title: "The Arsonist's Invoice: DOGE at One Year" subtitle: The Department of Government Efficiency spent a year breaking things. The bill is in. author: Rebecca Rowan publication: For the Republic date: 2026-02-14

The Arsonist's Invoice

Here is what the Department of Government Efficiency cost the American taxpayer in its first year of operation.

*One nonpartisan analysis (Partnership for Public Service); excludes litigation costs.

They wanted receipts. Here are the receipts.

Breaking Even Was Never the Point

There is a phrase for what DOGE produced, and it deserves to enter the language: negative returns on destruction. You spend money breaking something. The breaking costs more than the thing was costing you. And now you own both the original expense and the wreckage.

The ledger is underwater -- spectacularly, humiliatingly underwater. The people who actually knew how government works walked out the door. And a government that can't collect taxes, process retirement claims, or inspect food isn't "efficient." It's incapacitated.

The financial case is already closed. The Cato Institute -- a libertarian think tank ideologically built to celebrate government reduction -- found that federal spending rose $248 billion in 2025 even as DOGE executed the largest peacetime workforce cut on record. Two hundred and seventy-one thousand workers gone. Spending? Up. "No noticeable effect on the trajectory of spending," Cato wrote. When the libertarians say your cost-cutting didn't cut costs, the fiscal debate is settled.

And the savings claims themselves? WBUR's On Point found that all 13 of the largest items on DOGE's "wall of receipts" were incorrect. Not most. Not the close calls. All of them. An ICE contract was claimed at $8 billion in savings; the actual contract was $8 million -- a 1,000x error. A Politico analysis reported by Newsweek verified only $1.4 billion of $52.8 billion in claimed contract savings. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Fahrenthold of the NYT put it flatly: "DOGE didn't cut a dollar of federal spending."

This is not rounding error. This is fabrication at industrial scale.

The Cato data proves spending wasn't cut. But why was it structurally impossible to cut? Because DOGE attacked the wrong target -- and not by accident.

The 8% Chainsaw

Federal employee compensation -- according to Cato's own analysis -- is roughly 8% of total federal spending. The other 92% is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense procurement, interest on the debt -- mandatory spending and commitments that workforce cuts cannot touch. You can't fire your way out of Social Security. DOGE took a chainsaw to the 8% and left the 92% alone.

This wasn't a mistake. Cutting the right targets -- entitlements, defense contracts -- would require congressional action and political courage. Neither was on offer. The chainsaw went where it could go, not where it needed to.

Now, a defender might point out that the 8% framing is misleading -- federal employees administer 100% of the budget, not just their salary share. Fair point. But this actually strengthens the thesis: if these workers are the load-bearing infrastructure of the entire system, then cutting them doesn't reduce costs elsewhere. It degrades everything. The Cato data confirms it. The service collapse confirms it.

And that collapse has a human face. Science/AAAS reports that 10,109 STEM PhDs departed federal service in 2025 -- three times the 2024 rate, 14% of the government's entire doctoral workforce. At 14 research agencies, departures outnumber new hires 11 to 1. Those are the climate scientists who tracked hurricanes, the epidemiologists who managed pandemic response systems, the auditors who ensured your tax dollars were spent correctly. 106,636 years of accumulated STEM and health expertise. Gone.

Meanwhile, at the Social Security Administration: 6 million pending cases. Nearly 600,000 retirement claims backlogged -- a 71% increase. Call wait times that peaked at 2.5 hours. These are people who paid into a system their entire working lives, now waiting in line for benefits they already earned, while the agency meant to serve them is gutted. Real people. Real suffering. And entirely predictable.

The Alibi

I want to be honest about what DOGE actually accomplished, because dismissing everything would be dishonest.

Doge.gov was a genuine transparency win. The Treasury payment tracking fix -- making a previously optional ID field mandatory -- that's actual modernization. The CMS Fraud Detection Operations Center suspended payments to 33 fraudulent providers in its first month, including one billing medical equipment for a patient who died 20 years ago. OPM cut contract spending by 50%. These are real achievements.

