Why Did DOGE Exist? Now We Know.

Turns out, Elon Musk’s pimply minions didn’t actually want to cut government spending. They wanted to get a piece of it for themselves.

One of the nagging questions about the DOGE fiasco is why. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was established to cut $2 trillion from the $7 trillion federal budget. But in fiscal year 2026, which ended two weeks ago, the federal budget was $7.4 trillion, a 6 percent increase. The budget deficit, whose size was the reason to cut government spending, increased by 12 percent to $2 trillion.

Some of that increased spending is the result of DOGE cuts. As I explained four months after DOGE closed its doors last year, even if we were to take at face value DOGE’s claim to have saved the taxpayer $215 billion, you’d have to subtract from that the $135 billion that Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, said DOGE cost the government in lost productivity, paid leave, and the rehiring of fired workers. You’d also have to figure in the $597 billion in lost revenue that the Yale Budget Lab now projects for the next ten years due to DOGE cuts at the Internal Revenue Service. That puts DOGE about $517 million in the hole (more than twice the estimate I reported last year).

So why did about 200 people, more than two dozen of them “special employees” drawn from the tech world, flock to DOGE? As Michael Lewis observes in his wonderful new book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, the typical special employee “was a twenty-five-year-old tech guy trying to breathe the same air as Elon Musk and only just now grokking the fact that the United States government had three branches.” DOGE had the feel of a startup, with Musk hosting a six-month slumber party on the fifth floor of the Office of Personnel Management, from which most OPM personnel, even very high-ranking ones, were excluded. The Muskrats had carte blanche to show up at any federal agency and secure access to computer data that they didn’t even try to understand. Not understanding made it easier to score points with Musk.

But Lewis’s answer is incomplete; it turns out there’s also a simpler and more cynical answer. Like so many self-styled crusaders against government spending—indeed, like Musk himself, whose companies, pre-DOGE, extracted somewhere north of $38 billion from the federal government—the Muskrats wanted to suck on the government teat.

Read all about it in a Washington Post story published Monday:

[R]oughly two dozen former DOGE staffers have parlayed their government experience into relevant private-sector jobs or investments—becoming founders, securing CEO positions or senior executive roles, amassing large stakes in start-ups looking to........

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