DOGE’s Supposed Savings Are About to Cost the U.S. a Lot of Money

Elon Musk’s decision to take a chainsaw to the IRS is fast-tracking the agency for a steep decline in revenue.

Abrupt, DOGE-directed staff cuts at the agency have sparked fears that U.S. tax revenue could plummet by 10 percent, or $500 billion, this spring, reported The Washington Post.

Last year, the IRS collected $5.1 trillion, with $825 billion going to the Defense Department. Such a massive loss would hobble government services or increase the national deficit.

“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official, told the Post.

Some of DOGE’s loftiest goals for the tax collection agency include a mass layoff of some 20,000 agency employees, many of whom work directly in processing taxes and investigating tax fraud. But the Trump administration has been less than serious with regard to the impact of the cuts: In February, Donald Trump suggested that the tax specialists could find new work as armed border agents.

So far, DOGE has fired more than 11,000 IRS employees and lost two agency commissioners, both of whom stepped down since Trump was inaugurated. That’s forced the agency to quickly reimagine how it allocates its resources: In order to keep its core functions operating, the agency has dropped investigations into high-valued corporations and taxpayers, several IRS staffers involved in the matter told the Post.

That stands in stark contrast to the Biden administration’s agenda for the IRS, which aimed to beef up the agency with more than 80,000 new hires. That was under the helm of IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, who promised to make mincemeat out of the ultrawealthy and their tax cheats.

The transition hasn’t been too noticeable this tax season so far, Timur Taluy, CEO of tax-prep service FileYourTaxes.com, told the Post. So far, IRS data shows a roughly 8 percent drop in representative availability on the IRS helpline compared to last year—a small indicator of the forthcoming changes. But IRS specialists argue that more changes are on the way.

“We tried to make clear this is a logistics operation. There’s a science to it. If you put 30 people on the line, this is how much you can accomplish today. If you put 15 people on the line, you can accomplish half of that,” a source who was involved in warning the Trump transition team about the planned IRS changes told the Post. “You can change the productivity over time with a smaller input of personnel, but not this filing season. This is where we are today.”

Border czar Tom Homan gave up the game on Donald Trump’s revenge scheme to rob noncitizens of their legal rights under the Alien Enemies Act.

During a Sunday interview on ABC News’s This Week with Jonathan Karl, a sedated-sounding Homan struggled to answer questions about the rushed deportations of more than 100 alleged members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang the Trump administration has declared an invading force.

Karl asked how authorities had been able to determine whether the individuals were in the gang; Homan readily admitted that many of the deportees did not have any criminal record.

“A lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories, just like a lot of terrorists in this world, they’re not in any terrorist databases, right?” he said.

Homan said that authorities had relied on social media, surveillance, sworn statements from gang members, and wire taps to determine supposed gang affiliation.

Karl explained that lawyers for several of the deportees claimed that authorities had wrongly labeled their clients as gang members.

“Do they get a chance to prove that before you take them out of the country and put them into a notorious prison in a country that they’re not even from? I mean, do they have any due process at all?” he asked Homan.

“Due process? What was Laken Riley’s due process? Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TdA, where was their due process?” Homan said.

“Well the people who did that should be prosecuted—” Karl continued, but Homan cut him off.

The border czar insisted that due process could be suspended because “every Ven-ze-ulan” on the flight was determined to be a member of the gang, and therefore a terrorist.

Shortly after the AEA was invoked last week, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary injunction on deportations under the wartime law after lawyers from the ACLU challenged the designation of five individuals under the act. Still, the Trump administration proceeded with the swift removal of more than 100 Venezuelan nationals, launching a series of hearings last week reviewing the use of the law to suspend due process.

While the Trump administration has since said it would comply with court orders, the president and other members of his administration have begun relentlessly attacking Boasberg, claiming that he was a “lunatic” who was biased against Trump.

On This Week, Homan was asked to explain his own wild attack on the judiciary, when he said, “I don’t care what judges think.”

“I don’t care what that judge thinks as far as this case,” Homan explained Sunday. “We’re going to continue to arrest public safety threats and national security threats. We’re going to continue to deport them from the United States.”

On Monday, Boasberg ruled that the ACLU was “likely to succeed” in arguing that individuals the government had claimed were members of the Tren de Aragua gang were “entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether the Act applies to them at all,” denying the government’s request to lift his restraining order on AEA deportations.

Despite Homan’s admission that the deportees lacked actual criminal records, Attorney General Pam Bondi falsely claimed Sunday that the Trump administration was within its rights because the deportees had committed “the most violent crimes that you can imagine.”

