en months after the launch of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, one thing is clear: no one can agree on how much money it saved—or, in fact, whether it saved any money at all—and, if there were savings, what happened to them.
What if DOGE were done right? Here something else is clear: we have had the Government Accountability Office, founded as a green-eye-shade operation back in 1921 to audit every single government transaction. It’s grown into the indispensable watchdog on the federal government’s spending and operations. It’s what DOGE done right looks like.
At first, Musk promised to find $2 trillion in savings. Then the pledge dropped to $1 trillion. Then he struggled to document any savings at all.
Since 2002, GAO’s work has logged more than $1.45 trillion in savings for taxpayers, across more than 29,000 different federal operations. Last year, savings were $67.5 billion. And better than most watchdogs glad to gobble up every available can of dog food, GAO has kept watch on itself. It’s measured the return on taxpayer investment in its own operations: $123 for every budget dollar.
It’s operations aren’t flashy. In fact, they’re pretty wonky, which as card-carrying wonks we greatly admire. Its staff get advanced training when they walk into the door, which never stops as employees move up through the ranks. The size of its staff, which was reduced from 5,200 staff to it current level of about 3,500 after the Republican takeover of the House in 1995, has been relatively stable over the last decade, despite expanding demands on its work.
Musk promised to trim the number of federal agencies. “There’s so many that people have never heard of. I think we should be able to get away with 99 agencies,” he said. It wasn’t clear where that number came from. It was clear from his work that DOGE didn’t know how to get there.
GAO, on the other hand, has been identifying areas of duplication and overlap since 2011, with $725 billion in savings in this area alone. As others were struggling to come up with solid savings, GAO in May issued a 154-page report detailing just how to do more.
Musk brought in IT whiz kids to comb through the federal government’s information services, but they had little to show for it except putting the security of Americans’ personal information at risk.
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