Episode 4 - The Harm Caused by DOGE & Why it Matters
Full Transcript and Sources
Welcome back to Toil - Episode 4. My intention in launching this podcast was to dig into a specific issue per episode on how the government can better protect and represent Americans - whether that issue is hot in the current news at the moment. Often the most harmful injustices are not covered in the news - intentionally or not.
However, for this episode we do need to talk about what IS getting a lot of coverage in the news right now: and that’s DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, its leader Musk, and Trump’s freezing of funding that Congress has already appropriated.
Trump, his Administration, and Elon Musk claim these actions are in pursuit of efficiency and savings for the American people. But what services are the American people losing in these “cost savings” and is this the best way to achieve cost savings?
First of all, efficiency does not seem to be an agreed upon term here. Musk has been using it synonymously with cost savings, but it means so much more than that, and in fact, many of his cuts will mean less efficiency in services for the American people.
I want to talk through three main aspects to all of this: First, what President Trump and Musk are doing is not efficient, not likely saving costs in the long run, and harmful to Americans. Second, there are way more effective ways to save money if we were being serious and honest about this effort. Third, the way that President Trump and Musk are doing this violates our Constitution and Congress is failing in its responsibility to act as a check on power. I also take a little detour to highlight how poorly Musk is running DOGE, as well, then I’ll end with what we can do about all this.
DOGE Cuts are Not “Efficient”
Musk’s DOGE cuts and President Trump’s freezing of funding is not efficient, it’s not saving money in the long run, and it’s harming Americans. And I’m just going to walk us through a list of several funding cuts and freezes that have happened and explain this.
Musk cut over 1,000 workers from the VA, will that make service delivery to veterans more efficient? Will that cut down on wait times at the VA? Most of the 1,000 workers were veterans themselves, and 30% of the entire workforce are veterans, so tens of thousands of veterans are losing their jobs in Musk’s DOGE cuts, is that efficient? Is that good for the American people? This is not how we should treat our veterans.
Musk fired almost 7,000 people from the IRS, many of whom had been hired recently to modernize the technology because up until last year, IRS staff were using systems from the 1960s and receiving paper tax returns in the mail and manually typing the information into their computers. Part of this plan included rolling out a new system where Americans could file their taxes for free online, will this program be impacted by these cuts? Does firing these people achieve efficiency? Does it help Americans? Many of the workers fired were also hired to identify when billionaires were cheating on their taxes, does firing these people achieve cost savings by decreasing government revenue? We’re also in peak tax season right now, does firing so many staff mean Americans will experience slower processing, will they wait longer for their refunds?
Musk fired over 400 workers at the FAA, how does that make our air traffic control system more efficient and safe? Are cost savings worth it if they leads to more plane crashes?
Musk fired over 2,000 workers at the government’s premier science institution, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This included scientists researching cures to diseases! And Trump’s freeze on all funding included NIH grants to universities across the country that fund similar research into cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and others. Is this efficiency? American lives are not worth haphazard cuts here. But if all someone cares about is money, don’t we lose more money by Americans needing more healthcare and for longer as they suffer from diseases without a cure?
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the CFPB. Musk, with help from the principal author of Project 2025, Russel Vought, who Trump has put in his cabinet, have effectively killed the entire CFPB. The CFPB was created after the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans from Wall Street greed and has saved Americans tens of billions of dollars since then. When Americans are tricked or taken advantage of by massive financial corporations, they can file claims with the CFPB and the CFPB fights on their behalf and gets them their money back. Does destroying this agency achieve some kind of efficiency? The miniscule amount of money saved by not paying staff at the CFPB is not worth Americans losing their protections.
Musk fired over 130 staff at the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA is responsible for protecting American infrastructure from hackers. Hospitals are often a prime target of hackers, because they must pay the ransom to get their systems back up and running or people die. Is cutting staff at CISA worth American hospitals losing this protection? Is the money Americans lose when hospitals have to pay millions in ransom worth the tiny amount saved by firing these workers? Do we save money if key government infrastructure, like our electrical grid or nuclear weapons, is hacked by the Governments of China or Russia? What resources will we have to mobilize then in response?
