The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a project that President Donald Trump’s administration touted as the flagship endeavor in its “war on waste,” has generated $21.7 billion in waste since its launch, Democrats claimed in a new report Thursday.
The staggering figure comes from Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, spearheaded by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), who released their findings in a 55-page report on losses accrued by DOGE, the brainchild of Trump and his billionaire friend-turned-enemy Elon Musk.
The results, the Democrats say, are the unsurprising outcome of a tech CEO with zero government experience taking charge of a massive federal spending overhaul, promising it was “going to be a revolution.”
“By prioritizing disruption over governance and failing to identify solutions for any of the problems it purported to solve, DOGE has created its own forms of waste,” the report stated.
The waste found in the investigation was largely generated by the Trump administration paying hundreds of thousands of employees to stop working. That includes $14.8 billion under the deferred resignation program, which has paid around 200,000 employees not to work throughout the last eight months. Sources told The Washington Post on Thursday that there are currently more than 154,000 federal employees in that program being paid through Sept. 30 or to the end of the year.
