Now that DOGE has been allowed to rampage and burrow in throughout the federal bureaucracy for a few months, and in anticipation of its creator, Elon Musk, ramping down his involvement as he focuses on saving Tesla, it’s a good time to take an accounting of what all the chaos and disruption have accomplished. It’s been obvious for a while that federal spending has actually been continuing to rise despite all the braggadocio from Musk and his minions. Musk himself keeps lowering estimates of the taxpayer dollars he’s saving even as those estimates are being exposed as not terribly accurate. But observers are only now beginning to assess the costs imposed by DOGE in the way of inefficiencies, confused directions, illegal personnel actions that have to be reversed, and other bad business practices run wild. As the New York Times’ Elizabeth Williamson reports, it’s increasingly likely that DOGE is a net money sink for the federal government, generating nothing but dysfunction:

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity, and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5........

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