Trump’s DOGE program collapsed under its own incompetence

The government efficiency program was just too inefficient to keep.

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Donald Trump has quietly killed his signature “waste, fraud, and abuse” initiative. The Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, has been shut down in order to save money.

Yes. The government efficiency program was too inefficient to keep.

You cannot script it better.

The Big Promise: DOGE Will Clean Up Washington

When Trump rolled out DOGE, it was marketed as the thing that would finally clean up Washington. It was going to root out fraud. It was going to slash waste. It was going to cut billions in spending. It would delete mountains of bureaucracy. It was going to be, in Trump’s words, incredible.

In reality, it did the opposite.

DOGE turned out to be so expensive and so ineffective that the administration decided to quietly pull the plug. They did not hold a press conference to explain why their flagship “efficiency” program failed. They simply let it fade away until reporters noticed it had vanished and started asking questions.

That alone tells you how bad it was.

The official line now, from the Office of Personnel Management, is basically “DOGE? Never heard of it.” They are acting as if the department never existed.

Which raises a pretty obvious question: what happened to all the fraud they supposedly found?

Where Are the Consequences?

For years, Trump and his allies talked about waste, fraud, and abuse as if they were everywhere. If you believe their rhetoric, the government is one big scam that only they can fix. DOGE was supposed to be the proof.

Yet in all the time DOGE existed, there has not been a single high profile indictment or meaningful consequence tied to its “discoveries.” Not one person marched out as the poster child for the fraud they claimed to uncover.

Fraud is a crime. If DOGE had really exposed large scale fraud, you would expect at least some prosecutions, some major referrals, some tangible results.

Instead, what we got was vague talk of “billions saved” with no public accounting. Basic statistical mistakes where billions somehow turned out to be millions. Cases where the “savings” they claimed were from programs that had already been cut under Biden, or from programs that had not even started yet.

Every time you looked closely, there was nothing solid to point to. It was branding. It was Elon Musk. It was vibes and tweets, not real oversight.

In the end, the actual work just went back to the regular agencies that had been doing it in the first place.

The Department of Grifter Embarrassment

Trump created an entire agency on the theory that by spending money now, he would save much more later. Instead, DOGE cost more than it saved and had to be canceled in order to stop the bleeding.

The Department of Government Efficiency became the Department of Grifter Embarrassment.

The Elon and Vivek Problem

It gets even more ridiculous when you look at the Elon Musk angle.

DOGE was built as a kind of personality vehicle for Elon. He promoted it. He posed with props. He talked about having a mandate to delete regulations. It was presented as the tech genius finally fixing government waste.

They even put two people nominally in charge at one point: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. It never made sense structurally and it quickly became obvious that Vivek was essentially window dressing. Elon was the real face of the whole thing. Then Vivek quietly disappeared from the branding.

When Elon’s relationship with Trump later blew up and he walked away from Washington, DOGE began to disintegrate at the exact same time. Suddenly people close to the White House talked about DOGE in the past tense. DOGE “did what it set out to do.” DOGE “fulfilled its efficiency mandate.”

What they did not want to say out loud was the simple truth: the project had failed and was effectively over.

What Happened to the People Inside DOGE?

The internal story is just as chaotic. Reports suggest that once DOGE fizzled out, many of its employees were reassigned inside the administration. Others simply lost their jobs.

Some were apparently shuffled into side projects like Trump’s national “design studio,” another vanity initiative supposedly created to beautify government websites. Because nothing says small government like hiring a bunch of designers to tweak federal landing pages.

If that doesn’t sound like government waste, I don’t know what does.

So the Trump administration created a Department of Fixing Leaks that did not find any leaks, at least not outside of its own walls. It spent money to save money and ended up spending more. It promised accountability and delivered none.

Now the White House wants the entire episode scrubbed from the public memory.

The Signature Achievement That Was Not

Trump has had plenty of public embarrassments: foreign trips where he looked lost, speeches that went off the rails, and weird signing ceremonies in the Oval Office.

DOGE is different.

This was supposed to be a pillar of his second term. A trademark initiative. Proof that he could run the government “like a business.”

Instead, his big efficiency experiment turned out to be inefficient. His waste-cutting agency became a wasteful one. His anti-bureaucracy project added bureaucracy. Then it was quietly put down and disavowed.

The program that was going to clean up Washington ended up proving that what really needed cleaning up was the program itself.

It became the punchline of its own joke.

And now it joins the long list of Trump era ideas that started with hype, achieved nothing, and were eventually buried without a proper obituary.

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