Now make the argument that matters: you did not need to fire 271,000 people to build a website. The 18F program, USDS, and GSA's Technology Transformation Services had been doing this kind of modernization work for a decade without mass layoffs. Technology modernization and mass destruction are separate initiatives that were deliberately conflated. The good things could have been accomplished without the bad.

The question is whether the good things were the purpose -- or the alibi.

Defenders compare DOGE to a corporate turnaround: short-term pain, long-term gain. But corporate restructurings are designed to retain the most valuable people and cut redundancy. DOGE did the opposite. The blunt instruments -- hiring freezes, "fork in the road" emails (yes, that was actually what they called them), across-the-board RIFs -- drove out the most experienced, most employable workers first. The PhDs. The senior auditors. The people with outside options. A restructuring that loses its best people and keeps its least mobile workers is not a turnaround. It's adverse selection at industrial scale. It's a liquidation.

Short-term tax receipts held up through April 2025 -- a data point defenders cite, and fairly. But people notice when enforcement gets weaker, and they adjust -- not in months, but over years. Britain ran this experiment. HMRC cut staff during austerity and lost 42 billion pounds in uncollected tax. For every pound spent on enforcement, they recovered 18. The UK deficit was worse after the cuts than before. It took years to manifest. The American data will follow the same curve.

The Yale Budget Lab projects that IRS workforce cuts will cost between $198 billion and $323 billion in lost tax revenue over a decade, depending on the depth of the cuts. Every dollar spent on IRS enforcement yields $5-$12 in revenue. Cutting IRS staff is, mathematically, the single most fiscally destructive thing a government can do. And we did it in the name of "efficiency."

If the technology wins were real but tiny relative to the destruction, then what was the destruction for?

The Arsonist Moves In

The spectacle phase is over. Musk departed in May 2025. DOGE was effectively disbanded in November. The media moved on.

But someone stayed. Russell Vought, the OMB Director, quietly institutionalized DOGE across the federal government. The administration's FY2026 budget requested $45 million for DOGE. One hundred and fifty permanent staff -- 30 direct employees, 120 embedded as "in-house consultants" at individual agencies. OMB itself requested a 4% staff increase, even as it directs drastic cuts at every other federal agency. All remaining DOGE staff were converted to political positions.

I'm going to let those facts sit there and let you draw your own conclusions about the endgame. But consider: an initiative designed to shrink government has created a new permanent bureaucratic layer that oversees the shrinking -- and is itself growing. The fire is out. The arsonist left. But someone is moving into the rubble with blueprints.

The Invoice

One year ago, 72% of Americans said they wanted a government that works better. They were right to want that. Government should work better. Legacy IT systems running on decades-old infrastructure, procurement processes that take years, performance management that is functionally nonexistent -- the frustration is real and justified.

The problem is not wanting efficient government. The problem is that DOGE made government less efficient, less capable, and more expensive -- the precise opposite of what that 72% wanted.

Reform and destruction are different things, and Americans know the difference. The 72% who wanted efficient government are not the enemy. They are the constituency for actual reform -- the kind that modernizes systems without gutting the workforce, that treats public service as infrastructure worth investing in -- not waste to be eliminated.

The next time someone promises to fix government by breaking it, you have a phrase for what they're selling. Negative returns on destruction.

