I Thought DOGE Would Be a Joke (Turns Out, It’s a Wrecking Ball)

DOGE’s Secret Sauce and $84B in Savings (So Far)

Trump’s reelection sent shockwaves through Washington, but nothing has rattled the establishment more than his creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Not that anyone’s surprised—government and efficiency go together like a politician and an honest day’s work.

Now, look—I’ve had my reservations about DOGE. And for good reason. After all, it was originally envisioned as a Federal Advisory Committee, meaning it would have no real authority to implement changes directly. Instead, it could only provide recommendations and advice to the President and agencies.

The Grace Commission under Reagan, a similar effort in the 1980s to identify government waste, proved just how difficult—if not impossible—it is to take on Washington’s entrenched bureaucracy in this form.

Note: You can read how the Reagan Revolution was derailed by the Washington political process in less than half a year in a book called The Triumph of Politics by David Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan administration. I strongly recommend it.

As I put it in a recent piece:

The upshot is that any recommendation from the DOGE Commission, if it ever sees daylight, will land on the desk of a bureaucrat whose budget it targets. Their first response will be a memo—ten times longer than the original proposal—arguing why it’s absurd, harmful, and impractical. Then it becomes mired in legal challenges, with cases bouncing between courts for years. The legal back-and-forth is endless, and while the White House may occasionally win, each legal battle is an isolated case and requires enormous effort.

Well, now we know—President Trump took DOGE in a different direction than expected (more on that below)… but even setting that aside, after looking deeper and talking to people in the know, I have to admit—I may have underestimated DOGE. More specifically, I underestimated Trump’s efficiency czar, Elon Musk, and his knack for sidestepping the usual bureaucratic traps.

Here’s what I mean…

Just weeks into DOGE’s fight against the Deep State, it’s obvious that Musk’s brainchild operates more like a tech startup—fast, agile, and focused on delivering results. I mean, just look at Team DOGE—instead of bringing in career bureaucrats or Washington insiders, he handpicked young engineers from Silicon Valley, Austin, and even Eastern Europe, all under 30 years old.

One of them, a 24-year-old Estonian coder, developed a fraud-detection algorithm that flagged over $2 billion in illicit transactions for private banks. Another, a 26-year-old AI specialist, helped optimize Tesla’s supply chain automation. Then there’s Luke Farritor, who created an algorithm capable of reading text from carbonized ancient scrolls, winning a $250,000 prize from the Vesuvius Challenge. (Here’s a quick clip showing how he did it.)

Notice a pattern? No Beltway insiders. No political appointees. Just young, hyper-competent tech professionals leveraging AI and automation (to cut through waste faster than any government watchdog ever has).

Another key strategy? Publicity. DOGE isn’t waiting for agencies to act—it’s making its findings public before legal challenges can even be filed. Instead of quietly reporting waste to the White House, DOGE posts its discoveries directly on Musk’s X platform, putting agencies on defense immediately.

Trump's Masterstroke

It’s all pretty smart. But what’s even smarter is how President Trump and Musk created DOGE in the first place.

Instead of starting from scratch, they took an existing agency already tied to White House authority—the U.S. Digital Service (USDS)—changed its name, rewrote its mission, and turned it into a government wrecking ball.

Here’s a snippet from Trump’s Executive Order 14158, "Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency," issued January 20, 2025:

As you can see, they even kept the same acronym, turning USDS into the "United States DOGE Service.”

This was a strategic masterstroke. Had they tried to create DOGE from the ground up, Democrats and career bureaucrats would have blocked its funding immediately. But by repurposing an existing agency, DOGE inherited USDS’s budget and was operational from Day 1—no need for a separate funding bill.

Beyond the funding, the U.S. Digital Service already had infrastructure in place—offices, employees, and access to federal records, IT systems, and agency infrastructure. That meant DOGE could tap into government data immediately, enforce compliance without new laws, and embed itself in the bureaucracy, making it harder for the deep state to push back.

The other thing President Trump’s order did was set an 18-month timeline for DOGE, expiring on July 4, 2026.

Now, if you’re wondering why that’s a good thing, it’s simple: a limited timeline means the Deep State can’t stall it indefinitely.

Dragging cases through years of bureaucratic delays until reformers give up or a new administration takes over is one of their oldest tricks. But with DOGE set to expire in 18 months, bureaucrats can’t just “wait it out” without serious backlash.

And it’s not just agencies—this affects court battles too. If deep-state operators try to tie DOGE up in court for years, they risk losing by default when DOGE exposes the waste before the case even concludes.

Now, I’m not saying Musk’s team will magically avoid (or win) every legal challenge. In fact, we’ve already seen a federal judge temporarily block Trump from placing USAID employees on leave after DOGE started gutting the agency.

But given all the things working in its favor, DOGE now actually has a shot.

Scrapping the Nonsense

Funny enough, the original USDS was created by none other than Obama in 2014 to “modernize government software." Hard to imagine a more neutral, technocratic goal....

Under DOGE, though, the newly revamped USDS has been doing a lot more than that.

Alongside their ongoing fight with the bloated mess that is USAID, DOGE has helped cancel over $1 billion in wasteful federal contracts. For instance, the Department of Education scrapped 89 research projects worth $881 million and 29 DEI training grants totaling $101 million, including programs on “histories of oppression” and “privilege.”

A smaller but especially satisfying win for me was the cancellation of funding for a museum exhibit dedicated to Dr. Anthony Fauci (don’t ask me why anyone thought that was a good idea in the first place). That was part of a broader effort that wiped out $182 million in unnecessary administrative spending at the Department of Health and Human Services.

All these efforts add up to real-world results. Just take a look at this—the U.S. Debt Clock recently added a DOGE “clock” to their site, tracking the cuts made since Donald Trump was sworn in 22 days ago. Just hit play—it’s pretty satisfying to watch.

At the time of filming, it was around $80 billion—now it’s coming up on $84 billion.

How is DOGE racking up savings this fast? Clearly, it’s not just from canceled DEI contracts.

The U.S. Debt Clock reports that the DOGE clock reflects “real-time savings from reducing government waste, fraud, and abuse”, which lines up with what we’ve been seeing—agencies forced to return unspent funds, contracts getting slashed, and wasteful programs getting shut down.

Now, $83 billion might not seem like much compared to the sheer scale of U.S. debt (which you can also see in the clip above), but it’s a start.

If the current pace holds, DOGE could theoretically save taxpayers $1.38 trillion by January 2026—nearly 70% of Musk’s promised $2 trillion in annual cuts.

Regards,

Lau Vegys

P.S. Can DOGE really save $1.4 trillion by next year? Honestly, I doubt it. Legal challenges are just beginning, and Democrats and Deep State operatives will fight tooth and nail to keep their gravy train running. But you know what? I’m not worried. Because there’s something else that matters here more than the raw numbers—the exposure. The longer DOGE keeps pulling back the curtain, the harder it gets for the system to justify its waste and corruption. The Deep State can fight all it wants, but once people see where their money is really going, there’s no unseeing it.