Summary
$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his DOGE team are “expecting” to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts.
To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15% of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash.
In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden.
“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”
$150 billion
Does this even take into account all the extra work and thus spending doge’s flailing caused?
In addition to that cutting NOAA staff only saves money until the next hurricane hits, cutting the CDC only saves money until the next outbreak hits, cutting the FDA only saves money until the next foodborne contamination etc. etc.
150 billion
Yeah and if you actually believe that to be true then I have a bridge to sell you. These dumb fucks sold 8 million as 8 billion
I’d be surprised if it’s even close to 15 billion
Also they lost like 500Bn according to the IRS due to cutting IRS staff alone, not including revenue lost as a result of cutting services that the government provided and revenue lost as a result of other nations no longer doing business with the USA such as arms sales, energy, rocketry, hospitals, and other transactions.
By all accounts DOGE is losing money.
These dumb fucks sold 8 million as 8 billion
Even aside from stuff like this, things they claim to be saving tend to be cut contracts. Contracts that have already been paid, but will no longer have to provided what they’d been paid for.
“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”
So, mission accomplished then? I never believed for a moment it was ever about reducing waste / increasing efficiency. At best, it was scrounging the government couch for change to pay for tax breaks for the rich.
The only waste in government is corruption. “Inefficiencies” are actually resiliency—a crucial trait of any social system.
It doesn’t matter when the loads of idiots think he’s a genius. My dad is one of them. He refuses to believe anything that would call this into question calling it fake news. What am I even supposed to do?
My mother-in-law thinks he’s an altruistic genius—essentially a super-hero. It seems the maga boomer internet is filled with AI generated sites that spread the Gospel of Musk. The one I saw was ludicrous: it promised that Elon has developed an amazing sci-fi wheelchair that he will soon be making available for under $200 (!). The wheelchairs pictured were obvious Dall-E level AI slop, the text read like it was translated into English by GPT. Nobody with even rudimentary critical thinking would believe these absurd claims.
But the comment section was littered with desperate old people pleading to knew where they could order these mobile miracles. A Cargo Cult of credulous, desperate fools.
The generation that warned us all growing up about how we shouldn’t believe anything on the Internet will now swallow anything they read on the Internet (without any critical thinking) as long as it has a like from one of their friends.
The amount of money it’ll take to fix all this will dwarf the $150B. By several factors at least.
The CFPB people he cut were saving citizens - i.e. the very taxpayers Musk claims to represent without a mandate of any kind - $21 billion already.
He was selling our dollars for pennies.
He saved all of our personal and national security information to give to the kremlin
He didn’t save anything he’s stealing it.
The goal was never to save money but find ways to enrich himself.
Ending democracy, that’s their true goal.
The working class has never had any form of democracy
That’s not true at all, even if you want to restrict yourself and only consider direct democracies as true democracies, you have at least Switzerland as an example.
In Sweden and Denmark, workers can even choose representatives to sit on the board of directors of the companies where they work (however, only for companies with more than 25 or 35 employees).
This entire post and thread is about the US
Which is what Putin has tasked him with.
I’m possibly more worried about what he didn’t destroy at this point. What’s gone will at least be rebuilt largely from scratch by people that care about restoring those institutions.
My huge worry now is what backdoors are now in systems like social security that impacts us all and we may not find out about for a long time. How much identity theft and scamming will go on now that outside actors likely have access to some or all of that data?
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security
Every. Fucking. Thing that doge touched has been backdoored to Russia. Doge is a front to get sensitive information to the Kremlin. Elon is a fucking traitor.
We will need a whole new SSA computer system, just to kill this question dead. Same goes for EVERY department. Some 20 years from now, I guess DOGE would have fulfilled its original mission of updating American computer infrastructure, in the most stupid and malicious way possible.
SS numbers seemed compromised enough pre-Musk. I feel we should all get a new one that isn’t just tossed blindly onto any form we have to fill out on a daily basis.
They increased the budget of the Pentagon. You should be worried about where the funds are being moved-to
The military budget doesn’t seem to have gone up by anything that hasnt been trending the last decade or 2, and despite all the talk about going to fight other countries, I don’t think there is enough support for anything other than Iran, and even that I dont think would be done directly by the US military.
I do worry more about a more internally agro surveillance state, but with facial recognition and a camera on every doorbell, I think we’ve already long traded privacy for security. I keep learning about previous rebellions and having covert places to gather, plan, and stage have really been crucial, and I don’t know how one does that in the modern world.
You’re being defeatist. There’s not cameras everywhere. There are loads of blind spots, even in major cities.
It’s a fact that the majority of square feet in the US has places where there are no cameras compared to where there are cameras.
There are groups that map this. You can help identity the cameras on OSM.
