Remember when the Department of Government Efficiency rolled into Washington like a bunch of guys who just discovered Excel and decided the federal budget was a spreadsheet with a few too many tabs?
Then, uh, whatever number looked good on a podcast that week.
It turns out "efficiency" is a lot harder when you can't just fire the people who process your grandma's Social Security check and call it a win.
The whole operation had the energy of a startup that pivots every quarter.
Big dramatic announcements, chainsaw props, "deleted this agency" tweets — and then the actual savings turned out to be mostly accounting tricks, canceled contracts that were already expiring, and a whole lot of vibes.
Independent analyses kept finding the math didn't math.
Who could have predicted that a guy running five companies simultaneously might not personally audit every line item in the federal ledger?
Here's the part that really gets you: a sizable chunk of the "savings" came from stuff that wasn't actually being spent, or from contracts where cancellation fees ate the difference.
It's like declaring you saved $500 by not buying a boat you were never going to buy.
Meanwhile, actual services — you know, the boring stuff like food safety inspections and tax processing — got squeezed, because efficiency sounds great until it's your refund stuck in limbo.
They gutted agencies, then realized oh wait, we need people to actually run these things, and started quietly rehiring.
This is the government equivalent of throwing away your umbrella, getting rained on, and buying the same umbrella back at full price.
Only this umbrella costs taxpayer money and handles nuclear safety.
The real kicker is the transparency angle.
For an outfit named after a meme coin and obsessed with "waste," DOGE was remarkably allergic to showing its work.
Reports got revised, numbers got walked back, and the goalposts migrated to wherever the cameras weren't.
Reddit's r/fednews had a field day, and honestly, federal workers deserved a support group after that whole circus.
A few genuine cuts, a mountain of headlines, a bunch of rehires, and a masterclass in how "move fast and break things" plays out when the thing you're breaking is, say, veterans' benefits.
Lessons about governing like a tech demo: priceless. **The take:** Efficiency isn't a buzzword you slap on a logo — it's boring, incremental work that doesn't fit in a soundbite.
If the plan relies on dramatic announcements instead of audited numbers, you're not cutting waste, you're just performing it.
Final Thoughts
Next time someone promises to run the government like a business, ask which business, because Enron was also a business.