Musk fired 3,400 staff from the Forest Service. The Forest Service is our key agency responsible for preventing forest fires, which are getting increasingly worse every single year. It was just in January that L.A. was consumed in unprecedented forest fires. How is terminating the staff tasked with preventing fires efficient or good for the American people? Is it cost savings when the response to fires is so costly? It is the government’s responsibility to protect the American people from fire.
Musk destroyed the US Agency for International Development (USAID). This Agency saved lives, providing emergency medical and food relief to dying people around the world, all for well under 1% of the entire federal budget. How is destroying this agency one of Musk’s first priorities in achieving cost savings. It’s less than 1% of the budget. It also keeps America safe. Beyond building incredible goodwill towards the USA, it prevents diseases from reaching our shores. USAID contained the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Musk claimed in Trump’s cabinet meeting last week that he accidentally cut USAID staff and funding currently working to contain an ebola outbreak in Uganda, but that he immediately rehired them and allowed the programs to continue. Turns out this wasn’t accurate. I link in the notes to more info on this, but we don’t actually have staff and programs containing Ebola right now. How much will it cost to respond to an Ebola outbreak if it reaches the U.S.? Also, American farmers provide more than 40% of the food aid that USAID distributes globally, that’s billions of dollars into the hands of American farmers. All of that has been stopped, almost $500 million in food aid is rotting in warehouses, prohibited from being distributed. Some of it is already paid for, just sitting there spoiling while people starve, I link in the notes to information on how every single state is negatively impacted by the shuttering of USAID. Did Musk even know this when he decided to destroy USAID?
Musk fired 350 people at the National Nuclear Security Administration, only to realize later that they were the staff directly handling our nuclear weapons. He then struggled to hire them back because he had locked them out of their government emails and didn’t have their personal contact information. Is this efficient? Is that even competent? He did the same thing with staff at the US Department of Agriculture who are currently trying to contain and manage the outbreak of bird-flu we have in the U.S. Is this an efficient way to cut the government?
Trump and Musk have forecasted deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Americans will bear this cost when their government can no longer protect their air, land, and water.
DOGE cut hundreds of staff at NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week. NOAA forecasts are used by 96% of Americans. NOAA forecasts are used in flight and shipping paths, they issue tornado and hurricane warnings and make predictions used by farmers across the country. What impacts on lives and the economy might we feel by massive cuts to NOAA?
Musk is threatening to cut HALF of the staff at the Social Security Administration. Will this mean more efficient service and prompt and correct payments to our seniors? Could it mean payments get interrupted?
These firings and funding freezes that Trump and Musk are enacting are not efficient, most aren’t saving money in the long run because it will cost more money to deal with the fall-out, and they’re not good for the American people. It’s harming key services and protections that the government should be providing to its people. Musk is applying a “move fast and break things” approach which might work for social media companies, when the stakes are pretty low in failure, but can lead to poverty or death when applied to key government services.
Lastly on this point, most federal workers, about 80% (almost 2 million people), do not live in the DC area, so tens of thousands, possibly to become hundreds of thousands of workers, are being fired across the 50 states. What will that do to local economies and what will be the cost of that harm?
This is Not the Way to Cut Government Spending
If Trump and Musk were truly serious and honest about wanting to cut costs and save American taxpayer money, they would do things very differently.
First of all, instead of putting so much energy into a very small portion of government spending: federal workers who account for only 5-6% of the entire federal budget, they would focus on the biggest categories. For example, they could start with cutting the massive subsidies and tax breaks the government doles out to wealthy private companies.
We could start with the $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits that has been given to Elon Musk alone across his companies. $28 billion, to one man. Or the billions in tax breaks we’re still granting to the oil and gas companies. Or the same to Boeing, Intel, Ford, GM, Amazon, Foxconn, Disney, and more.
