alt Hacker NewsGovernment spending and the deficit has increased by approximately $800 billion since Trump came into office. It certainly hasn't gone down. Weird that none of the DOGE apologists seem to care anymore. Trump adding billions of dollars to the deficit in increased military spending in 2026? Not a peep.
Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless.
But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink.
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+1 to all
DOGE was an exercise in vice signaling.
Which is a real shame because there was a real opportunity to inject a fresh set of eyes on what is surely a problem-rich environment.
It will unfortunately serve as discredit to all future efforts that look anything similar.
The whole thing is a sham. The real purpose of DOGE is to enact radical ideological changes that Congress has been unwilling to implement, by strategically sabotaging parts of the executive branch that the Heritage Foundation has a problem with.