World News

Elon Musk’s DOGE Is Weaponizing Efficiency

By Devan Grewal ‘27 in Spring 2025

Elon Musk’s tenure at DOGE is nearing its end, leaving behind a trail of unfulfilled promises and controversial cuts. What started as trying to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget has quietly been reduced to $150 billion. Elon isn’t even going to reach that.

DOGE started as an admirable goal: a 2010s coded acronym for Department of Government Efficiency. What’s wrong with cutting government spending and making the government more efficient? First, the administration and DOGE went after USAID, a U.S. government agency that gives foreign aid and helps fight disease outbreaks like tuberculosis and HIV in developing countries. Then DOGE cut spending in research and education departments, including federal grants that help lowincome students and support innovation and studies at public universities. And now, the Trump Administration has proposed slashing Medicaid, which provides health coverage to over 80 million low-income Americans. In addition they are attacking public broadcasting, which offers educational programming for children and reliable news in the “news deserts” across rural and suburban America. What do these things have in common? Liberals widely support them. What are DOGE’s true motives?

If cutting the deficit via eliminating wasteful programs is the motive, why raise the defense budget to a record-breaking 1 trillion dollars when they have never passed a government audit? Why further expand on Trump’s 2017 tax cut and other facets in Trump’s new budget proposal which will add 2.8 trillion dollars to the deficit? If the goal was to put more money back into your pocket, why implement tariffs where the fluctuating stock market will force people to retire later, and increased prices will be passed onto the consumers? Because cutting the deficit and giving you more money aren’t the motives of DOGE. Their goal is to dissolve liberal strongholds like public education, healthcare, and foreign aid, undermining the programs that empower the public. From education to healthcare, DOGE is reframing these programs as a waste instead of an investment because of their ideological opposition to them.

To be fair, DOGE has had some unarguable successes. For example, they’ve found vacant buildings the US Government was still paying for and software licenses nobody was using, but isn’t that the job of an auditor, not a billionaire? Government efficiency shouldn’t be a public spectacle.

Yes, government inefficiency exists. Ask anyone who’s been to a DMV. Often democrats focus more on expanding programs without fixing how they are run. But DOGE is not the answer. DOGE has gone after programs that help ordinary Americans, not because they are inefficient, but because they ideologically oppose them. Real efficiency would eliminate bloated military contracts, reform rather than cut agencies, and fix infrastructure, not slash research and Sesame Street.

Efficiency has become politicized. Instead of serving the American people, DOGE serves a political agenda, shrinking the public sector not to save money, but to shrink what the government can do for you.