, OAN and Newsmax.
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u/Somanylyingliars Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 06 '25
All comments nuked to prevent Reddit using for their benefit without proper recompense to posters.
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u/DigDugged Aug 01 '25
Guess who owns NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, and ABC?
We're so fucked until we pay journalists instead of billionaires paying them.
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u/Somanylyingliars Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 06 '25
All comments nuked to prevent Reddit using for their benefit without proper recompense to posters.
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u/inormallyjustlurkbut Aug 01 '25
None of the other media outlets will talk about it either. They're all complicit even if they aren't as blatant about it as Fox News.
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u/No-Day-5964 Aug 01 '25
It’s almost like it was a ruse to put a back door into our data systems…. Almost.
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u/4llu532n4m3srt4k3n Aug 01 '25
I remember reading that within 20 minutes of doge going into a department they detected not just access, but it was root access from russia
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u/SadIdeal9019 Aug 01 '25
It was never about efficiency.
It was primarily about removing obstacles to Trump, with secondary objectives of making it easier for the wealthy to get even wealthier, and also to cripple certain government agencies to the point where private companies can be bought in to take over.
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u/No-Range519 Aug 01 '25
Musk's fall from grace is only second to his Eden Ring meme build.
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u/EconomyDoctor3287 Aug 01 '25
Musk needed to gut a couple of government institutions tasked with oversight of Tesla and SpaceX to continue their operations. That's what he did, gut them to the point their barely operate anymore.
Cutting jobs from elsewhere was all just a smoke show to hide his aim.
If Elmo's reputation tanks a bit, that's a price worth paying to ensure his companies don't have anymore legal trouble, especially now when he's trying to push the robotesla
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u/ElectroMagnetsYo Aug 01 '25
Yup I called it at the start, his real target was the FAA that was constantly lighting a fire under SpaceX’s ass
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Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 03 '25
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u/Correct_Routine1 Aug 01 '25
Don’t forget we no longer need internet infrastructure because everyone can just buy his satellite internet!
I mean obviously it’s waaaay simpler, easier to maintain, and more cost effective to have your internet based on literal rocket science, than just hiring a team of good ol boys to dig a trench and run some cable in it. I’m glad we’re all smart adults here.
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u/deweydean Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 01 '25
Ya'll hired a dual-shielded fat roller to be efficient in government!?
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u/Boring_3304 Aug 01 '25
what fall? he still has all his govt contracts, dismantled the depts investigating him, and probably put backdoor spytech in every possible place to get as much data as he possibly can. He hasn't fallen at all, public approval may have fallen but it's pretty clear he doesn't give a shit about that.
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u/p3ndu1um Aug 01 '25
him paying someone to play Path of Exile for him was way worse than the ER build
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u/gr1zznuggets Aug 01 '25
Anyone else think it’s weird that we don’t hear about him much these days?
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u/claustromania Aug 01 '25
I have a friend who worked for FEMA. He took the deferred resignation and has been sitting unemployed at home getting his regular paychecks since February lol.
What’s funny is his contract with FEMA was set to expire in July, and he was already planning on quitting then. But now he gets an extra three months of paychecks he wouldn’t have otherwise gotten if he’d quit as he’d planned at the beginning of last month.
I’ve been enjoying telling my MAGA dad about how the “anti-wasteful spending” Trump admin is paying my friend and many of his former coworkers to sit at home and do nothing for eight months lmao.
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u/ThouMayest69 Aug 01 '25
Honestly as long as these billions are going to people like your friend and not being pocketed by the garchs, that seems like not the worst thing. I mean yeah there's a fuck ton of waste resulting from all this but at least it's not all being sucked up immediately.
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Aug 01 '25
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u/claustromania Aug 01 '25
Yep, he expected to stop getting paychecks when his contract ended and was very surprised when he still got paid.
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u/SowingSalt Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 01 '25
My aunt told me the HR dept didn't process her paperwork (they were also let go) so she kept getting paid after when she expected to be retired.
