Some of the USAID spending arguably was self-defeating for soft power. What I've heard from multiple Japanese family members is that the subsidies and policy pressure for LGBT programs and refugee acceptance felt like narcissistic cultural imperialism and soured their opinion of the US-Japan alliance.
I have no idea if what is posted on the site is actually valid.
But even if it was, you can "save" money by not doing oil changes for your car, but what do you think will happen to your engine? How much will that cost you eventually?
So whether the (alleged) savings will actually end up costing less (over the long term) is something that will have to be determined over time:
Yeah, but at some point you have to realize you can't afford a car any more and you should sell it. You can get another one when you are on top of the debt.
People (and nations) need to live within their means.
> Yeah, but at some point you have to realize you can't afford a car any more and you should sell it. You can get another one when you are on top of the debt.
The Pentagon spends in two weeks what USAID (or NASA) spent in a year. The proverbial oil change is not what is causing the financial issue in the analogical car example: in fact, a bit of preventative spending (oil change: USAID social programs) may be cheaper because it reduces the chances of a large expense (engine rebuild: major war/conflict/attack).
> Staff at the State Department’s Office of Countering Violent Extremism and Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, which led U.S. anti-violent extremism efforts, were laid off, the units shuttered, on July 11, 2025.
> This dismantling of the country’s terrorism and extremism prevention programs began in February 2025. That’s when staff of USAID’s Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization were put on leave.
Sure, if you were asking _me_ where I would save money, defense would be ahead of aid. My point that the US debt is staggering, and it might take more than just skipping an oil change, you might need to do something drastic like selling the car.
Cutting back on oil changes (USAID) or your gym membership (NIH) will do nothing if your "spending problem" is actually you not taking up enough shifts at work (taxes, cutting of).
The US debt is going up, and that's because there are sizeable annual deficits: perhaps there should be less cutting of taxes (for the rich, by the GOP)—and maybe even raise them—and see if that helps.
If you defer costs or trade monetary costs for non-monetary costs, you aren't "saving", you're just moving them around.
You can stop changing the oil on your car and show a couple hundred dollars of savings on paper over the next year or two ... but you will incur tens of thousands of costs consequentially.
When a parent stocks up on a bunch of bland tasting generic imitation food because "it was on sale", and then the kids get tired of it so they stop eating it, do you consider that "savings" ? In my book, that's called being "penny wise, pound foolish".
Europe spent the last few decades focussing on being a soft power, yet that did nothing to stop Russia, wars in the middle east or the ongoing migrant crisis.
It stopped Russia and other conflicts for the last decades... It's still preserving peace in Europe.
But there is no perfect solution. There always will be a maniac doing stupid shit because their personal benefit is more valuable for them than the greater good of everyone else. We are now in such a phase again, where all kind of maniacs have become loose, wasting societies for fun and giggles... We will have what we will make of it.
If the program being cut is valuable, I would say absolutely. Ignoring that this website is obviously going to have massive bias, a huge amount of the savings listed are for programs I would generally support: Health services, health research, USAID (we saved a billion dollars on "polio immunization," yay), environmental research, education, etc. Maybe the specific contracts cut were wasteful, but they certainly don't provide enough information to determine that and I'm not going to assume the cuts were good because "money saved."
Also, the savings are pretty minor overall. If we trust the website, we get $1.3k saved per taxpayer. The vast majority of the programs cut would have to be completely useless for me to think it is worth it to save $1.3k.
Also, "waste" doesn't have a singular definition: a contract with Honeywell (just picking a big government contractor at random) with the DOD/DOW to develop a new weapon could easily be seen as wasteful by one taxpayer, while another could see a different contract with Honeywell with the DOE or EPA to develop green energy tech as equally valid waste. The solution to this isn't to have one person run roughshod over already-signed contracts and commitments; the fix is for Congress either to not enter into them in the first place, or to use the CRA to override an agency's decision.
Considering that every independent estimate puts the money saved at slower to $90M than $200B, yes, running around thinking you have 5 orders of magnitude more effect than you do is a bad thing.
Add to that that most of the things cut, for example weather forecasting, has returns to the economy of several times what is spent on it, and the damage to the economy is much larger than any savings.
Saving a dime today, to waste a dollar tomorrow, is not good.
DOGE has prominently trading long-term-benefits for short-term-gains. Some are already showing today, but many will show their harm in years and decades, too late to fix it, and when it will cost significant more to handle them.
Yes – we're still going to end up with deficits due to tax cuts. We may as well actually get things done while doing so, and be honest to ourselves about it.
