The Boston Globereported that a federal judge in Boston blocked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”s plan to reduce the number of vaccines required for children.
MAHA indeed!
Some people still believe in science.
A federal judge in Boston has temporarily blocked federal health officials from cutting the number of vaccines recommended for every child, and says US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likely violated federal procedures in revamping a key vaccine advisory committee.
The decision Monday halts an order by Kennedy — announced in January — to end broad recommendations for all children to be vaccinated against flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, some forms of meningitis and RSV.
Leading medical groups voiced alarm at the changes. The American Academy of Pediatrics and some other groups amended a lawsuit filed in July, asking the judge to stop the government from scaling back the nation’s childhood vaccination schedule.
The judge also says Kennedy’s reconstitution of the vaccine advisory panel likely violated federal law. He ordered the appointments — and all decisions made by the reformed committee — put on hold.
After decades of bashing public schools and advocating for privatization, charters, and vouchers, grumpy education reformers should familiarize themselves with the grand successes of Sahli Negassi.
Sahli is a remarkable young man who recently learned that he scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT in reading and math.
He is a senior at West Orange High School in West Orange, New Jersey.
He didn’t go to a charter school or a fancy private school or a religious school, nor was he homeschooled. He went to public schools in West Orange.
Sahli was born in the U.S. to a family of Eritrean immigrants.
During his four years at West Orange High School, Sahli Negassi balanced two sports, served as president of two clubs and excelled in multiple Advanced Placement classes.
And as if that weren’t impressive enough, he recently achieved another milestone — one that fewer than a 1,000 students nationwide reach each year.
He received a perfect score on both the reading and math sections of the SAT. He hopes to be admitted to Harvard and eventually become a lawyer.
Negassi earned a near-perfect score on his first attempt, one that most would be happy with. But, he then took the test again and answered every question correctly, earning a 1600.
“I came into class and I was like, ‘I can do better,’” Negassi said.
Between classes and extracurriculars, he somehow found time to prepare for the test on his own, using free online resources….
His strategy, Negassi said, was all about preparation. Through practice questions, he learned that the SAT isn’t a test of intelligence — it’s about pattern recognition, memorization and time management, Negassi said.
“Preparation for the test fell on me, it was no tutor … it was me and whatever website I could find,” he said Thursday. “I was comfortable applying the skills I had trained and when the time came, it was no pressure.”
Negassi was born in New York City and raised in West Orange.
He credits his father, who taught him to read before he even entered grade school, with laying the foundation for his success. It was the love and sacrifice of his parents that instilled in him the unwavering determination he carries today, Negassi said.
Beyond academics, Negassi is deeply involved in extracurricular activities at West Orange High School. He has been a dedicated member of the cross-country and track teamssince seventh grade and spent two seasons on the color guard. He is also the president of the math team, chapter president of the National Honor Society, a varsity chess team member and part of the Royal Strings ensemble. His involvement in multiple honor societies speaks to his well-rounded excellence.
Sahli played in the String Quartet of the West Orange Music Departnent and was inducted into its honor society two years ago. At the induction ceremony, The String Quartet (Theo Brinkerhoff, Andrew Chan, Alexa Dias, Maya Kirton, Sahli Negassi, Henry Pfeifer) performed “Air” from “The Water Music Suite” by Handel.
I would like to know more about his family, but little is said about them in the coverage. Nothing has been reported about when they immigrated to the U.S. or their occupations.
One of the key features of the “Mississippi Miracle” is the retention of third-graders who do not score well enough to enter fourth grade. Third-graders with low reading scores are held back for an extra year.
Critics of the “Miracle” say that holding back the lowest scoring third-graders inflates the fourth grade scores.
But what about the effects of retention in the students who are held back?
Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reports on a new study that found negative, long-term effects of third-grade retention.
It’s an age-old debate with an emerging conventional wisdom: Third graders should not move on to the next grade if they are still struggling to read.