Or force pharmaceutical companies to negotiate the cost of drugs with us. This seems fair given every single drug over the last decade was made possible with government funding of research that led to its discovery and development. How then can we allow these pharmaceutical companies to over-charge the American people and the US government’s medicare and medicaid programs? We should fix that. Instead of kicking people off Medicaid, which could happen if Trump and Republicans in Congress cut the program to pay for trillions in tax cuts for billionaires, we should instead refuse to pay the pharmaceutical industry’s bloated prices. As a side note we could also not give billionaires trillions of dollars in tax cuts, that would save a lot of money, too. But, moving on...
Biden and Democrats fought hard, against Republicans at the time, to require the federal government to negotiate the price it would pay for Medicare drugs, starting with a list of 10 in the first phase. The USG is a major buyer through the Medicare and Medicaid programs. In a capitalist system, it is entirely normal for a major buyer to negotiate prices with a supplier.
Wouldn’t Trump say we’re losers and suckers for accepting this bad deal? Yet he and Musk aren’t touching that. Democrats introduced a bill during Trump’s first term that included the ability for Medicare to negotiate dozens of drug prices and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated it would save $450 billion for the Medicare program over the next decade. Trump actually indicated initial support for this, but Congressional Republicans killed it.
Lastly on this point, if at a place in a cost-cutting exercise where it does make sense to start cutting staff and the programs they manage, you do it in a thoughtful way. You take time to understand what an agency does, and how it impacts the American people more broadly, what the workers do, the organizational structure of the agency, and which employees you can afford to lose and which you can’t. This happens in the private sector all the time, it’s often called a “restructuring”, there are blueprints for how you do this, this is not a new concept. But Musk is not taking this thoughtful approach. He is not firing based on an understanding of what staff do and who we can afford to lose. His deferred resignation offer, where folks can quit but be paid through September, or firing probationary workers, or forcing remote workers back to the office in the hopes that they’ll just quit, many of these tactics are illegal and they’re causing us to lose hundreds of thousands of highly productive and highly skilled workers that we need. There might be some workers we could afford to lose and still maintain services and protections to the American people, but you’re not going to identify who those folks are with these hammer-like tactics that Musk is using, instead you might lose some of your best and brightest. It is not normal to run around a company, or the government, like a bull in a china shop just slashing left and right without understanding what you’re cutting. It’s really strange that we’re allowing this to be done to vital government services. It’s an entirely unserious way to look for savings.
But, the bottom line when it comes to cutting government spending, is that this power and responsibility lies with Congress. Which leads to my third point.
All of this Violates the Constitution
Congress sets our annual budget, THAT is what is adding to our debt. We want to decrease our debt? Congress must decrease the size of the budget that it passes each year. Then, agencies are given a smaller budget to work with, and the President can then make decisions around who and what needs to be cut to survive on that smaller budget. Now, the President does have the opportunity to propose a budget to Congress, this happens every year, which Congress then uses to negotiate the final version, which the President then signs. THAT is how Trump, with Elon Musk’s advice if he’d like, can work to cut government spending. What they are doing now however, is breaking the law; they are not spending money Congress already passed in past years AND they’re eliminating agencies that Congress created.
Only Congress has the power to create and eliminate federal agencies (Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution). So what Musk has done with USAID and CFPB is illegal. Similarly, only Congress holds the power of the purse (Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution), which means Congress sets the budget and tells the President, the executive branch, how much money to spend and on what. The President must then spend that money as Congress directed (Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution).
We should all be gravely concerned with how Trump is trying to lay the groundwork for his ability to ignore the power of Congress in his freezing of funding and allowing Musk to cut so many workers and cancel contracts. Trump recently posted on Truth Social that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Seriously? This is where we are? That kind of power is the power only a King has. “He who saves his country”, who is to say what “saves a country”. In this case, Trump and only Trump. So this quote from Trump means whatever HE thinks is good for the country, is not illegal. Think about what that could mean.