I can look at my budget and say, "Wow I spend a lot on coffee, better stop". Are these savings a good or bad thing? You have to remember every transaction has two parties. If I stop buying coffee, maybe it's better for me, but it's not better for the coffee shops, and the coffee producers. Every transaction has two parties. So who are the parties on the receiving end of government spending? Well, it's the private sector. It's you and me.
To decide if it's a good thing you need to see if stopping the spending benefits BOTH parties.
I am not going to look for the information again, but this list was debunked many times in my news feed.
i.e. doge says they saved some insane amount of money for some program, but most importantly, for many cases:
- most of the money have been paid already, so almost nothing is saved (imagine 5 year program for 10B, but 4 years have passed, 8B has been paid and now it will not be finished);
- program brings more business than it costs;
- or both;
It grinds my gears when musk, trump and the like bring their “run government as a business” attitude. Government is a “meta-business”.
It takes care of things that businesses won’t. Roads, trains, growing and educating new generation of workers and businessmen, army, etc.
thiel’s technofascist libertarian dystopian city states will crumble from lack of infrastructure or if not - more powerful states (China?) will eat them up one by one.
Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'
You realize that website has become a national laughing stock because they keep making multibillion dollar errors?
[edit] to explain further - there were lots of different errors, but a big one is that many contracts have high max values because they can't always predict how much they'll need to spend over ten years but they want a contract in place in case they need to spend money quickly (say for spare parts). So in many cases the number DOGE says they cut was just a placeholder, not an actual reflection of money that was ever going to be spent. So if you have a contract for spare parts for MRI machines for VA hospitals with a max value of, say, $1B over ten years, but you actually spend $100M over ten years, then DOGE will say they saved $1B, when actually they will have only saved $100M. That does not include the downstream effects of not having a contract for spare parts for MRI machines. If the MRI machines have more downtime, then the VA has to spend more money sending patients elsewhere, but DOGE has no way to account for that in their wall of receipts.
It's like if I stop commuting by car to work every day and rent a helicopter. I'm going to save a ton of money by selling the car and not buying gasoline. Of course I spent a ton of money with the helicopter method but we're not going to list _new_ expenses on the website are we?
It’s not necessarily that clean cut. Money saved today can easily be many times as much lost further down the road when factoring in long tail effects, and none of the cuts were given any such consideration. Even if the numbers were correct as of the time of posting, they could ultimately end up contributing to the deficit in the long run.
Exactly! A lot (most?) of this spending has very obvious multiplier effects.
Tax enforcement is a trivial and almost immediate example. Spending $X on compliance seems to recover about $5X in evaded taxes. On top of that, there are knock-on effects: if it becomes easier to cheat on your taxes, more people may cheat.
Vaccines and other forms of preventative healthcare fall into this bucket too. Even completely ignoring the moral aspect of letting people (mostly kids!) fall unnecessarily ill, it often makes economic sense to pay a little bit to avoid having to potentially pay much more down the road. One ER visit can cover a lot of flu or COVID vaccines; a few nights in the ICU even more.
Research grants are maybe less obvious, but they have a huge multiplier too: the human genome project had something like a $120x return(!). This is not just big breakthroughs, but also all the work along the way. A lot of grant money goes to training people or supports small businesses making their equipment. I saw an interesting article claiming that the Air Force essentially bootstrapped the use of more exotic materials: military contracts covered the initial investment in (e.g.,) machinery for working with titanium, and once those fixed costs are covered, it was feasible to dip a toe into the consumer space and see if there's demand. Thus, titanium golf drivers.
We don't have enough information to determine that, in many cases. Because it depends on what the costs of those cuts will be. DOGE is in many cases cutting things without doing a proper impact analysis.
There are many documented instances of DOGE cutting things that they later realized were needed -- leading to unnecessary switching costs and other consequential costs.
Second: deferring costs in the short term are often a bad choice that can cause higher costs over the long term.
Third: some cuts can exchange monetary costs for non-monetary costs. These will make a number look good but can cause impacts that are bad.
The savings are good, assuming they're correct. The correctness part seems to be in question. Also, I don't know whether the hypothetical benefit is more or less than the things that were being paid for.
Junk food can be cheaper than healthy food, it's not good to save on money now at the cost of spending thousands on medical care and insulin in the future.
Or to paraphrase Terry Pratchett: "boots at $10 dollars that last a month are more expensive than $50 dollar boots that last a year"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
It's the difference between being cheap and being frugal...
There's also the allegation that Elon's Doge cuts were to prevent various agencies from pursuing legal action against him.
