The US government doesn’t have many watchdogs left. Donald Trump fired a whole bunch of them shortly after returning to power, and many others have been pushed out since. We do still have a Government Accountability Office (GAO), for what it’s worth, and one week ago, that office published a report detailing the remarkable lack of transparency in how Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency conducted its affairs and how the savings DOGE reported fell far short of its claims.

But here’s the thing: a) We knew that from the start, and b) the GAO entirely misses the point.

DOGE saved us nothing. In fact, Musk’s little project has cost America dearly. In countless ways, we are much worse off than we were on the day Trump took back the Oval Office and invited the richest man on Earth to come in and break things.

Here’s just a partial accounting of what their nonsense has cost us.

A ton of money: Before he was tapped to run the IRS under President Barack Obama, John Koskinen spent decades as a turnaround man, helping large, failing organizations get back on track. And “the last thing I ever thought,” he told me, reflecting on how DOGE was gutting the tax agency, “was, ‘Well, let’s starve the revenue arm.”

But starving the government’s revenue arm is precisely what DOGE and Trump have done, with the gleeful complicity of Republican leaders long hostile to tax enforcement yet who are always eager to enact obscene tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

During Trump’s first year back, through the firings and deferred resignations that DOGE spearheaded, the IRS lost 28 percent of its workforce. The first to go were probationary employees, Joe Biden hires who had been on the job less for than two years. “A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds and experience in technology and tax law management,” Koskinen said. “They weren’t 25-year-olds. They were filling important positions.”

“The cuts were done not on a glide path, as one would do if one had conducted a reasonable review of programming, but it was a cliff.”

Cheered by Republicans, these firings crippled the IRS’s capacity to collect unpaid taxes and investigate sophisticated tax cheats—rich individuals and companies, including firms that, as we speak, are routing their substantial profits through offshore tax havens without consequences.

The IRS’s inability to conduct complex audits encourages law-breaking by the uber-rich, the richest of whom invariably avoid punishment. (Commoners who defy the rules are easy to catch.) An April report from the Yale Budget Lab estimates that the 2025 IRS layoffs will cost the nation $600 billion in lost revenues over 10 years—and the IRS budget cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill will add another $263 billion to the deficit.........

© Mother Jones