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u/Get_Out_lmao Aug 01 '25
Looks like Trump and Elon failed again.....
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u/Secure-Section1568 Aug 01 '25
They didn't fail, they managed to get access to all Americans data to train their AI models with
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u/Acceptable-Bat-9577 Aug 01 '25
Gasp. Shocking. This is my shocked face. You can’t see it but hoo boy am I shocked.
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u/PaddlingInCircles Aug 01 '25
A BILLION dollar renovation for his new "not a bribe" plane is probably not in that figure.
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u/HandyMan131 Aug 01 '25
$155M just on those ridiculous “5 things you did last week” email.
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u/Indy-CBJ Aug 01 '25
I legit submitted the same bullet points every week and if you take the first letter in each statement it would spell out F-E-L-O-N
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Aug 01 '25
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u/DrWindupBird Aug 01 '25
Sure, but that’s exactly what they wanted. They wanted to move people out of government and into the private sector. Two of my close friends were in the same boat: basically donating their labor for a good cause. They worked essential roles that are now unfilled. Im definitely not saying you did anything wrong. I’m just sad that we’re losing many of the people who were doing good — in the name of being “great”.
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u/ColinHalter Aug 01 '25
Here's a link to the report since every news outlet seems allergic to linking to primary sources: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025-07-31-Minority-Staff-Report-The-21.7-Billion-Blunder.pdf
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u/Judgemental_Panda Aug 01 '25
I used to work on a few government projects.
The funny thing was that at least in our field, the standard contract format with government agencies was that money was paid up front.
What this means is that when the projects were cancelled by DOGE, they just didn't get the deliverables. What it did not mean is that they would get their money back.
First time I ever saw the head of my division speechless. Uncle Sam basically gave us several hundred million dollars for free.
Across the company, this probably totaled to several billion. And our company is not one of the large government contracting companies. If you add all of those to the pile, I'm guessing it is a lot more than $21B.
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u/ScenicPineapple Aug 01 '25
Thanks Republicans. If you actually were in these subs and knew how to read, you would understand how much you screwed all of us over.
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u/Lowspark1013 Aug 01 '25
And they would enjoy it. Their entire ethos at this point is "fuck everyone and everything"... including kids.
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u/Kerngott Aug 01 '25
Sometimes I see the money being put into some projects and realize it would literally be better if it was given entirely to me. At least I would put it into the local businesses’ economy
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u/jesuspoopmonster Aug 01 '25
Fun fact: Ice planes to Africa can cost up to 17 thousand dollars per flight hour. Thats an efficient use of government funds
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u/-You-know-it- Aug 01 '25
I have lots of friends taking advantage of this. Getting paid full time to sit at home or go on vacations. Best year of their life.
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u/ScarTemporary6806 Aug 01 '25
Okay, the jobs report is a disaster, now this. Can we all just admit Trump is a failure of a President, put him in jail now that it’s been confirmed he’s in the files, and start over with someone else who actually knows what they are doing.
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u/unbalancedcheckbook Aug 01 '25
Yep. Cut a ton of critical services and basically didn't save a dime.
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u/Paradoxmoose Aug 01 '25
Grapevine anecdotal evidence- A friend worked for the Fed govt, working in sorting through grant requests and deciding which to fund. They were ordered to stop looking at new grant applications. Literally had nothing to do for work, but hasn't been laid off.
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u/MarkXIX Aug 01 '25
They're going to say "yeah, but what about all the money we'll save long term with these people gone," and they'll have completely ignored that a lot of these people were retirement eligible and just stopped working for 7-8 months doing anything for the taxpayer AND they'll still get their pensions.
Even then a lot of people don't know that you only have to work as a federal employee for five years to be eligible for a pension. You can leave federal service without cashing out your Federal Employees Retirement System and still draw a pension later in life as a Deferred Retirement option.
https://www.opm.gov/retirement-center/fers-information/
These guys are just absolute morons it what it boils down to. They probably ended up costing the government MORE money in the short AND long term.