This is absolutely not what the Founding Fathers envisioned for America. This is entirely against everything America stands for. America was founded to specifically NOT allow its leader to have this kind of power. The founding fathers created three separate and co-equal branches of government (Congress, the Executive Branch, led by the President, and the Judiciary) to be checks on each other to literally prevent our democracy from becoming a monarchy; from our President becoming a King. Even after all I’ve shared here in this episode, you still agree with some or even all of what Trump is doing, surely you don’t think he should have the unchecked power of a King. But that is what he is trying to do, and Republicans in Congress are doing nothing to stop this.
Republicans control the House and the Senate right now, if they continue to stand idly by as Trump does this, they are ceding their Constitutional power to him and failing to be a check. Not only is this very concerning for the future of our democracy, it also sets the precedent for future Presidents, maybe Democratic Presidents, to do the same. If you do agree with the cuts in funding and of workers that Trump is carrying out, my guess is you would not be thrilled about some of the things a Democratic President might try to do and you would want Congress to check them, right? Allowing President Trump to ignore Congress now, gives a Democratic President later, cover to do the same, not to mention giving him Kinglike power.
Concerns that Elon Musk is Leading this Effort
Before closing with what we can do in this moment, I do think it’s important to also talk about two serious issues with Elon Musk, in particular, being the one to lead this effort. First, his clear conflicts of interest, and second, how he is running DOGE.
So first, his conflicts of interest:
Musk has been given massive power over agencies that regulate him, investigate him, and grant him subsidies, loans, contracts, and tax breaks.
When asked about this obvious conflict of interest in the Oval Office, President Trump said if his Administration saw a conflict of interest, they would say something. Musk said people won’t be shy, seeming to refer to folks outside the Administration, and they’ll also say something. Trump’s Press Secretary when asked the same question in a press briefing said “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” All these responses are so disingenuous for two reasons. First, this is not how conflict of interest works; you can’t just trust the person who might have the conflict of interest, to recuse themselves, ONCE they’ve identified the opportunity for corruption: you must do it BEFORE that. For example, as soon as Musk was anointed as the head of DOGE, he would have needed to recuse himself from day one from touching any agency with an active investigation into him, or the ability to investigate or regulate him or award him government support. Clearly, he did not do that. Second, this statement is just blatantly false, because we have six weeks of evidence that Musk is not recusing himself from anything even AFTER a conflict of interest is clearly identified, and people have been raising these conflicts of interest and nothing is happening.
For example, a review by the NYTimes, that I link to in the notes, found that at least 11 federal agencies with more than 32 investigations, pending complaints, or enforcement actions into Musk’s companies, have been weakened or even cancelled by Musk or Trump. Rolling Stone also just came out with a great breakdown, which I also link to, of agencies investigating or regulating Musk and how Musk has used DOGE to cut them down.
Musk has even destroyed entire agencies who would or could investigate or regulate him, like USAID that I mentioned earlier, which was investigating his use of starlink in Ukraine, or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which would have directly regulated the new payment system Musk is setting up with Visa to enable X to transfer money, like venmo or paypal.
Musk is also using his position to identify ways to funnel taxpayer money to his businesses. For example, he is pressuring the FAA to cancel a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon to improve air traffic control communications and instead transfer that $2.4 billion contract to his own company Starlink, and the FAA seems poised to fold to this pressure. Musk may also be trying to secure $400 million from the State Department to pay for an armored fleet of cyber trucks. He has also notably not touched NASA with his DOGE cuts, an agency from which his company SpaceX relies on for billions of dollars in government contracts.
This. is. corruption.
Second, how Musk is running DOGE should concern us all.
First, he has filled out a lot of his DOGE team with incredibly inexperienced and unqualified people AND given them unprecedented access to government information and American’s personal and private information. Federal workers undergo extensive and deep background checks before being given access to any sensitive or classified information. Musk’s team has not had to undergo this vetting and yet they’re gaining access to very sensitive information.
