100 Days, a Trillion Dollars: DOGE’s Costs Keep Adding Up

Congratulations! You’ve survived 100 of the 1461 total days Trump is scheduled to serve as President.

In honor of the occasion, I wanted to pull together three accounts of DOGE, which suggest DOGE and related cuts have cost Americans over a trillion dollars.

First, there’s this WaPo story from March, which describes the cuts to IRS may cost 10% of revenue — or $500 billion a year.

Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.

Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.

NYT reported last week (in a piece that discussed, but did not put a price tag on, other costs) that the way Elon carried out personnel cuts may have created $135 billion in personnel costs, partly because Elon fucked up firings and so Russ Vought had to do it again.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year.

And today, Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murray released a tracker that lays out $430 billion in spending that taxpayers have paid for, but for which the services have been withdrawn or frozen.

As the tracker details, President Trump has—through a variety of different means—frozen, cancelled, clawed back, illegally impounded, and slow-walked federal funding for all manner of key priorities. Among much else, this includes investments in:

• Critical research into Alzheimer’s disease, women’s health, cancer, diabetes, and much more, throwing research already conducted into the shredder and setting back treatments and cures.
• Public safety, including COPS grants, Office of Violence Against Women grants, and programs to help victims of crime.
• Relief for states and communities responding to and recovering from natural disasters.
• Farmers and local agriculture businesses, making it more expensive for hardworking people to run their farms and cutting off research they count on.
• School lunches and food for child care institutions at the detriment of the farmers who rely on these local markets.
• Head Start. Head Start programs are already beginning to close their doors as this administration slow-walks funding, kicking kids out of their classrooms and sending parents scrambling to find new preschool options.
• Critical investments in transportation projects—for roads and bridges, airports, public transit, ports, and more—and energy projects across the country that are creating new, good jobs and lowering families’ monthly energy bills.
• Our national security and efforts to prevent and end global conflicts.
• Essential health services like birth control and cancer screenings for over 800,000 patients—and resources to protect people from public health threats.

As a reminder, I’m collecting these and other DOGE debunkings here.

Altogether, that’s $1.065 trillion (of which the $430 billion includes stuff Elon touts as “cost savings”).

Elon Musk came in promising (at various times) to save a trillion dollars.

Instead, a hundred days in, and we’re already a trillion in the hole, and that’s before you consider defending these unlawful cuts, the increased costs that disease and extreme weather and wars will incur because we’ve defunded their mitigation, or increased borrowing costs arising from Trump’s trade war.