There’s both logic and evidence behind this policy. Studies have found that students have higher test scores after they’re held back. This practice may also have played a role in helping Mississippi make remarkable improvements in recent years.A chorus of policymakers and journalists have insisted with growing confidence that others should replicate the state’s model.
But a new study offers a warning about the downside risks of retention. Third graders who had to repeat a grade in Texas were far less likely to graduate from high school or earn a good living as young adults, nearly two decades later. The harmful effects were quite large and came despite initial improvements in test scores.
“Retaining low-achieving students in third grade further deepens educational and income inequalities,” writes Jiee Zhong, an economics professor at Miami University.
The findings are hardly the last word on this topic. But they complicate the evidence base for retention at a time when more states — like Arkansas, Indiana, and West Virginia — are adopting this policy.
The paper, set to be published in an economics journal, examines an early 2000s Texas policy to hold back struggling readers. Students had three chances to pass the state exam.
Zhong, the researcher, looked at those who just barely missed the passing score versus those who just reached it. These students were essentially identical — the only difference was a few questions right or wrong on the test. Yet those handful of questions changed the trajectory of many students’ lives by determining whether they would be held back. This also created a natural experiment that allowed Zhong to compare the two groups of students, thus isolating the effect of retention.
Failing the exam wasn’t a guarantee that students would repeat the grade — parents could seek exemptions — but it dramatically increased their chances. Relative to the overall student population, the retained students were more likely to be low-income, Black or Hispanic, and still learning English.
In the short term, the results were promising. By the time retained students finished fourth grade, their test scores were much higher. But there were warning signs. Students missed more school after they were held back. As the years went on, the test score gains, relative to non-retained students, started to fade. In middle school, the students who had been held back were more likely to exhibit violent behavior (although this remained rare).
By the end of high school, retained students were 9 percentage points less likely to graduate, compared to similar students who weren’t forced to repeat third grade. This is a very large effect. Even those students who graduated typically did so a year later, reflecting the extra year from being held back.
At the age of 26, the previously retained students, now young adults, earned less money than if they hadn’t been held back. Again, the effect was substantial: nearly $3,500, a decline of 19%.
To finish reading the article, please open the link.
The “Mississippi Miracle” seems to be too good to be true. The scores of Mississippi fourth-graders have risen sharply on NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Supporters of the Miracle attribute the dramatic increase to the state’s adoption of the “science of reading” curriculum, teacher training in the “science of reading,” and holding back third-grade students who aren’t reading well enough.
This formula is especially appealing to Republicans because nothing need be done to reduce the children’s poverty or improve their living conditions. Conservative states have hailed the “Mississippi Miracle” because it relieves them of any responsibility to create jobs or change the conditions in which the poor live. It’s a low-cost cure: Just raise reading scores and prosperity will follow.
The story of the Mississippi Miracle also appeals to blue states because they are convinced there is a quick and easy way to end the perennial “reading crisis.” So they too have passed legislation to require all reading teachers to adopt the “science of reading.”
Critics of the “Miracle” say that the practice of holding back low-performing third-graders artificially inflates the fourth grade scores. They also point to eighth grade scores to say that there was no miracle. Eighth grade scores are more important that fourth grade scores because they show longer-term effects of reading instruction.
He begins a recent post with a quote from scholar Bruce Baker:
On NAEP Grade 8 Scores: “a better indicator of the cumulative effects of a system on student learning than 4th grade assessments.” Bruce Baker, February 11, 2026
He writes:
The media, political leaders, and education reformers are making a mistake about reading reform well explained in the parable of the blind men and the elephant.
In this case, many are rushing to make over-stated claims about reading reform in Mississippi by hyper-focusing on limited and distorted data—grade 4 NAEP scores on reading.
First, research details that states implementing reading reform have achieved some short-term test score increases in grade 4; however, those gains disappear by grade 8. And more damning, the determining factor in successful reform is exclusively grade retention policies (not teacher training, reading programs, direct instruction, etc.).
