DOGE’s Cruelty—and Lies—Will Taint the Cause of Downsizing Government
Musk’s chainsaw approach has failed to deliver the promised savings to taxpayers while making future reforms harder
Elon Musk looks set to end, or at the least significantly scale back, his involvement at DOGE—the obscure, Obama-era IT office that President Donald Trump let him repurpose into an all-powerful tool to slash government—once his 130 days as a “special government employee” (not a Senate-confirmed appointee) are up.
Despite indiscriminately slashing the federal workforce, haphazardly dismantling entire agencies, and seizing sensitive government data—and at least on one occasion a privately-owned building—Musk has failed to deliver his proclaimed savings to taxpayers.
On the campaign trail with President Trump, he boasted that he would deliver $2 trillion in savings by taking his chainsaw to federal agencies and eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” In March, he cut that projection in half. And then recently to $160 billion, or just 8% of the original. But the DOGE website offers receipts for only $58 billion. Even that might be optimistic given that the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service estimates that DOGE might end up costing the federal government about $135 billion this year to defend multiple lawsuits and the potential impacts of firing so many IRS staffers.
Meanwhile, sadly, the way DOGE operated under Musk will taint the cause of limited government for a long time. As
recently put it: “They are going to make those ideas toxic for a generation.” Had Musk done the constitutional thing and asked Congress—which had duly created the executive agencies and programs—to bless his downsizing plans, he might have come up with something more sensible, enduring, and likely to stick. Given that both the chambers and the presidency are in Republican hands, it wouldn’t have been that much trouble to get approval. Instead, he chose the most lawless way that concentrated power in the executive. And then he used that power for utterly political ends, namely, destroying leftist groups responsible, as per his rants, for spreading the “woke mind virus.” In the process, he maximized the harm to real, breathing humans—including not just federal employees but also those who counted on these programs to get by—even as he protected his own business interests, ignoring, like his boss, all concerns about a conflict of interest.
And he used abject lies to get public buy in for his designs.
Here is a roundup of just a few of the whoppers he told to sell DOGE’s attack on three entities in particular: the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), and the Social Security Administration (SSA).
USAID
This agency that leads America’s international humanitarian and development efforts was Number One on Musk’s hit list. Trump claimed it was run by “radical left lunatics” and Musk described it as “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”
Musk insisted that his decision to go after USAID first was based on impartial analysis but, suspiciously, its timing coincided with the firing of USAID's inspector general, Paul K. Martin, who had been investigating Starlink, Musk’s international satellite-based telecommunication network, and had sounded the alarm on the disastrous global impact of the sudden downsizing without any notice or warning.
Musk spread numerous falsehoods about USAID to justify taking his chainsaw to it, while simultaneously shutting down the agency's website and blocking access to factual information.
Musk's lies about USAID include that it funded:
Chelsea Clinton to the tune of $84 million.
A transgender comic book in Peru.
Former Republican and Never Trump commentator Bill Kristol’s career.
Celebrities like Ben Stiller and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s visits to Ukraine.
Condoms in Gaza to the tune of $50 million (a claim that Trump later embellished in even more preposterous fashion by claiming that Hamas repurposed them as bombs).
An Arab-language Sesame Street show in Iraq (a gross mischaracterization of a broader early-childhood development initiative) for $20 million.
Very often, Musk wasn’t necessarily the originator of these lies but rather their superspreader. For example, after an X user erroneously suggested that Politico was receiving $8 million in grant money from USAID, Musk—with an assist from other high-profile right-wing accounts—amplified the story which then made its way into White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s remarks and subsequently Trump’s social media posts. At that point Musk looped back and further boosted Trump’s claims. All of this despite the fact that the X user who originally made the claim did a follow-up post within the same thread on the same day that noted, “The USAID portion of the subscriptions turns out to be about $24,000.” (The actual amount, for what it’s worth, is $44,000— and it wasn’t to Politico but its umbrella corporation to subscribe to E&E News, an energy and environmental policy resource that the parent company produces.)
In other instances, Musk used a modus operandi remarkably similar to the one he deployed in his so-called Twitter Files, namely, taking over the agency, pretending to dig out dirt from its own internal records that was allegedly being hidden, and then releasing it selectively, accompanied with out-of-context, pre-framed narratives to discredit the previous regime.
All of this created multiple, diabolical feedback loops of misinformation that made trying to correct all the USAID lies emanating from Musk into a game of Whac-a-Mole. Even when accurate information about USAID was presented, he neither retracted nor corrected his previous characterizations of the agency, allowing the lies to continue spreading unchecked.
Musk’s anti-USAID campaign was aimed at one goal: portraying the agency as an unnecessary funding stream for what he labeled “woke” initiatives worldwide and generating outrage among Americans by convincing them that their hard-earned tax dollars were being squandered not on humanitarian efforts but on frivolous or ideologically-driven projects abroad.
The mischaracterizations, according to one credible estimate last month, may result in 15 million additional AIDS and two million additional tuberculosis deaths around the world for patients whose access to drugs was suddenly cut off.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether—and to what extent—America should be funding overseas aid programs. But no sensible person can disagree that yanking life-saving initiatives without notice or warning based on lies to “own the libs” is pure cruelty, not fiscal responsibility.
