Cliff Notes
- Over 60,000 government employees have been laid off, with an additional 110,000 participating in a deferred resignation programme initiated by DOGE.
- Mass layoffs have primarily affected the US Treasury, especially the IRS, leading to projected losses of $10.3bn in tax revenue against a savings of $1.8bn from job cuts.
- Experts criticise the approach of treating government operations like a business, arguing it neglects the complexity and necessity of diverse governmental functions.
How Elon Musk’s mission to cut government spending fell flat | US News
Unprecedented layoffs
DOGE has managed to create sizeable cracks in the foundation of the US government by firing an unprecedented number of people.
Over 60,000 government employees have been laid off. More than 110,000 people have also left through a deferred resignation programme DOGE launched, according to Roger Lee, an independent researcher who has been tracking media reports of government layoffs.
Mass layoffs are part of Mr Musk’s business playbook – after buying Twitter in 2022 he fired 80% of the workforce. But it doesn’t work to treat the government like a company, says Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University.
In business, Mr Musk has been “laser focused on efficiency, streamlining, getting rid of useless parts, getting rid of what he sees as useless employees, and then still producing the product at the end”, said Prof Slobodian. “The problem with the federal government is it doesn’t just produce one thing.”
“To think that you can use the same approaches of streamlining that you use in a firm and scale it up to the level of the entire state is extraordinarily reckless.”
The largest exodus has been from the US Treasury, which has lost more than 29,000 employees. Almost all of those workers were at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the government tax authority.
Analysis from the Budget Lab at Yale University suggests the job losses will cost more than they will save.
While eliminating 22,000 positions is projected to save the IRS $1.8bn in 2026, the resulting loss in tax revenue is estimated at $10.3bn. In other words, having significantly fewer employees means it is likely less tax will be collected.
After 20 years as a civil servant, Sylvie Williams was recently informed she’d be losing her job at the IRS. At the taxpayer experience office, she worked to make filing taxes – a notoriously complicated process in the US – easier for the average citizen.
“Is there waste? Definitely. Can there be efficiencies? Yes. Can we move faster? Yes,” she admits. “But it wasn’t done correctly.”