Next, grade retention in Mississippi has been analyzed revealing that retention distorts those scores, resulting in a statistical manipulation of the data and not higher student achievement. In short:
Yet, a new story has emerged claiming that Black students in MS are outperforming Black students in other states, notably California:
Suggesting that Black students are being better served in MS than CA is at least misleading. In fact, Black students in CA, GA, LA, MA, and notably the Department of Defense (DoDEA) schools outperform Black students in MS at grade 8.
But an even better story is that student achievement among Black and Hispanic students is very complicated, especially when you consider that states have dramatically different percentages of these populations of students.
Further, if we return to the parable from the opening, even better data at grade 8 is not the full picture.
In MS and throughout the US, Black students are still suffering the consequences of the persistent race gap in achievement (most states have the same gap as 1998, including MS).
And Black Americans remain trapped in the burden of racial inequity both in schools and in their communities.
The misleading stories about MS using grade 4 NAEP data are designed to promote a “beating the odds” story—one that isn’t true—but all students in the US would be better served if we chose not to seek those who beat the odds, but to change the odds so that no one—especially children—would have to overcome those inequities in the first place.
Brendan Carr, selected as chairman of the Federal Communications Conmission, threatened to revoke the licenses of stations that were too negative in their coverage of the war in Iran.
Ann Telnaes was an editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post. She drew a cartoon showing billionaires bowing down to Trump. One of them was Jeff Bezos, owner of the Post. Her editor wouldn’t publish her cartoon. She resigned.
In a startling attack on freedom of the press, Brendan Carr–chairman of the Federal Communications Commission–threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters whose coverage of the war on Iran is negative. With Trump ally, the billionaire Ellison family, buying control of CBS and CNN, Carr’s threat is ominous. One of the first steps of fascist leaders is to gain control of or silence the media.
The job of the media in a democracy is to inform the public, not to serve as a propaganda arm of the government.
President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman is threatening to revoke the licenses of news broadcasters over their coverage of the Iran war.
Brendan Carr, the head of the agency, warned broadcast news organizations on Saturday to “correct course,” following the president’s rants over news coverage of his war with Iran, including stories about U.S. aircraft tankers sustaining damage in a strike.
“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr said in a post on X, without naming any media outlets. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”
The FCC did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
Carr referenced a Truth Social post from Trump Saturday morning denying reports that five U.S. Air Force refueling planes were struck at a military base in Saudi Arabia. Trump directed his screed at the The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, The New York Times and “other Lowlife ‘Papers’ and Media,” claiming they “actually want us to lose the War.”
In his own social media post later in the day, Carr pointed to Trump’s 2024 election win as an example of the lack of trust in the media from the American people.
“When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong,” the FCC chairman said. [Editor’s note:Trump did not win a landslide victory in 2024. Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, while Harris won 48.3%.]
Carr’s threat was met with immediate blowback from free speech advocates and political figures.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment advocacy group, called Carr’s statement an “authoritarian warning,” adding, “Again and again, Carr’s tenure as FCC chairman has been marked by his shameless willingness to bully and threaten our free press. But even by Carr’s standards, today’s hypocrisy is shocking — and dangerous….”
Carr, an author of Project 2025 whom Trump hand-picked to run the FCC, has sought to use his powerful position to bend media outlets — and late-night talk show hosts — to the Trump administration’s will. Under his watch, the FCC has opened investigations into multiple news outlets and threatened to strip the licenses of broadcasting companies deemed to have covered the administration and the president unfavorably.
But his latest missive took the administration’s assault on what the president routinely calls the “fake news” a step further. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said in an X post, “This is a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed. This is worse than the comedian stuff, and by a lot. The stakes here are much higher. He’s not talking about late night shows, he’s talking about how a war is covered.”
