The Most Dodgy of DOGE's Cost-Cutting Calculations Has Gone Completely Under the Radar
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Elon Musk's tenure leading the Department of Government Efficiency has attracted enormous controversy, largely for its focus on cutting government jobs and programs . Reports have revealed that estimated savings from these efforts were significantly lower than Musk had anticipated, that even these savings were particularly overstated , that Musk's actions might actually end up costing the government money by reducing its ability to collect revenue, and that many lives will be lost as a result of these cuts, those affecting assistance to the world's neediest people.
Much less attention has been devoted to DOGE's claims about savings from deregulatory measures. These claims rely on unbearable logic , but more importantly, they reveal a deeply troubling worldview. DOGE's deregulatory math systematically ignores outcomes for working-class Americans, who will pay more in health care costs and banking fees under DOGE's “cost-saving” proposals while the benefits of Musk's “savings” increased to the government and corporations.
To all its work, DOGE published an “ Agency Deregulation Leaderboard ” showing yearly savings of $29.4 billion. Roughly 98 percent of the total is attributed to three agencies: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Energy.
The single deregulatory measure to which DOGE attributes the greatest savings—$10 billion—is an HHS proposed rule that would restrict insurance coverage and reimbursements for medical expenses under the Affordable Care Act. The savings increased to the federal government. But on the other side of that equation are individuals—mostly low-income, working-class people—who would not get reimbursed for needed health care expenses. DOGE entirely ignores the additional costs that this group would bear, which exactly counterbalance the “savings” to the government.
One might think that this constrained view results from DOGE's mission to save the government money and reduce the deficit. But something far more nefarious is behind DOGE's approach.
The cost savings attributable to CFPB actions—a total of $14.7 billion—come from undoing two rules limiting, respectively, fees for credit card lending and bank-account overdrafts . (One of these rules was disapproved under the Congressional Review Act, and the other was set aside by a court.) Here, the savings touted by DOGE are to private financial institutions—there are no savings to the government.
But, again, there is another side of that ledger: the lost savings for individuals—again, mostly low-income individuals—who now have to pay the higher fees.
By ignoring these costs, DOGE reveals its philosophy. The savings to powerful financial institutions from deregulation matter, but the savings to everyday Americans that the displaced rules would have provided do not.
DOGE doubles down on this philosophy in its treatment of the Department of Energy savings, which all increased from proposed repeals of appliance efficiency standards. Here, the deregulations benefit the manufacturers, who can cut costs by making cheaper, less efficient appliances, including air conditioners and dishwashers.
Although consumers would very temporarily benefit from cheaper sticker prices, they would lose money overall by paying additional energy costs, a detail that DOGE entirely overlooks. Indeed, in some cases , purchasers would experience overall cost savings during even the first year of owning the most efficient appliances. For example, for a DOE rule rescission involving air purifiers , DOGE lists savings of $26.9 million due to lower purchase costs but ignores $690 million in higher energy costs (more than 25 times as great as the savings), as well as $200 million in forgone health benefits and $100 million in forgone climate benefits that increased to a broad cross section of the US population.
Because low-income populations spend a greater proportion of their income on energy expenses, these deregulatory measures would disproportionately hurt them. Similarly, the significant health and climate benefits sacrificed with these rescissions disproportionately harm people with compromised health and communities with high exposure to pollution or weather impacts.
In sum, if the choice is between keeping money in the federal Treasury and reimbursing low-income individuals for medical treatment, DOGE has decided the individuals don't count. If the choice is between financial institutions' profits and their low-income customers' savings, the customers don't count. And, predictably, individuals overburdened by energy costs don't count either. It's not that these Americans' interests lost out in a fair comparison of policy choices—their interests were ignored altogether. That's the DOGE philosophy.
DOGE is not acting as a rogue agency within the Trump administration—the exclusive focus on one side of the ledger is a guiding philosophy across this White House. Indeed, the centerpiece of President Donald Trump's legislative agenda, contained in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is a massive tax cut that will decrease the federal government's yearly tax receipts by hundreds of billions of dollars, far exceeding the $10 billion savings from HHS cuts of ACA benefits. Why does the Trump administration want to save money from the public taxman in the HHS case but deplete the public taxman of far more money in the tax bill? The answer is that the beneficiaries of the bill are powerful corporations (like the beneficiaries of the CFPB and DOE regulatory repeals) and wealthy individuals . And the bill hurts working-class Americans , as do the deregulatory measures for which DOGE claims credit.
Though Trump asserted , at Musk's Oval Office farewell, that “DOGE has installed geniuses” to conduct its work, DOGE's fuzzy math should earn a failing grade. But these are not random errors resulting perhaps from the inexperience of 20-year-old staffers . They reflect the Trump administration's carefully constructed worldview, in which the powerful and wealthy count and working-class Americans do not.
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