Donald Trump and DOGE adviser Elon Musk, May 30, 2025, in the Oval Office. Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok.
Remember Elon Musk running around in his DOGE garb with sunglasses and a chainsaw? The Republicans are hoping that you don’t.
The ostensible point of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” was rooting out trillions of dollars of government waste, fraud, and abuse. Musk gathered together a group of “super-high-IQ” MAGA boys who worked 80 hours a week ransacking all the various government agencies and departments in this effort.
Musk promised to cut at least $2 trillion from the U.S. budget with his DOGE gang. Musk came up largely empty-handed in this effort. He did manage to save around $20 billion a year by eliminating USAID, a program that provided healthcare and nutrition to millions of people in Africa. While this ended the Bush II AIDS program, PREPAR, which has saved tens of millions of lives, it did not do much to help U.S. taxpayers. The $5 billion cost of the program was roughly 0.08% of federal spending.
Mostly, what Musk ended up doing was creating chaos in programs that he seemed to not understand. He took credit for canceling contracts that were already completed, fired people who were subsequently rehired, and did things like end a screwworm monitoring program. This last move has led to a screwworm outbreak threatening the country’s cattle stock.
But the key point here is that Musk has a free hand and a chainsaw to pursue government waste, fraud, and abuse wherever he saw it. Everyone needs to keep that in mind when they hear Republican politicians yelling about how they will save us billions or hundreds of billions from various programs, not by cutting meat, but by rooting out fraud.
This means that when Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn claimed a few months back that 12 million people were fraudulently added to the exchange created by the Affordable Care Act, she was claiming that Elon Musk and his super-high IQ boys were too incompetent to find 12 million fraudulent enrollees. That is roughly half of all the people on the exchanges.
Similarly, when Speaker Mike Johnson claims that he will deal with a projected $370 billion annual shortfall in the Social Security program, for years 2033 and beyond, by eliminating waste and fraud, Johnson is claiming that Musk and the DOGE boys somehow missed this. That would be equal to roughly 15% of the program’s spending.
In the same vein, when Trump claimed that Minnesota had $19 billion in fraud in its Medicaid program, he was claiming that an amount roughly equal to the state’s entire annual Medicaid budget was going to fraud. This is despite the fact that Minnesota’s per capita spending on Medicaid is not out of line with other states. But more importantly, Trump had just sent Elon Musk and his DOGE boys looking into this, and they apparently found nothing.
At this point, it should be obvious to everyone, even elite reporters, that when Republicans yell about fraud, they are just doing a slightly more polite version of shouting the N-word. Fraud does exist in government programs, and we should do what we can to minimize it. This means the hard work that the Government Accountability Office does, as well as the work that was done by the 16 Inspector Generals fired by Trump just after he took office.
It’s also more often done at the high end with major companies ripping off the government, as Florida Senator Rick Scott did in his earlier career as an insurance company CEO. The high-end fraudsters who pocket the big bucks are more likely to be found on Trump’s pardon list or at parties at Mar-a-Lago than the receiving end of a Republican investigation.
But whenever Trump and other Republicans yell about fraud, it is important to remember that he handed over the keys of government and a chainsaw to Elon Musk and gave him a free rein. It is impossible to believe that there is a large amount of fraud in government without also believing that Elon Musk is a total incompetent. Logic doesn’t carry much weight in policy circles, but the rest of us should recognize this simple fact.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
