WASHINGTON—Randy Erwin, who presides over the National Federation of Federal Employees, has a two-word summation of the July 8 demise of Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency: Good riddance.
Trump and Elon Musk, his billionaire cohort took a chainsaw to needed government programs allegedly to save money but ended up saving nothing. They did, however, give away trillions of dollars to the super wealthy, Erwin said in a not-so-fond farewell after DOGE officially died.
A New York Times analysis at the end of 2025 of all the federal contracts and cuts DOGE, Musk, and Trump claimed in the first nine months of that calendar year found no savings at all. They may have even cost money, that analysis says.
There was a cut, though: The 317,000 federal workers whose jobs Musk and Trump OMB chief Russell Vought cut down.
And those cuts continue. Trump is now trying to disassemble the Agriculture Department, but the Machinists and other unions and their members are resisting.
“Good riddance to DOGE, the most damaging government reform effort in the last century,” Erwin wrote. “The fact the Trump administration does not plan to publish a final DOGE report is an admission the entire program was a miserable failure.
“It was so unpopular, and for good reason, that nobody from the administration even wants to talk about it. We cannot let that happen. We must continue to show the damage DOGE did to our government institutions, the federal workforce, and public services the people rely on every day.”
Musk, Trump, and DOGE promised savings of $2 trillion when their chainsaw against supposed “waste, fraud, and abuse” was fired up in early 2025. The actual savings they claimed by the time it was all over was only $215 billion, one-tenth of that projected sum, and it’s unclear whether any of that was waste at all. Most of it came from funds that had previously paid the salaries of fired workers performing necessary services.
“The American people will be paying for DOGE’s mistakes and recklessness for decades,” Erwin concluded. “Institutional knowledge and critical expertise have been permanently lost.
“DOGE has left a stain on the federal workforce, as it has become very difficult to recruit and retain the talent and experience necessary for agencies to achieve their missions.
“DOGE leaves behind a legacy of damage to the federal government and trauma for the civil service—which we must continue to rebuild after this miserable failure.”
The “miserable failure” is compounded by the Trump administration’s lies about cuts in federal contracts, the New York Times found after combing through every federal procurement record for the first nine months of Trump’s second term. That ran through the end of fiscal 2025.
DOGE “did not do what Musk said it would: Reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October” of 2025, the Times team wrote. “On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.”
The Times explained 28 of the 40 largest cuts DOGE claimed, including the two largest, turned out to be “flat-out wrong.” Those two contracts, for aircraft maintenance and information technology, totaled $7.9 billion, and they’re still alive and well. They’re also larger than all of DOGE’s other claimed 29,000 cuts combined.
What is indisputable is DOGE’s impact on the workers. The Government Employees (AFGE) and Erwin’s union, NFFE/IAM, hear the horror stories daily.
So does the Federal Unionists (FUN) Network. Fired feds set up FUN for mutual aid, solace, and to lobby to preserve and restore public service. Its initial splash was a tent city in front of Washington’s Union Station, set up to house federal workers who lost their paychecks and their homes—and to give them aid, comfort, and training in job hunts.
“We are here to help unify the federal workforce, defend vital services and programs, and protect the people we serve,” FUN says on its website. “Even in the face of mass layoffs and retaliation, we are not backing down.
“Federal workers and the public must join forces to organize and fight to defend against the authoritarian dismantling of the services and protections that sustain our democracy.”
And what is also indisputable, and Erwin pointed this out, is there is an agency, the Government Accountability Office, committed full-time to eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. In one of its two most recent reports on that, GAO identified $186 billion in “improper payments”—overpayments, fraud, and waste—in fiscal 2025, the year which ended last Sept. 30.
Just over 73% of the $186 billion occurred in five programs: Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), the earned income tax credit, and Shuttered Venue Operators Grants, a now-dead program from the coronavirus era, available to small businesses.
GAO’s other identified savings, totaling between $132 billion and $251 billion, would need congressional action in fields ranging from more-efficient shipbuilding by the Navy to equalizing Medicare payment rates for providers to preventing “double dipping” by Social Security recipients who also get disability benefits.
“The federal government already has a long established, nonpartisan agency that ensures the effective use of taxpayer dollars via the Government Accountability Office,” Erwin wrote, meaning there was never a need for DOGE.
“In reality, DOGE created massive tax waste by firing or putting on paid leave thousands of federal workers for months on end only for them to be reinstated or hired back because they were mission-critical employees.”