USIP
Although
has already described the strongarm tactics—that he dubbed “coercive vandalism”—deployed by Musk to commandeer this agency that is not even part of the executive branch and was housed in a private building paid for by private funds, here’s a brief recap.DOGE employees, acting on Musk’s orders, showed up at the agency’s building, FBI and police in tow, threatened to blackball the agency’s private security, which got it to comply with its orders to let them into the building, and then ejected its entire staff.
But that is not all that Musk did. He viciously and falsely attacked the agency.
The USIP charter describes it as “an independent, nonprofit, national institute” aimed at promoting “international peace and the resolution of conflicts among the nations and peoples of the world without recourse to violence.” Musk, however, suggested that it is committed to war, not peace, when quote retweeting a conspiracy-prone X user who alleged that USIP was funding the “Taliban and Iraq.” A Snopes report found no evidence for this.
Musk also, without a shred of proof, accused USIP of attempting to “cover their crimes” by deleting “a terabyte of financial data.” One video Musk shared to his 200+ million followers on X contained a half-dozen falsehoods about USIP, such as that it has no fiscal or congressional oversight (it has both), that no one knows who hired its leaders (its board is comprised of the U.S. secretaries of state and defense, the president of the National Defense University, and the rest are appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate), and that its budget is hundreds of millions of dollars (it was $55 million in 2023).
SSA
Donald Trump promised he would leave Social Security untouched, but Musk has gone to town on it. DOGE:
Offered every single SSA employee the option to activate early retirement, right off the bat.
Marked 47 of the SSA’s offices throughout the U.S. for closure.
Sought to reduce the agency’s workforce by 7,000 employees, according to CNN, a 12% cut to its overall staff.
It would be one thing if the personnel reductions were the product of careful analysis identifying redundancies and inefficiencies—but CNN’s investigation found the opposite to be case. Jack Smalligan, now a senior policy fellow at the Urban Institute but previously an Office of Management and Budget official, where he focused on Social Security, said, “The downsizing is happening in such an unstructured, unplanned manner, it puts the agency at special risk.”
Worse, DOGE sought Social Security’s highly-sensitive data systems that store information about Americans, leading to the resignation of Michelle King, the SSA’s acting commissioner who had served in the agency for 30 years, and replacement by a mid-level lackey. District Judge Ellen Hollander issued an injunction, and before that a restraining order, to limit DOGE’s access and admonished the administration for flouting the law, but the damage had been done.
To justify these moves, Musk, as is his wont, painted a very distorted picture of the agency based on the data he accessed (again, the Twitter Files modus operandi at work!).
Musk chose to spread the falsehood that 150-year-olds are receiving benefits. Trump, too, got in on the action, claiming: “If you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200 years old.” To substantiate these outlandish claims, Musk presented on X “evidence” that people hundreds of years old are receiving Social Security benefits, and Trump publicly read out a list of Social Security recipients over 200 during his address to Congress.
But these claims, based on a willful misunderstanding of how the Social Security database works, have been thoroughly debunked.
For the overwhelming majority of its entries, the database reads perfectly fine. But the database is not currently configured to accurately relay information on a small number of cases—such as when an entry has incomplete birthdate information (which read as though the person is 150 years or older) or for entries of Americans born prior to 1920 (which read as “alive” since electronic death records weren’t implemented prior to their deaths). Yet an Inspector General report from 2013 concluded that “almost none” of the entries with improbably long lifespans classified as alive are current recipients of benefits. As for the entries whose incomplete birthdate information converts them into 150 years or older—the SSA automatically stops payments when a person reaches 115 years of age.
There is no denying that the database needs an adjustment. A full six months before Trump assumed office, the SSA Inspector General issued a report exposing $71.8 billion in improper payments between 2015 and 2022 to living people. (Hey, maybe retaining, and listening to, inspectors general is a good idea, after all.) That’s worth addressing, certainly—but, for context, the U.S. spent $1.35 trillion on Social Security in 2023 alone.
Since a report documenting $71.8 billion in improper payments over a half-dozen years was not sensationalistic enough for Musk’s purposes, he decided to take a fixable programming quirk and spin that into a narrative of the program being rife with fraud and abuse. This was not an accident or an honest mistake—it was an intentional distortion in order to underwrite DOGE’s actions.
To reshape government in Trump’s image, it was always going to take a formidable propaganda effort. Musk acquired one of the most prominent social media platforms and repurposed it as a vehicle for doing just that.
It’s a shame that the inhumane and cavalier manner in which Musk has conducted himself might make the cause of streamlining and right-sizing government synonymous in the public mind with death, destruction—and lies.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
 | A guest post by
|
DOGE did the impossible: it made Vivek Ramaswamy into a sympathetic character about whom people wondered if things might've gone better had he not been forced out.
USAID is a CIA front, no matter what its PR says about its intent. It *doesn't* foster peace and security around the world; it is used to overthrow democratically elected governments that refuse to be US puppets.