Revision Log

Fact-Check Corrections

1. 92% spending description (RED FLAG): Removed the inaccurate characterization of the non-compensation 92% as "transfer payments." The 92% includes defense procurement, state aid, interest on debt, AND transfer payments. Replaced with "mandatory spending and commitments" and let the parenthetical list (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense procurement, interest on the debt) convey the point. Added "according to Cato's own analysis" for attribution.
2. Politico/Newsweek attribution (YELLOW): Changed "Politico verified" to "A Politico analysis reported by Newsweek verified" to accurately reflect the source chain.
3. IRS revenue range (YELLOW): Added qualifier "depending on the depth of the cuts" to clarify the $198-$323 billion range represents different Yale Budget Lab staffing-reduction scenarios, not a single continuous estimate.
4. DOGE dissolution (YELLOW): Changed "formally dissolved" to "effectively disbanded" since there was no formal executive order dissolving DOGE -- just an administrative acknowledgment it had ceased to function.
5. $45M budget (YELLOW): Changed "The FY2026 budget includes a $45 million funding request" to "The administration's FY2026 budget requested $45 million" to clarify this was a budget request, not necessarily enacted.
6. Fahrenthold Pulitzer (YELLOW): Changed "NYT Pulitzer winner David Fahrenthold" to "Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Fahrenthold of the NYT" since he won the Pulitzer at the Washington Post, not NYT.
7. 106,636 years scope: Added "STEM and health" qualifier both in the invoice table and in the body text to accurately reflect this covers STEM/health PhD departures, not all federal workers.
8. "70-year-old magnetic tapes": Changed to "decades-old infrastructure" to avoid echoing a DOGE characterization that IT professionals have contested.

Structural Changes

1. Moved adverse selection/"liquidation" paragraph from "The 8% Chainsaw" to "The Alibi" where the corporate restructuring counterargument naturally belongs per the outline. This rebalances both sections.
2. Added transition beat between "Negative Returns on Destruction" and "The 8% Chainsaw": "The Cato data proves spending wasn't cut. But why was it structurally impossible to cut?"
3. Added transition beat between "The Alibi" and "The Arsonist Moves In": "If the technology wins were real but tiny relative to the destruction, then what was the destruction for?"
4. Compressed the closing recap paragraph. The original listed IRS losses, expertise drain, SSA backlogs, and OMB institutionalization -- all already covered. Cut to avoid recapping the article back to the reader.
5. Reworked the close to land on "Negative returns on destruction" as the final phrase, per editorial guidance that the framework phrase is the article's most powerful asset.
6. Removed the repeated thesis statement at the end of "The Arsonist Moves In" that echoed the "Negative Returns on Destruction" section almost verbatim. Trusted the rubble-and-blueprints metaphor to do the work.
7. Renamed section header "Negative Returns on Destruction" to "Breaking Even Was Never the Point" for more personality in the header while preserving the framework introduction in the body.
8. Removed Writer's Notes section (not for publication).

Voice Adjustments

1. Cut the meta-rhetorical self-explanation in "The Alibi": removed "and the honest concessions are what make the critique sharper." The corpus shows its rhetorical work without explaining it.
2. Added parenthetical aside about "fork in the road" emails: "(yes, that was actually what they called them)" -- adds the personality-laden parenthetical texture the corpus relies on.
3. Folded the three-level framework definition into flowing prose rather than labeled taxonomy. Removed "Financially... Institutionally... Democratically" labels and let the escalation do the structural work.
4. Applied editor's suggested rewrites for multiple voice mismatches: "You can't fire your way out of Social Security," "The chainsaw went where it could go, not where it needed to," "People notice when enforcement gets weaker," and the varied construction for DOGE achievements.
5. Added fragment punches: "Real people. Real suffering. And entirely predictable." at the end of the SSA section.
6. Shifted register in the 8% section from pure policy-brief language to mix analytical and colloquial.

Unresolved Notes

1. CMS "patient who died 20 years ago" anecdote: The fact-checker flagged that this specific detail traces to WBUR secondhand reporting, not an official CMS statement. I preserved it because it's sourced to a credible outlet, but the author should verify if a primary CMS source exists.
2. $135 billion figure methodology: The fact-checker notes this Partnership for Public Service estimate hasn't been independently replicated. The draft correctly hedges it as "one nonpartisan analysis," which I preserved. Author should monitor for updated estimates.
3. $214 billion vs. $215 billion: Some sources (including the cited WBUR episode) report $215 billion. I kept $214 billion for consistency with the Newsweek source and because the doge.gov figure fluctuated. Author may prefer to use $215 billion if citing WBUR as primary.
4. Word count: Final draft runs approximately 1,520 words (article body only, excluding revision log), within target range.