Second, Musk’s “move fast and break things” approach has been a mess. I mentioned earlier DOGE’s accidental firing of people managing our nuclear weapons, or containing bird-flu or Ebola. They’ve also made significant mistakes, or have been intentionally misleading, in reporting on their public DOGE website, what they call their “wall of receipts” about how much money they’re saving with all these cuts. The DOGE site included mistakes in savings of $8 billion that was actually only $8 million, it listed a $665 million cancelled contract three times, it included contracts that had already been cancelled years ago or even expired after all the money was spent, or just made a lot of miscalculations based on not understanding how government contracting works. And these are only the mistakes we know about thanks to folks outside of the government studying things closely.
If you are going to pursue a giant experiment like this ON the American people with THEIR services, and change how the government has worked for many decades, you better be on top of tracking what you’re doing and its impacts on the American people - now and over time. In addition to correctly tracking what you’re saving now, you better track what the American people are losing now and later if things go badly - so we can learn what works and what doesn’t and hold our leaders to account. It is of course not in Musk’s best interest to do this. This is why you need an independent party to track something like this, which is not happening.
DOGE’s inaccurate tracking of its savings is also concerning because Trump is already floating the idea of sending checks to Americans based on how much DOGE has saved. But if DOGE hasn’t actually saved what it claims, sending out these checks will just add to our federal debt. It’s also been suggested that DOGE savings could be used to offset the trillions in tax cuts Trump and Republicans want to give to the wealthiest in this country. Again, if the DOGE savings are incorrectly calculated then this too would just serve to add to our national debt. Also, if there are a lot of DOGE savings, shouldn’t they just just be used to pay down our national debt - which is costing us almost $400 billion per year in interest, by the way.
Given the haphazard and arguably incompetent way a lot of DOGE’s actions have been carried out, we should also be very concerned that Musk and his unqualified and unvetted team have access to Treasury payment systems - which includes social security payments, medicaid and medicare payments, tax information. What might they do with this information? Could they mess up these payments in trying to incorporate AI into the system? Could they expose American’s personal and private data to hackers? We cannot trust this team with this information.
What Now?
So, what do we do right now.
And I’m serious about this, we have to tell our friends and families about what is happening. Most Americans don’t follow the news very closely and might not know a lot about what Trump and Musk are doing, we need to tell them.
Pressure Congress to do something: Republicans and Democrats.
Republicans control the House and Senate, so they definitely have the most power, but we need to pressure both Republicans and Democrats.
If you’re represented by a Democrat, I link in the notes to great guides from Indivisible on how Democrats in the House and Senate can apply pressure on the Administration.
If you’re a Republican and you agree with massive cuts to the government but not in the dangerous way it’s happening and in violation of the Constitution, you have a role to play, too. You can tell your Representatives that regardless of how you feel about the need to cut the government, America is a country of laws and our leaders need to follow those laws and honor the checks and balances the Founding Fathers enshrined in our Constitution. A call from you to your Republican representative would carry a lot of weight.
Protest. It might not feel like it, but protesting can really have an impact. While it isn’t likely to change Trump or Musk's mind right now, it can push Republicans and Democrats in Congress to fight on an issue if they see massive public outrage about it AND it can also embolden federal workers to stand up to illegal pressures from within. Federal workers under Trump’s first term have said that seeing massive protests outside gave them the courage to fight against immoral and illegal actions inside, knowing they had the public’s support.
Support the organizations that are fighting back. Many are filing lawsuits against a lot of these illegal actions and others are mobilizing Americans to call their representatives and protest. Groups like Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, End Citizens United, Represent Us, and Indivisible. I link in the notes to a coalition of groups. Support these organizations if you can or join a local Indivisible chapter and get more involved.
In closing, hopefully it is now clear that the way in which President Trump and Elon Musk are carrying out federal job cuts and funding freezes are both illegal and will ripple out far beyond federal workers and DC with potentially very harmful consequences. We are likely to see increased reporting of those tangible harms soon and years down the road. What we do now matters. The Founding Fathers created this American Democracy to be of, by, and for the people. Let’s hold our leaders accountable to that calling.