Trump and members of his administration have repeatedly bemoaned the media coverage of the war. Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused the press of being too focused on American troops’ deaths than the military’s successes.
“But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news,” Hegseth said. “I get it; the press only wants to make the president look bad. But try for once to report the reality.”
“Some in this crew, in the press, just can’t stop,” he said.
Late on Friday night, Trump railed against coverage of the war, saying on Truth Social: “The Fake News Media hates to report how well the United States Military has done against Iran.”
It’s an ICE agent in Minneapolis, looking fearsome. His gun appears to be pointed at the photographer’s head or just over his right shoulder.
He is standing guard as other federal agents are cuffing a person who is face-down on the ground. This is a common tactic. Instead of cuffing a suspect as they stand, the armed ones throw them to the ground, face down, and three or four immobilize him or her, then cuff them.
I immediately noticed that this aggressive guy was wearing combat pants that had a large hole in them.
Adam Kinzinger is the Republican Congressman who was brave enough to say that Trump inspired an insurrection on January 6, 2021. He was brave enough, with Liz Cheney, to join the January 6 Committee investigating the insurrection. Both Kinzinger and Cheney were reviled by other Republicans for daring to question Trump’s lies.
On his blog, he speaks out with independence and courage. In this one, he describes the Pentagon’s splurge on delicacies and luxury items:
For years we have heard the same talking point from the Trump administration and its allies: government waste is the problem. The answer, they said, was to slash programs, dismantle agencies, and create flashy new outfits like the so-called fake agency Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — to root out fraud and save taxpayer money. The pitch was simple. Government was bloated, and adults were finally back in charge.
But the reality looks very different.
According to a watchdog analysis, the Department of Defense spent $93.4 billion on grants and contracts in September 2025 alone, with nearly half of that money spent in the final five business days of the fiscal year.
Anyone who has worked inside government understands that the end of the fiscal year can become a mad scramble to spend money before it disappears, but the scale of what happened here raises serious questions about priorities.
Some of the spending is almost comical if it weren’t real taxpayer dollars. The Pentagon spent $6.9 million on lobster tail, $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $15.1 million on ribeye steak, and $1 million on salmon in September alone. There were 272 orders of doughnuts totaling $139,224, along with $124,000 for ice cream machines and $12,000 for fruit basket stands.
That same spending spree included $60,000 for Herman Miller recliners, a $98,000 Steinway piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, and millions spent on electronics like Apple and Samsung devices. Even more staggering, the Defense Department spent $3.5 billion on cable television services.
At the same time Americans were struggling with rising grocery costs, borrowing money just to buy food, and falling behind on car payments, the Pentagon was filling shopping carts with lobster and ribeye.
What makes this particularly jarring is that this administration simultaneously dismantled programs that actually matter to people around the world. Under the banner of eliminating waste, they gutted much of the United States Agency for International Development. For decades, USAID helped prevent famine, stabilized fragile regions, and projected American compassion and leadership around the globe.
That money fed starving people.
But apparently feeding the world was wasteful. Lobster for the Pentagon was not.
I spent years in uniform flying the RC-26B surveillance aircraft with the Air Force. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t flashy. But it was effective. The aircraft supported counter-terrorism missions and provided intelligence that helped protect American troops on the ground.
In 2023, the program was cancelled.
Why? Because the Air Force didn’t want to spend about $20 million a year to keep it going.
Think about that for a moment. The entire annual cost of a program that directly supported operational missions was less than what the Pentagon spent on lobster tail in a single month. Programs that actually protect American lives were eliminated in the name of efficiency, while luxury purchases and end-of-year spending binges rolled on.
This is the fundamental problem with the politics of “waste.” The loudest critics of government spending are often the least interested in actually fixing it. They are interested in headlines and ideological targets. Programs that help poor people or foreign populations are easy political punching bags. Quiet spending inside the defense bureaucracy is not.
