100 days of DOGE: Lots of chaos, not so much efficiency

WASHINGTON, USA – At the Social Security Administration, lawyers, statisticians and other high-ranking agency officials are being sent from the Baltimore headquarters to regional offices to replace veteran claims processors who have been fired or taken buyouts from the Trump administration.

But most of the new arrivals don’t know how to do the job, leading to longer wait times for disabled and elderly Americans who depend on these benefits, according to two people familiar with the situation. Asked about the changes, an SSA official said in an email that reassigned employees “have vast knowledge about our programs and services.”

At the Internal Revenue Service, the internet has become so patchy since President Donald Trump ordered remote workers back to overcrowded offices that staff are resorting to personal hotspots, crashing their computers at the height of tax processing season, two IRS officials told Reuters. The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.

Nearly 100 days into what Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk have called a mission to make the federal bureaucracy more efficient, Reuters found 20 instances where the staff and funding cuts led to purchasing bottlenecks and increased costs; paralysis in decision-making; longer public wait times; higher-paid civil servants filling in menial jobs, and a brain drain of scientific and technological talent.

“DOGE is not a serious exercise,” said Jessica Riedl, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank that supports streamlining government. She estimates DOGE has only saved $5 billion to date, and believes it will end up costing more than it saves.

The examples – previously unreported – span 14 government agencies and were described in Reuters interviews with three dozen federal workers, union representatives and governance experts.

Although these accounts do not provide a comprehensive picture of the project by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to drastically cut the cost and size of the federal bureaucracy, they do reveal collateral damage resulting from DOGE’s efforts to make the sprawling federal bureaucracy more efficient.

In response to questions about the impact of DOGE’s cuts on government efficiency, White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement that Musk’s team “has already modernized government technology, prevented fraud, streamlined processes, and identified billions of dollars in savings for American taxpayers.”

Fields did not offer examples of improvements to government computer systems or workforce efficiency.

Saving billions

Musk confirmed on Tuesday he will step back next month from his role overseeing DOGE. His 130-day mandate as a special government employee was set to expire at the end of May. He said he will continue to help Trump overhaul the government, but not full-time. His reduced role leaves DOGE’s future in doubt, but governance experts said they believe the cost-cutting will continue.

Musk and his lieutenants have to date provided little concrete evidence about how the government is operating more efficiently as a result of the mass layoffs and terminated government contracts.

DOGE teams that have burrowed into a swath of government agencies and their computer systems operate in great secrecy, dozens of government officials have told Reuters.

A DOGE website that gives regular updates on what it claims it has saved US taxpayers — $160 billion to date — has been riddled with errors and corrections.

The White House provided Reuters with examples of cost savings including: the uncovering of more than $630 million in fraudulent loans made by the Small Business Administration to applicants over the age of 115 and under the age of 11 in 2020-2021; $382 million in fraudulent unemployment payments by the Labor Department since 2020; and trimming $18 million in leasing costs at the Environmental Protection Agency by moving staff out of a building in Washington.

Reuters was unable to independently verify those claims.

DOGE did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier on March 27, Musk said his team is careful how it makes cuts, admits to and fixes errors, and has discovered “astonishing” amounts of waste and fraud.

Cannot buy dry ice

In its drive to cut costs, DOGE says it has canceled almost 500,000 government credit cards. It has placed a $1 limit on many others, and centralized decision making within some agency headquarters. That means managers in some regional offices can’t buy basic supplies.

At one center at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, it took a scientist a month to get authorization to buy $200 of dry ice to preserve urine samples, a purchase usually made at a local supermarket. Because the administration has barred many employees from making purchases, a colleague in another regional office who still has a government credit card paid for the dry ice, but it had to be shipped to the lab – at an additional cost of $100, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which oversees NOSH, did not respond to a request for comment.

DOGE and the White House have also banned many agencies from communicating with outside vendors as they halt thousands of federal contracts.

One casualty of the ban: a nearly half-a-million dollar chemical analysis instrument at a CDC facility in Cincinnati, which has sat idle for months because scientists can’t schedule training with the vendor to start using the machine, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.

At the Social Security Administration, in a four-day period in the first week of March, computer systems crashed 10 times. Because a quarter of the agency’s IT staff have quit or been fired, it’s taking longer to get the systems online again, disrupting the processing of claims, one IT worker told Reuters.

Few dispute the SSA’s computer systems are old, often crash and need updating. Musk told Baier the agency’s computer systems are “failing”, and “we’re fixing it.”

Humanitarian aid cut

Since its founding on Trump’s first day in the White House, DOGE has largely shut down the US Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world’s needy, canceling more than 80% of its humanitarian programs. Almost all of the agency’s employees will be fired by September, all of its overseas offices shut, with some functions absorbed into the State Department.

At home, the government overhaul has resulted in the firing, resignations and early retirements of 260,000 civil servants, according to a Reuters tally.

Over 20,000 probationary workers – recently hired or recently reassigned employees – were fired in February. After court rulings they were reinstated but most were sent home on full pay. Most are now being fired again after further court decisions.

Trump and Musk have said the US government is beset by fraud and waste. Few civil servants and governance experts dispute efficiencies can be made, but say there are already people inside the federal bureaucracy trying to save taxpayer dollars. Yet some of these offices have been targeted for cuts by DOGE.

In January, Trump fired 17 inspectors general, whose mission as government watchdogs includes reducing waste and fraud.

Christi Grimm, who was fired as the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general, told Reuters she had identified for expected recovery $14.5 billion — “cold hard cash expected to come back to the US Treasury” — over three years from audits and fraud investigations.

Last month, DOGE eliminated one of the few government units charged with streamlining technology across the federal government, a 90-member team known as 18-F.

Waldo Jaquith, who worked for 18F between 2016 and 2020, said the team had saved the Pentagon $500 million during one three-day project alone after discovering two departments were unwittingly doing the same work.

Reuters was not able to independently verify that figure.

“18F worked just how Musk and his team pretend that they want government to work. But when his team found it, they destroyed it,” Jaquith said.

18F was deemed “non-critical” by Thomas Shedd, a Trump appointee at the General Services Administration, in an email to staff last month. – Rappler.com