DOGE Is Breaking the Government and a Congressional Report Has the Receipts
On February 12, Rep. Robert Garcia -- ranking member of the House Oversight Committee -- dropped a 47-page report with a title that says what everyone outside Mar-a-Lago already knew: "Breaking Government: How DOGE and Trump Cost Taxpayers, Federal Workers, and Public Services."
The report reads less like a policy document and more like a damage assessment after a natural disaster. Except the disaster has a name: Elon Musk.
The Body Count
More than 75,000 federal employees accepted buyout offers by mid-February. That number sounds clean until you realize these were the people who actually knew how to run the agencies. Senior scientists at the FDA. Veterans Affairs case managers. Social Security claims processors who kept the checks flowing for 68 million Americans. Gone. Replaced by 25-year-old DOGE staffers like Marko Elez, who came from Musk's X and SpaceX with zero government experience.
And Elez? He got caught forwarding spreadsheets of individual financial data to unauthorized Trump officials. Then he got caught posting racist content on social media. Then he quit. Then they rehired him at the Social Security Administration. You cannot make this up.
The Data Breach Nobody Got Fired For
The Trump administration formally acknowledged -- for the first time -- that DOGE employees accessed and shared sensitive Social Security data. Court filings revealed the data was uploaded to an unauthorized cloud server. That is the personal information of millions of Americans, handled with the care of a teenager's Dropbox folder.
A DOJ filing confirmed DOGE likely violated a court order on data handling. No criminal charges. No firings. A sternly worded court document and business as usual.
The $215 Billion Lie
DOGE claims $215 billion in savings -- $1,335 per taxpayer, they brag. Experts say the real number is somewhere between $1 billion and $7 billion. A CBS News analysis of DOGE's three largest claimed cuts found actual savings of 3 percent of what was claimed. In one case, DOGE listed an $8 billion contract cancellation that was actually worth $8 million. An error of a factor of 1,000. That is not a rounding error. That is either incompetence or a lie.
793,900 Dead
The foreign aid freeze is the part that should keep people up at night. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of public health at Boston University, built an impact counter tracking estimated deaths from USAID funding cuts. Her estimates showed 103 deaths per hour. Mostly children. Mostly from preventable diseases -- diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria -- that cost pennies to treat. DOGE slashed 80 percent of USAID's $42 billion budget overnight and called it efficiency.
That is a direct quote from the report. Garcia's committee held a shadow field hearing in Northern Virginia where fired federal workers testified about what happened to them. The hearing title: "How DOGE and Trump Damaged Federal Workers, Public Services, and How We Fix It."
Watch Rep. Robert Garcia take aim at Elon Musk during the DOGE hearing.
The Republican majority has blocked every subpoena Democrats have tried to issue for Musk. They refused to hold official hearings. So Democrats held their own. Whether anyone in power cares is a different question entirely.