Let's assume they are made up (a very conservative assumption, given there's been so much evidence for it already) - is making up numbers good for the economy?
Every transaction has two parties. If I save, you lose income. If you save, I lose income. Well, if the government saves, the private citizens LOSE INCOME. Read about the Accounting Identity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_identity
For these savings to be good, they need to be good for everyone. And that's not clear.
Let's assume they aren't correct - is the massive cost DOGE is incurring to taxpayers while destroying essential government services and weakening our national security a good thing?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the “grant cancellations” alone cost dramatically more (measured as NPV today of lost future tax revenue) than the entire reported DOGE savings.
Here's a report[1] arguing that $1 spent on an NIH grant generates $2.56 of economic activity---and these grants largely aren't even meant to have short-term payouts. Block grants for (e.g.,) preventative care or education probably have huge returns too: the ER and prison are expensive!
Savings isn't inherently a good thing. I can save a lot of money if I stop paying my mortgage. I can save money if I stop buying my meds. I can save money if I stop paying my utility bills. Things won't go well for me in the end though.
If we as a society choose to stop investing in ourselves, we'll have bad outcomes in the end.
Without knowing the details of the thirteen thousand contracts cancelled, we don't know.
As a thought experiment ad absurdum, we can save 100% of the cost of government by shutting down the entire government.
... but then what happens next? This trivial exercise demonstrates how on-the-surface positive metrics can hide costs that either aren't being tracked at all or aren't tracked here.
On this topic: some fascinating research recently out of Yale https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-reveals-stark-diffe... investigated the known discrepancy in life expectancy in the American South vs. other states. Their conclusion is that likeliest cause is weather. The reason it didn't show up is that metrics weren't tracking the secondary effects of a region being smashed by one or two hurricanes a year; immediate death tolls are in the low dozens and wouldn't move the needle, but the shared cost of infrastructure rebuilding puts local and state governments perpetually in a reactionary mode, which means they set up welfare programs that they can never fund. It's those on-paper-existing but perpetually-emergency-drained programs that are likely accounting for the difference in life expectancy; it's not about dying in a hurricane, it's about a mother three years down the line losing her newborn to preventable illness that wasn't caught in time because she can't afford pediatric care and her county doesn't have enough money to subsidize it, they're too busy rebuilding all the bridges that got torn in half by floodwaters before that newborn was even conceived.
I highly highly highly highly highly doubt that website and their data. It also doesn't mention how much was lost in those contracts because they were actually valuable science, health, diplomatic, or medicinal.
For instance, $3 billion saved from cancelling "Increasing Community Access to Testing, Treatment and Response (ICATT). The ICATT program provides access to no-cost COVID-19 testing in U.S. communities to people that are uninsured and no-cost COVID-19 vaccines to people that are underinsured and uninsured."
That is shortsighted, evil, inefficient (better to keep pandemics from not happening), and idiotic to cancel.
Again, anyone supporting DOGE is not a serious thinker or actually cares about what is "waste"
I know that civility is a core value of this community but it is very hard to respond to your comments here while maintaining that.
What number would I propose? Probably a negative one. I don't think "we can say that at least 50-75% is actually helping". On what basis? Helping with what?
>the USAID budget was about $20bn. Half a million extra dead so far from those cuts. So we can start there?
Saving $40k/person[0] is wonderful savings! Let's save even more! Boo yah! USA! USA! USA!
[0] I mean it's not like they're Americans. And they're most likely not white either. In which case, unless they're mowing my lawn or picking my cotton, they're worth essentially zero.
These are exactly the kind of questions an administration could have, hypothetically, asked before forming a department dedicated to acting like it already had the answers.
Did they ask them? I haven't seen evidence they did (if anything, the releases from the White House suggest DOGE became the tail that wags the dog, with OMB being asked to justify cuts to projects DOGE had already become convinced were waste, if they were consulted at all).
DOGE is, I think, a response to a real issue Americans have with their government: its process of evaluating cost and benefit is glacial in a world that is moving ever faster.
Unfortunately, it's glacial for a reason; there's 380 million people in the country and 8 billion in the world. That's a lot of effect to weigh when making changes to the status quo.
There's a three-panel comic about a person deciding they need change in their life and getting it by taking a chainsaw to their room. Panel three is them looking around and going "oh no." That is, unfortunately, sort of how I conceptualize DOGE.
I'm guessing that if you made a Venn diagram of people in favor of DOGE and people that believe COVID was fake and the vaccine is a sham the result would be a circle
