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A month into Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s much-hyped efforts to root out fraudulent and wasteful spending by government agencies, not a single instance of fraud or waste has been discovered.
Instead, DOGE has dismantled federal agencies and halted or cancelled programs that Trump and Republicans simply disagree with, amid efforts to purge agencies of employees not loyal to Trump. Along with Trump’s firing of 17 inspectors general whose responsibilities ironically include finding waste, fraud, and corruption in government agencies, DOGE may be making the government less efficient, in just one instance by firing employees like Department of Transportation economists who performed cost-benefit analysis of infrastructure projects.
Elsewhere, DOGE has fired FAA lawyers who help to keep drunk pilots out of the sky, Rolling Stone reports. And national parks are now understaffed thanks to the chainsaw DOGE is taking to the government.
With nothing to show for its efforts to find actual fraud, it has become clear that DOGE is simply a way for Trump and Musk to arbitrarily cancel programs they don’t like in lieu of having to negotiate with Congress on spending priorities and government policies. This is likely a violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. But it’s more than that: DOGE is now the enforcement arm of a Trump administration that has no interest in working with Congress to implement its policy priorities.
Unelected billionaire breaks laws to “restore” democracy
DOGE has claimed it’s rooted out $55 billion worth of spending, a dollar amount that appears to be wildly inaccurate: As of Sunday, DOGE’s website claims it has saved or cancelled $55 billion worth of government contracts. But that same website only accounts for $16 billion in contracts. Half of that comes from an $8 million government contract that DOGE incorrectly identified as being worth $8 billion. Additionally, DOGE has been in some cases simply cancelling contracts that the government has already paid for. Some $325 million in supposed savings are simply contracts that have been repeated in DOGE’s reporting, Politico found.
But actual fraud? DOGE has found nothing.
None of this has stopped Trump, Musk, congressional Republicans, and their allies in rightwing media from breathlessly highlighting millions of dollars’ worth of spending as examples of fraudulent government programs.
Nowhere in those lists of programs — like the USAID initiatives that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has been lambasting for weeks, including the tortured and incorrect claim that US taxpayers funded “condoms for Gaza” — is anything that even Musk or Trump themselves have identified as “fraud.” Instead, the goalposts for DOGE have silently moved from finding fraud and corruption to simply pointing out and cancelling government programs that Trump and Republicans simply don’t support.
Reflecting this mission creep, Sean Hannity has begun referring to the programs and agencies targeted by DOGE as being guilty of “wrongful spending.”
Still, Trump insists that DOGE is finding actual fraud, despite no evidence of having done so.
In his and Musk’s interview with Hannity last week, Trump shared a rambling anecdote about government contracts that appeared to have no basis in reality. In Trump’s telling of the story, businesses have signed contracts with the federal government under one government employee, only to have that employee leave and the contract fraudulently continue. Checks are then issued to the business even though the contract has expired, according to Trump’s fantastical tale.
“So, they sign a contract in a government agency and it has three months, and the guy leaves that signed the contract … and they pay the contract for 10 years,” Trump said. “So the guy is getting checks for years and years and he’s telling his family, obviously, ‘maybe it was crooked,’ maybe he paid to get the contract or maybe he paid that they didn’t terminate it.”
It’s impossible to tell where Trump heard this vague and likely made-up story of corruption, but he told Hannity that DOGE is finding instances of it occurring — without, of course, sharing any specific details.
“But they’re finding things like that. They’re finding things far worse than that,” Trump said. “And they’re finding what will be hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of fraud — I say waste and abuse.”
Some of those “hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fraud” might come in the form of Social Security payments that Musk and Leavitt have recently claimed are improperly going to Americans who are well over 100 years old. The problem with those claims is that they appear to be completely incorrect — the centenarians Musk’s DOGE team say are receiving Social Security payments probably aren’t actually over 100 years of age, but are instead simply classified that way as part of a complex coding system within the Social Security Administration (SSA).
And while improper Social Security payments are a problem, they have been accounted for well before DOGE came into existence: An audit from the SSA’s inspector general and released in July 2024 found $71.8 billion in improper payments from 2015 to 2022 — less than one percent of benefits handed out in that time period.
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The SSA’s inspector general might be able to find more improper Social Security payments, but unfortunately he was fired by Trump. Hannibal “Mike” Ware, who was also serving as inspector general for the Small Business Administration, was one of 17 inspectors general fired by Trump in the last month. It does not appear that the Trump administration has chosen a replacement for Ware to be inspector general at the SSA.
The White House’s effort to deceive the public about Social Security “fraud” was exposed last Friday by NBC’s Peter Alexander, who stumped Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt with a very simply question.
“Fraud, of course, is a crime. So have you turned over evidence of fraud to the Justice Department, and when should we expect to see those indictments?” Alexander asked.
“It’s a clever question,” Leavitt responded, before quickly changing the topic to the aforementioned IG report.
With DOGE failing to find a single dollar’s worth of fraud or waste, a clue to its real purpose can be found in the second of two executive orders signed by Trump that gives DOGE the authority to do its work inside the federal government.
“By eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity, my Administration will empower American families, workers, taxpayers, and our system of Government itself,” reads the second DOGE executive order signed by Trump on Feb. 11.
You won’t find the word “insularity” in any remarks by Trump, Musk, or DOGE through its official X account. But what it means is that DOGE has been authorized to find and eliminate any government spending that Trump or Republicans personally disagree with. In other words, spending that is insular from the Trump administration’s policy goals.
Justin Glawe is an independent journalist and the author of the forthcoming book “If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened.” He writes the newsletter American Doom.
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