President Trump and Elon Musk promised taxpayers big savings, maybe even a “DOGE dividend” check in their mailboxes, when the Department of Government Efficiency was let loose on the federal government. Now, as he prepares to step back from his presidential assignment to cut bureaucratic fat, Mr. Musk has said without providing details that DOGE is likely to save taxpayers only $150 billion.
That is about 15 percent of the $1 trillion he pledged to save, less than 8 percent of the $2 trillion in savings he had originally promised and a fraction of the nearly $7 trillion the federal government spent in the 2024 fiscal year.
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 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000.
In mid-February, the Office of Personnel Management targeted all 220,000 of the federal government’s probationary employees, who are new or newly promoted professionals serving a one- to two-year trial period with fewer worker protections. They included a cadre of younger, tech-savvy professionals hired at great expense to replace a wave of baby boomer retirees. Hiring and training them cost about $10,000 for a clerical worker to more than $1 million for an elite spy.
“This is the equivalent of a major-league baseball franchise firing all of their minor-league players,” said Kevin Carroll, a former C.I.A. officer and lawyer who represents some of the fired workers. “It’s a huge amount of money being deliberately wasted.”
For each probationary worker DOGE idled, the government lost thousands of dollars it spent on recruitment, hiring incentives, security clearances and training, an investment normally recouped over years of service. In one case, a fired probationary employee with the Department of Health and Human Services received a pay raise after she was reinstated and put on paid leave.
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