Now, a quick aside. Yearly budgeting and spending can be difficult. Let’s just take my personal Congressional budget per year of around $1.3 million. That covered everything from salaries, new printers, paper, and correspondence, to travel. If I went over my budget for the year, I was personally on the hook for the overspending. So naturally, we saved a lot of expenses for the end of the fiscal year so that we could make sure we stayed within the allowance. Some end of year splurging is understood, but this amount from DOD? Simply insane.
Real fiscal responsibility is not about cutting programs that feed the hungry or abandoning alliances that stabilize the world. It’s about making serious choices about priorities.
If the government wants to talk about waste, we should start with the billions spent on furniture, electronics, luxury food, and end-of-year spending sprees that do little to strengthen national security.
Because the truth is simple.
We didn’t stop feeding the world to save money.
We stopped feeding the world so someone else could buy lobster.
TheWall Street Journalposted a story about a tax economist who bet his life savings ($342,000) that the DOGE cuts would have no impact on government spending. He won. His bet returned $470,000, but the Journal pointed out that he probably didn’t win much because he took his money out of the stock market and missed gains and his winnings would be taxed. So there.
But seriously, what did Musk and his DOGE team accomplish?
Musk began his stint as leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency soon after Trump was inaugurated. Trump gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted so long as he cut the federal budget.
Musk boldly proclaimed that he would slash $2 trillion in government spending. He soon cut projected savings to $1 trillion. He didn’t come close to meeting his goal.
Analyses since then have concluded that his young team of computer nerds saved nowhere near that amount and that many of their “savings” were either overstated or false.
DOGE did fire hundreds of thousands of civil servants, but the cost of firing them was high and did not produce savings. As a result of losing senior civil servants, many government agencies may be less efficient today because of losing their knowledge and experience. Unions went to court; workers were fired, rehired, fired, rehired.
Musk boasted about shutting down foreign aid (USAID), but the cost there will be in loss of human life. International authorities believe that 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, will die by 2030 because of the cut-off of U.S. food and medicine.
The study, by researchers from the United States, Spain, Brazil and Mozambique, estimates that 91 million deaths were prevented between 2001 and 2021 in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) due to programs supported by USAID, the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid worldwide. However, recent U.S. foreign aid cuts could reverse this progress and lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5.
The cost of USAID to each American: $0.17 per day. Despite the sure death of people who needed USAID to survive, Musk celebrated the death of USAID at the national conservative political conference, dancing around with a jewel-encrusted chainsaw in his hands.
David Farenholdt and three colleagues at the New York Times published a summary of the impact of DOGE in December 2025. The title was “How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?”
The overview:The group’s biggest claims were largely incorrect, a New York Times analysis found. And its many smaller cuts added up to few savings.
The story begins:
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government — slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants.
But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.
How is that possible?
One big reason, according to a New York Times analysis: Many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong. And while the group did make thousands of smaller cuts, jolting foreign aid recipients, American small businesses and local service providers, those amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.
At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Mr. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations,” and said their demise had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.
Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.
Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate — reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend…
To sort DOGE’s bogus cuts from its successes, The Times looked at federal records for the 40 largest items on the “Wall of Receipts.” In at least 28 cases, DOGE got it wrong.
Its errors included:
Double-counting. DOGE took credit for canceling the same Department of Energy grant twice, adding $500 million in duplicate savings.
Timeline errors. One contract that DOGE claimed credit for ending had actually been terminated by the Biden administration, weeks before DOGE began its work. Three more items on DOGE’s list had simply expired. These were pandemic-era contracts with pharmacies that provided free Covid-19 testing for the uninsured. They were originally allowed to spend up to a combined $12.2 billion, but they never came close to that level. Then, in May, the three contracts ended on schedule.DOGE still claimed credit for killing them, highlighting $6 billion in savings.
Misclassifications. Seven programs that DOGE claimed to have terminated are not dead, including four that were resurrected by court rulings.