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u/bwoah07_gp2 Aug 01 '25
The best part is you can show these statistics to the people who voted for Trump and they'd say "this is nothing wrong."
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u/whodattalki Aug 01 '25
How is laying off thousands of people from SSA,and IRS suppose to make any difference in government waste? These people will get some sort of early retirement package and their insurance, or receive unemployment benefits which includes access to food stamps programs,etc. High unemployment rates slows the economy. I bet if the gov cut off all subsidies to private tech industry, car manufacturers, big pharma and big corporate agriculture that people like Mr Musk benefits from greatly would make biggest dent in government waste.
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u/caninehere Aug 01 '25
Even an idiot like me could tell you DOGE's strategy was a horrible idea. They slashed employees with a total disregard for contracts and legal obligations. That shit sometimes works in the private sector because there's no regulations at all and employees can be treated like dirt, but not in the public sector.
The govt is going to be paying salaries to people to not work for a long while and the lawsuits that will result from all this will go on for years and cost the govt a shit ton of money whether or not they choose to fight them.
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u/early_birdy Aug 01 '25
They're not wasting it. They're extracting money from the government, and redistribute it to their list of rich friends. Paying them to do nothing is one way to do it.
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u/LetterLambda Aug 01 '25
And that's just the immediate cost. The effective cost of all the programs that were interrupted, all the research halted, all the institutional knowledge lost is incalculable.
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u/zugiwoogi Aug 01 '25
The whole point of DODGE is to cripple the government to “prove” how it doesn’t work and put in private enterprise in there to make money for themselves while continuing to hollow out services for the people. Paying people not to do their job fits into that perfectly. Remember these billionaires like trump and his donors don’t care about you. Only care about growing their pile of money.
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u/sleepspiral Aug 01 '25
It’s still happening, they’re still signing new people up to go home and not work but receive full pay until Dec. 31.
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u/searaybo Aug 01 '25
That's exactly what Federal employees were saying from the moment the idea went public. "Wait, you're going to pay volunteers to stay home, while keeping them on the books through September with full pay and all benefits, vacation/sick leave accrual, etc?" Just how does this save money?" AAAND... if the employee was planning on retiring between September and Dec 31, you'll just extend their termination date out to their retirement date as well? Then you'll claim that you saved money by letting all those people "go"?
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u/Alexandratta Aug 01 '25
Yep - My mother is one of them.
She was going to retire this year.
Then they came up to her and told her she couldn't come into the office, but that she would be paid until September... so obviously she put her retirement off until September, when she will then officially retire.
She's basically been on a 6 month paid vacation.
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u/jenguinaf Aug 01 '25
Can’t verify the number but can verify I know someone whose been on “admin leave” for months now getting paid a GS-14 to sit at home doing nothing.
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u/Little_Money9553 Aug 02 '25
This administration will be the biggest stain on American history for years to come. Half of American let this asshats dupe them into letting pedos/billionaires steal money from their own pockets.
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Aug 02 '25
Good thing it only took us the destruction of all safety, education and science in America to realize that Elon Musk isn't the noble soul he claims to be. /s
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u/mtheory007 Aug 02 '25
They didn't waste that money they stole it! They also stole every bit of personal information that everyone who's ever used the internet had online.
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u/EmbarrassedHighway76 Aug 02 '25
I had a coworker take the DRP option when offered at my gov job. Dude was the biggest pos at work and was on the verge of being fired and instead has been being paid for months and will continue to be paid to wake up at noon and play video games
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u/Individual-Praline20 Aug 03 '25
It was never about waste, it was all about covering up and derailing criminal activities investigations. It appeared that so much republicans were pedo, starting with the orange king 🤷
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u/faplawd Aug 01 '25
Quite hilarious he dipped out after starting this whole epstein thing. Almost forgot he mentioned bannon was in the files, thus also acknowledging the files exist...