Donald Trump is appointing his personal lawyer Alina Habba as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.

The president announced the move in a Truth Social post Monday morning, saying that Habba “will lead with the same diligence and conviction that has defined her career.”

The move will put Habba in charge of all federal cases in New Jersey on what is supposed to be a temporary basis, bypassing Senate confirmation. The state is the home of Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, and is also the jurisdiction for the government’s case against pro-Palestine activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, whom Trump is trying to deport after rescinding his green card.

Habba has a reputation as one of Trump’s most ardent defenders, backing him up when he spreads conspiracy theories and, during his hush-money trial last year, offering defenses for his unusual behavior, from falling asleep in court to his penchant for holding press clippings of himself.

More recently, earlier this month Habba responded to the Trump administration’s firing of thousands of military veterans by saying that “perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment.” Her seemingly unconditional support for the president also extends into her legal acumen, which is highly flawed at best.

Throughout Trump’s New York hush-money trial, Habba misspoke in court, hurting Trump’s case and even seeming to misunderstand the term “due process.” While representing the president in a defamation lawsuit from writer E. Jean Carroll, Habba’s opening statement seemed to immediately undermine Trump’s case, and during the case, she was reprimanded by the judge on multiple occasions.

Making Habba the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey seems like a recipe for disaster, considering she is supposed to uphold and enforce the law in accordance with the Constitution. But Trump’s decision to appoint Habba is almost certainly by design: He wants a loyalist to push prosecutions that he wants, regardless of legal justifications, and protect his interests in the state.

Education Department staffers warn that Trump’s mass firings will do irreparable harm to the student loan system. At least 300 people were fired last week from Federal Student Aid, the office within the department that manages student loans. 

This was shortly followed by President Trump’s Thursday executive order to eliminate the Education Department entirely. 

“They got rid of all of the quality checkers. It’s only a matter of time [before] they cause the whole system to fail,” a high ranking department staffer told The Guardian anonymously. “If this was a bank, and they fired all the quality assurance team, their regulator would have shut them down.… It’s the opposite of safety.”

These anonymous workers believe the purge will create opportunities for fraud and abuse and  lead to more bureaucratic issues, like long wait times for loan service providers. “As an organization, we were already doing a lot more work than our staffing provides. We would need 10 times more people for a bank of our size,” the senior staffer said.

“What Linda McMahon has done is given 5,000 institutions the green light to cause massive amounts of taxpayer fraud and abuse of federal financial aid dollars financed by taxpayers without any check and balances in place,” one fired employee said. “The gatekeepers are gone.”

This is a massive blow to an already hobbled system. Many of those fired were working full time to make sure that American citizens could pay for college without drowning in millions of dollars in debt.

The MAGA movement is not falling in line behind Elon Musk.

Republican strategists and voters with an affinity for Donald Trump are not keen to see the world’s richest man make cuts to agencies and programs that they rely on, sparking concerns that Musk’s entrenchment in Trump’s agenda could cost conservatives in midterm elections.

GOP strategist Alex Conant told The Hill Friday that there’ll be “political costs” to empowering Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency if Republican voters don’t hear about the “benefits” of DOGE—and soon.

“What Republicans should be concerned about is Musk’s effectiveness,” Conant said. “If DOGE actually breaks things that people care about and rely on, there’s gonna be political costs to that.”

Republican strategist Doug Heye predicted that Musk’s involvement in the White House would result in “real job losses” in the coming weeks and months.

“And where that has an impact, especially in specific communities … that makes their life harder for the reliable voter, typically, for Trump,” Heye told The Hill. “That kind of slow burn, I think, could have an impact.”

Even some of Trump’s biggest fans have had their immense loyalty challenged by Trump’s new billionaire adviser.

Trump attended an NCAA men’s Division I wrestling championship in Philadelphia on Saturday, alongside White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and Musk. But reactions to the Tesla CEO were less than warm, reported The New York Times.

Katy Travis, a 48-year-old wrestling mom from Montana, told the publication that Musk’s constant presence at Trump’s side “looks ridiculous,” and that his enormous influence over Trump made the president “look weak.”

“It makes him look like he’s kissing ass to get money,” Travis told the Times.

Others were worried about their investments as Musk’s aggressive slashes to federal agencies rattled the stock market.

“I know there’s a lot of concern about what he’s doing, as far as the DOGE stuff and all,” Jarrod Scandle, a 44-year-old retired Pennsylvanian police officer who specified that he’s more of a “Chevy or Ford” guy, told the Times. “I understand everybody’s concern. I’m concerned. I own stock, and you know, it’s red every day, and I’m worried.