Lawmakers accuse DOGE of wasting $21.7 billion in six months

Since January, the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has been on a budget-slashing crusade to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. But last week, Democrats on a Senate investigation committee said DOGE has actually wasted billions in taxpayer dollars — especially through indiscriminate cuts and firings at several agencies including the U.S. Agency for International Development. “With Elon Musk at its head for its first four months, it is unsurprising that DOGE modeled itself on a defunct corporate motto, seeking to ‘move fast and break things,’” stated the report, which was spearheaded by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut. “Yet DOGE seems to have stopped there, never taking the time to fix — let alone understand — the things it had broken.” Through 54 pages, the report accused DOGE of wasting $21.7 billion in taxpayer dollars. The vast majority of that figure — $14.8 million — comes from costs associated with DOGE’s “fork in the road” program, an option floated to federal employees earlier this year that offered full pay and benefits until Sept. 30, 2025, if employees left their posts. Another $6.1 billion was spent on the 100,000 workers placed on administrative leave over the last six months, including the vast majority of staff at USAID, while other multimillion-dollar losses were the result of spoiled food aid, incinerated health commodities, and lost time due to DOGE-launched initiatives. The report also called out the recently signed $9 billion rescissions package, the bulk of which clawed back foreign assistance that had already been approved by the U.S. Congress. “The waste generated by DOGE in six months could have fully covered the President’s misguided rescissions package twice over — with $2.9 billion to spare — despite the package being promoted as codifying DOGE’s purported savings over the next several years,” read the committee’s report. At USAID, that meant more than $400 million of waste over the last six months, according to the report — with nearly $300 million spent on firing, suspending, or paying staff involuntarily separated from the agency — and over $100 million spent on spoiled or destroyed commodities, including food and contraceptives. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but DOGE’s own figures paint a starkly different picture: Since DOGE’s work began, it claims to have saved nearly $200 billion in workforce reductions, program changes, and grant cancellations, according to the DOGE website. Despite that, those calculations have been repeatedly refuted by researchers, journalists, and think tanks, with Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, calling DOGE figures on education cuts “an arbitrary mishmash that doesn’t hold water.” In the meantime, the costs of making those cuts have continued to grow. In the committee’s report, the only figures related to USAID involve commodity waste and staffing costs. But there are likely many other costs that didn’t make it into USAID’s total waste tally: The report examined DOGE efforts that spanned the entire federal government, with details provided for other agencies. One example is DOGE’s “defend the spend” emails, which were sent across the government earlier this year. After the majority of USAID programs were canceled, organizations with surviving contracts were forced to contend with this initiative, which asked organizations to provide additional details on requested funds. That added layer of review, the report found, cost the government another $1.68 million at three federal agencies alone — the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Administration for Children and Families. “These cases are by no means isolated and likely represent only a fraction of the waste generated by this initiative,” the report stated. Blumenthal paired the report with a letter to Michael Horowitz, the inspector general for the Federal Reserve Board and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, urging Horowitz to initiate a “comprehensive review of DOGE’s activities” to determine the “full scope of costs that DOGE’s careless actions have imposed.” “As an inspector general, it is your duty to root out waste fraud and abuse in the federal programs maintained by the agency that you oversee,” Blumenthal wrote.