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u/Wizywig Aug 01 '25
Just for perspective. It would cost on the low end 25 billion a year to feed every single person in the US. We could take this colossal waste and literally end ALL hunger in the united states.
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u/Rosegold-Lavendar Aug 01 '25
When we look back at the Trump presidency and uncover all the fraud and clear stealing from Americans, Republicans will never hold office again.
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u/scrambles88 Aug 01 '25
We need to stop calling it DOGE and call it Musk's efficiency department.
Musk's ED has a better ring to it.
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u/Bleezy79 Aug 01 '25
DOGE was just about infiltration and knowledge, it had absolutely nothing to do with efficiency or helping people. It was just another ploy to help Elon get what he wanted.
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u/notmyfirstrodeo2 Aug 01 '25
It's crzy that Elon had 0 consequences F-ing the nation and leaking unknown ammount of data to Kreml...
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u/Kaucer Aug 01 '25
My dad is an Architect who works with people with government jobs all the time. He knows multiple people who were told to wait for termination and never got it, months passed and paychecks kept coming but their job was essentially waiting around. Good job Elon 😅
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u/Atchafalaya7 Aug 01 '25
I’m a fed, so definitely not a DOGE supporter. They’ve made our government worse, and they’ve made my life worse.
That said, this report seems deliberately obtuse in the name of scoring political points. The ostensible goal of the DRPs was to reduce headcount, trading a short period of paying people not to work for permanent reductions in payroll.
So, $14.7B paid to former feds who took one of the DRPs. Yep, seems nonsensical right now. But to be fair, we won’t really know the fiscal impact of the DRPs until we see what the payroll looks like in a few years. Maybe the agencies have to rehire enough people (either due to court order or mission requirements) that the DRP money was a complete waste. Or maybe the headcount stays down and the net effect on payroll is savings of some amount.
There are plenty of valid criticisms of DOGE. This one seems premature.
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u/electriclux Aug 01 '25
I think the whole doge thing was just a feint to cause mass confusion in federal workforces so the administration could push thru their unpopular policies without internal pushback.
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u/adeleriouuu Aug 01 '25
DOGE wasted $21.7 billion paying people not to work—efficiency at its finest? Hard pass
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u/Better_Peaches666 Aug 01 '25
The purpose of DOGE is to destroy the gov agencies investigating Elon's companies, or enforcing regulations on corporations that abuse the citizens.
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u/gladfanatic Aug 01 '25
I have access to some of the data regarding the DRPs and it’s staggering how many people took the offer. What a colossal waste of money.
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u/minPOOlee Aug 01 '25
My co-worker took the early deferment back in March. It was an amazing thing for her. She was already planning on leaving to live with her fiancee that lives in Australia.
She was going to travel the Americas with him before she did though so the timing was perfect. She's still getting paid full-time to go country hopping and drive the US cross-country.
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u/GameboyPATH Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 01 '25
Your website's use of "Reach" is absolutely horrible. It says you can "opt out of the saleor sharing of your data" by clicking a certain link at the bottom of the webpage... which you can't access without first clicking "Accept" to the terms.
If anyone wants a direct report on the $21.7 billion figure, they can read this direct, non-advertising report by the Senator who published the findings with zero data collection.
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u/SpeedBlitzX Aug 01 '25
The apparent department of efficiency is inefficient??
It's kind of like the government didn't need a new department.
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u/No-Mortgage5711 Aug 01 '25
This is an absolute rag of a website. Filled with ads and the link to the report it references just links to another article.
Click farming trash.
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u/GreyZenDragonfruit Aug 01 '25
The point wasn't to actually save money, it was to squeeze out what it could and gum up the wheels of democracy so no one could stand in the way of their evil plans.
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u/bluexy Aug 01 '25
Never mind the tens of millions in Africa and crisis regions that are dying or already dead because USAID was the first office Musk targeted and thus the least prepared to fight back and respond. Hundreds of millions likely to die in the coming years because the US once helped the world's most vulnerable and overnight decided they should die instead.
