The Government Accountability Office reviewed Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and discovered it inflated its claimed savings by a significant margin. DOGE said it saved $110 billion. The GAO said that number was wrong. The actual cuts fell somewhere below that figure. More importantly, DOGE promised $2 trillion in cuts total. It missed by roughly $1.89 trillion.
That's not a rounding error. That's not close. That's the financial equivalent of aiming for the moon and hitting your own foot.
Musk runs Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and apparently a federal cost-cutting initiative that can't count. The man who sends rockets into orbit somehow can't subtract government spending accurately. Inspiring stuff.
The nonpartisan watchdog used actual data instead of vibes. They checked the numbers. The numbers didn't check out. DOGE claimed victory anyway because in 2026 you can just say anything and half the country will believe you.
Retail traders will now pivot to trading stocks based on imaginary government savings that never happened. They'll buy defense contractors because surely the savings came from somewhere. They'll sell municipal bonds because efficiency sounds bad for cities. They'll lose money both ways and blame Jerome Powell.
DOGE promised to revolutionize federal spending. It delivered inflated press releases and a PowerPoint deck someone made in thirty minutes. The GAO took one look at the math and said no. The savings weren't there. The cuts weren't real. The $2 trillion was a fantasy.
Somewhere a guy named Derek just put his entire Roth IRA into a government efficiency ETF that doesn't exist yet because he heard Musk was involved.
Photo by Kanchanara on Unsplash
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