How much time you got? I'll keep it high level because I'm pretty sure I'd crash Hacker News if I spent all day typing out every last specific issue for you, and I don't have time to do that anyway.
- A multitude of errors in basic math in the claimed savings, like claiming 55 billion in savings when the "receipts" posted on their own site to back up those numbers did not add up to 55 billion even assuming they were accurate. Diving deeper, they clearly misunderstand how government contracts work, claiming they saved the full value of contracts they cut despite said contracts having been partially paid out. In one case they claimed 8 billion in savings for a contract that was worth 8 million, and then apparently tried to change the data to cover up their mistake when called out.
Here's a twitter thread with some more specific examples: https://x.com/electricfutures/status/1892432354016202831
- And here's all the contracts they claim to have canceled: https://doge.gov/savings
No verifiable reasons have been given for why these specific contracts were chosen. What made these more wasteful than other contracts? How will canceling them improve efficiency? Nothing more than "Trust us bro", I doubt they know themselves; they certainly haven't had the time or the staff or the expertise to investigate anything with any detail.
- Elon's companies are recipients of massive government contracts and were under investigation by some of the agencies he is attempting to cut. An insane conflict of interest that has not been accounted for beyond "trust us". There is no politically independent oversight of any nature.
- The shutdown of USAID was done so incompetently that employees were left stranded overseas locked out of government networks without support.
- The wholesale gutting of the CFPB, a program which actually made more money for taxpayers than it cost, while claiming to care about financial efficiency.
- Avoidable accidental firings of critical personnel across government agencies. Re-hiring is a non-trivial cost on top the immediate disruption and you won't get a 100% return rate. Complete waste of time of and money while disrupting mission critical activities.
These are not the actions of serious people trying to curtail government waste, fraud and abuse. If they are, they're a sign of rank incompetence. These are the actions of people who, even if given the benefit of the doubt, are falsely convinced that the government does no good whatsoever and they can cut programs and grants with no consequences that matter except to their political enemies.
This isn't even getting into the legality of what they're doing, but DOGE supporters have made it quite clear at this point that they view the law as the enemy, or at the very least irrelevant.
