9 hours Ago By Zachary Shahan
Last Updated on: 13th March 2025, 11:44 pm As others have pointed out in a comment thread today, DOGE (the “Department of Government Efficiency”) is not actually creating “government efficiency” just because that’s in the name and Elon Musk and his team of 20-year-olds are mass firing government employees. Without actually evaluating what’s needed and who should be in their roles, DOGE is just haphazardly crippling government agencies, which is going to make it much harder for the government to function efficiently. They have laid off thousands of “probationary employees,” seemingly because they think these are just-hired employees who are not needed.
Or maybe the 20-year-olds and Musk thought “probationary” meant they were problem employees who had been cautioned but not fired for doing something badly or wrong. (It wouldn’t be the craziest conclusion they’ve come to.) However, anyone who had just been promoted would be in a “probationary” period.
I was at a hotel a couple of weeks ago because my daughter was in a regional robotics tournament, and I was talking to a couple of people over breakfast about the disaster in the White House. The guy mentioned that he had a friend in the Social Security Administration who had worked there for 15 years, was just promoted, and was laid off because of this idiotic policy. It’s completely illogical to mass fire people who were doing such good work that they had just been promoted! (Luckily, a judge just ordered that the government needs to reinstate these thousands of employees, but we’ll see what actually happens in the end.
) Okay, to the title of this article. Let’s look at three or four ways DOGE activity is helping tech billionaires, but not you and not the US. Adding more IRS employees is a huge net positive for the US budget.
Wait, that doesn’t make sense — you have to pay these IRS agents, and they can’t be cheap. The thing is, you need a lot of IRS agents in order to do more than the basics, and more than the basics involves specifically going after fraud from super rich people and corporations that have top lawyers to fight for them and drag things out in court. Without adequate resources, the IRS can’t go after such tax fraud and tax evasion.
Normal people probably get concerned about the IRS adding agents. What if we did something wrong on mistake? But that’s not what this is about. The IRS is not wasting resources going after minor tax screwups.
The problem is that many very rich people and corporations have a tendency of trying to push the boundaries of what’s legal tax evasion, and that can lead to massive losses in tax revenue. And some are just blatantly committing tax fraud but there aren’t enough IRS agents to notice or to adequately pursue and prosecute them. (Side note: If you go on Trulia or Zillow or something and zoom into some rich neighborhoods, go to the tab that shows you crimes in the area.
You won’t find a lot of stolen cars or busted drug deals, but you will find most of the crimes in the area were fraud. It’s just the truth.) “A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that ‘would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,’ in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy ,” ProPublica writes .
Indeed, $13,000 an hour is surely far, far more than an IRS agent costs — and good luck finding a better ROI! For more on this topic, also see: “ IRS says its hiring surge and funding boost could generate $560B more than it thought “ “ 5 reasons why the Republican claim about 87,000 new IRS agents is an exaggeration “ So, why was it such a high priority for DOGE to lay off IRS staff? Well, that should be obvious by now, right? Billionaire Elon Musk doesn’t want to be bothered by IRS auditors, and his billionaire friends Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Donald Trump, and several others don’t want IRS agents looking into their taxes either. They are most likely robbing the US and firing the cops who would investigate the robbery. But even if these people aren’t robbing the US, others are.
That doesn’t help the US budget. Others have written about this at length, so you’ve probably seen it, but just in case not: Elon Musk and his companies were the subjects of several investigations , and then Musk conveniently fired the the people leading the investigations. Is there much more to say here? The crazy thing — from a logic of government efficiency point of view — is that inspectors general (IGs) are specifically in place to independently investigate fraud and abuse in their agencies , and Trump firing 17 in his first week in office was an obvious act of corruption that would kill investigations into Trump’s friends, like Elon Musk.
Five IGs were investigating Musk and his companies , and then they were gone and Musk was the investigator. Wonder what he will find..
.. Some of Musk’s billionaire tech friends were also reportedly under investigation.
I wonder how those investigations will go...
. With all of the crazy activity coming out of the White House and DOGE, we are absolutely flooded with wackadoodle news every day. Anyone concerned about real political corruption, nepotism, and disaster has more to consume than 24 hours in a day can handle.
What does that do for tech billionaires engaged in questionable activities? Well, it probably takes a lot of attention off of them. Who has time to investigate or bring attention to problematic activities at Big Tech companies when DOGE is creating so many wild stories every day? Well, there is a 4th thing that in theory is a “benefit” of DOGE. Why does Elon Musk suddenly care so much about saving the government money? The deficit has ballooned under every Republican president in the last several decades.
It’s crazy that Republicans constantly act like they are so concerned about the deficit and then continually drive it up. But there’s an obvious reason for this. They want to pass tax cuts for billionaires, but that just drives up the deficit — massively.
So, they obsess over cutting government expenditures and distract people from the truth. Coming back to Musk, once he cashed in on a big chunk of Tesla stock a few years ago to buy Twitter, he had to pay a lot of taxes on that — reportedly, the most anyone paid in history in one year. I assume this really annoyed him and stuck with him, to the point that he wants to gut the federal government to justify not having to pay more in taxes.
The thing is, the “trickle-down economics” theory that Republicans are so focused on doesn’t actually play out the way they always say it will. Cutting taxes on billionaires and corporations doesn’t lead to a net positive economically. There’s research on this.
In Musk’s case, he makes the argument for trickle-down economics without using the name. He and his Silicon Valley billionaire friends all seem to believe in it. But belief in something doesn’t make it true.
They can try to justify massive tax cuts, but the fact is, this is what causes the massive US deficit. The DOGE cuts may get a lot of headlines and look big on the surface, but they don’t come close to making up for the Trump tax cuts on billionaires. However, being honest, how many people are going to pay enough attention to understand all of this? CleanTechnica's Comment Policy LinkedIn WhatsApp Facebook Bluesky Email Reddit.