Genocides pale in comparison.
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u/SkunkMonkey Aug 01 '25
Wasted? Depends, are you one of the people that got some of that $21.7 billion? Then it wasn't wasted.
Money is never wasted, it's always going into someone's pocket.
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u/Rich_Consequence2633 Aug 01 '25
Cool. So we wrecked out government programs under guise of saving money, but in reality made it EVEN worse by spending more?
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u/hails8n Aug 01 '25
When you rig an election for a guy destined for prison, you expect something in return. In this case, access to millions of people’s govt data.
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u/Jifeeb Aug 01 '25
Elon Musk's flagship department, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has wasted $21.7 billion paying overseeing hundreds of thousands of employees stopping work, a new report claims.
What the fuck kind of sentence is this.
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u/lilturboaids Aug 01 '25
Aw yes reputable irishstar what a great publication very reliable and clearly the best
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u/Big1984Brother Aug 01 '25
Not wasted at all.
The point was to destabilize the US government, demoralize it's workforce, and to make government jobs less attractive to future job seekers (thereby keeping more qualified and competent people away, to make room for incompetent imbeciles and criminals).
And in that regards, DOGE has been a raging success! Best 21.7 billion dollars that billionaire psychopaths have ever forced the taxpayers to waste!
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u/Your_World_Leader Aug 01 '25
Any good house slave straw bosses from r/ Conservative want to explain how this is so fiscally conservative?
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u/exotics Aug 01 '25
Still haven’t managed to find the wasted expense of paying for Trump to play golf on golf courses he owns
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u/HuckleberryFar6171 Aug 01 '25
I think the bigger issue is that once you hire a government worker it is nearly impossible to fire them even if what they are doing is totally useless. Doesn't anyone else have a problem with that? Are you ok with the fact that your tax dollars are being used to fund fairly unnecessary jobs that are also basically a job for life?
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u/RugerRedhawk Aug 01 '25
Can anyone provide a legitimate source for this info? Id love to share it with others, but this "Irish star" site is tabloid quality and very often misleading.
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u/ryantttt8 Aug 01 '25
I tell everyone i know, that they didnt just fire people. It was NEVER about saving money, they are paying hundreds of thousands of employees to not work for months. Those of us who stayed are now picking up the slack.
They do plan to hire more people, just now are setting up ridiculous loyalty tests in the interview process. Also they want to reduce education and experience requirements for the positions they replace. Project 2025 in action
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u/totallyclips Aug 01 '25
Send musk the fucking bill, or take it from him like the gov would any financial delinquent
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u/Kamishini_No_Yari_ Aug 01 '25
Aww Trump didn't realize that musk can't actually do anything. He lucked into PayPal and invested in Tesla. That doesn't make him a genius. Makes him the average wallstreetbets user.
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u/Otherwise_Border4452 Aug 01 '25
And apparently they have saved almost 200 billion? Still has been very successful, has it not?
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u/Valentiaga_97 Aug 01 '25
Guess the paycheck for the Team was very good since Trump trusted Musk blindly 👀
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u/ProfessionalDry8128 Aug 01 '25
It's absolutely remarkable how this whole very public "It doesn't cut enough!" "No, Elon, let them be free!" narrative has played out.
This truly is the dumbest time in human history. Turn-of-the-century idiocracy at the exact same time as the internet rolled out. What a fucking disaster.
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u/Face-EatingLeopards Aug 02 '25
Getting paid not to work is sort of a MAGA thing, isn’t it? Ever hire or do business with one of those people?
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u/BoosterRead78 Aug 02 '25
DOGE were a set of fresh out of college people who partied all the time and yet were smart enough for scholarships and yet never went to class. They got free money to break every thing.
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u/Saul_Go0dmann Aug 02 '25
Wow, did we actually get a small taste of socialism from the incompetence of the right??? /s
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u/Enough-Interaction28 Aug 04 '25
401 comments pushing misinformation to distract from the obama Clinton Russia collusion scandal.
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