DOGE's Failures Prove the Private Sector and Public Sector Don't Always Mix

I’ve mentioned in the past how my wife and I will occasionally spend our date night performing karaoke. And, not to brag, I have occasionally ended a song (usually Poison’s “Every Rose Has its Thorn”) to thunderous applause from the drunk people at the bar.

However, even on those good nights, I have never once been under the delusion I could sell out a stadium like Bon Jovi or Taylor Swift. In fact, I am convinced it would be very similar to Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency – an embarrassing failure.

OK, I am going to take the high road a bit and say, while I’ve never been a personal fan of Musk, I do respect the success he has had in the private sector, making him the wealthiest person in the world by a large margin. In fact, I’ll take the even higher road and pay President Donald Trump a similar compliment as far as his business successes are concerned.

Here’s the thing with that though. Much like how karaoke doesn’t guarantee a singing career, success in the private sector doesn’t always carry over to the public sector and we are seeing that firsthand with DOGE in several different ways.

One of the most publicized DOGE moves are the ongoing government layoffs that are being conducted en masse to various results. In the private sector, mass layoffs based solely on seniority are a great way for a company to reap financial rewards with little or no repercussions. In the public sector world, it’s something that can be politically damaging because it creates a potential inconvenience for millions or even puts lives at risk. The layoffs at the United States Forestry Service, for example, includes employees who would normally be tasked with wildfire prevention while cuts at the United States Department of Agriculture inadvertently included people who were trying to bring the bird flu problem under control.

There are also the bureaucratic nuances only people who have worked for the federal government for a long time would know. A recent example was the Social Security “fraud” DOGE claimed to find that turned out, according to multiple sources, not to be fraud at all and just a well-known records glitch that costs taxpayers nothing because they were just phantom accounts that were no longer receiving money. It would, however, cost money to correct the problem.

It's like something I personally experienced on the private sector side. I worked for a company some time ago that had easily 1,000 or more phantom accounts that were listed as active but weren’t. Some were customers who changed their minds. Others were dummy accounts created when the billing system was first tested. It didn’t cost the company money to keep those accounts active, so they saw no point in paying someone to go through and delete them.

Even the money DOGE claims to have saved taxpayers is questionable at best. At least one $8 billion claim has been proven to be a typo (it’s only $8 million) while there’s a good chance a large chunk of the other claimed savings (which, according to many independent accounts is about a quarter of what DOGE says it is) will be struck down in court as  the executive branch choosing not to spend money appropriated by Congress is challenged on constitutional grounds, as is the termination of federal employees without the cause their contracts require.

The irony with all of this is the federal government already had a system in place to track down fraud and waste prior to DOGE. The 17 inspectors general that were fired by Trump shortly after taking office (one of the things still being debated in court) were tasked with that job. Based on the difficulty Musk and company are having finding legitimate waste, forcing extreme measures to even reach a fraction of the savings they promised and the need to spread false information to hide their failure, show that system was probably working.

Of course, it helps to have qualified people doing the job.