Exaggerations. In 16 cases, DOGE greatly exaggerated its cuts. Many, including those two large Defense Department contracts, relied on an accounting trick that produced “savings” with little real-world effect. DOGE lowered the official “ceiling value” of contracts — reducing the theoretical limit on what the government could eventually pay — without changing its actual spending….
In total, the Trump administration terminated more contracts this year than the government did last year. But the actual dollars “de-obligated” — money the government had committed to spend but then pulled back — were at most a couple of billion dollars higher in 2025 than in recent years, according to contracting experts.
For decades, the government has funded outside analysts to study whether taxpayer-funded programs actually work, and how to improve them. It is the kind of work that would seem to serve DOGE’s mission of making government more efficient.
But DOGE canceled some of these contracts as well.…
A Chaotic Process
Many of the errors DOGE has left in its wall were rooted in the chaotic process of how it identified cuts — or told agencies to.
DOGE was staffed by outsiders from the business and tech worlds, without much experience in the arcana of government programs. The early approach to measure savings by subtracting spent money from ceiling values helped drive its choices, and its high error rate.
Dr. Sunny Patel, who was a top official at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said he and his colleagues were given a dollar target and an Excel formula for calculating savings. DOGE officials suggested contracts to cancel, and agency officials fought to protect ones they viewed as most critical by offering others instead.
“You had to hit the hard number, and there’s only so many things that you can cut,” he said. “So it was like, ‘Oh, I guess we’re going to offer this up,’ because this is the least bad thing to do.”
In other cases, government workers came to understand DOGE’s process and fed the group nearly finished contracts with high ceiling values, rather than contracts that would significantly reduce spending.
Many of DOGE’s initial broad cuts and layoffs were later put on hold or reversed by litigation — a fact DOGE never went back to the wall to update. That litigation also cost the government money.
The Port Discovery Children’s Museum in Baltimore had won a $200,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (I.M.L.S.) to fund a program in which museum staff members went into child care centers connected to public schools in Baltimore. There they would teach parents how playing with their children could foster child development and family relationships.
On April 28, the government sent the museum a form letter terminating the grant and half its funds. The program no longer met agency priorities, the letter said, “and no longer serves the interest of the United States.”
“We were serving low-income families in Title I schools,” said Sonja Cendak, the vice president for development and marketing for the museum. “I don’t know what to say.”
The DOGE wall shows that it canceled more than 1,000 I.M.L.S. grants to local museums, libraries and history centers. States and the American Library Association sued, and courts required the grants to be reinstated. The Baltimore museum later received most of its funds. And on Dec. 3, I.M.L.S. announced it was reinstating all grants. But those grants still appear as cuts on the DOGE website, collectively “saving” the government about $134 million.
But DOGE achieved one of its undisclosed aims: It gained access to confidential Social Security files, which were quickly hoovered up by the tech-savvy DOGE kids. According to the Washington Post, “Members of DOGE …had obtained one of the government’s most protected databases, risking the security of hundreds of millions of Americans’ private Social Security records.” The Justice Department admitted “that the Social Security Administration had discovered a secret agreement between a DOGE employee and an unidentified political advocacy group. The agreement called for sharing Social Security data with the aim of overturning election results in certain states.”
DOGE busted government unions, wrecked the civil service, and demoralized career employees in every department.
DOGE created confusion and chaos in the federal workplace; certainly it demoralized career workers, who didn’t know from day do day whether or not they were still employed. They were fired, recalled, fired, recalled.
Blumenthal asserted that DOGE was actually a huge money-waster:
U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) released a Minority staff report today unveiling that Elon Musk’s brainchild, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has generated at least $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government between January 20, 2025, and July 18, 2025. The report, “The $21.7 Billion Blunder: Analyzing the Waste Generated by DOGE,” follows a months-long investigation into Elon Musk and DOGE and is the most comprehensive effort to date to quantify taxpayer dollars squandered by DOGE despite its ostensible goal of eliminating government waste.
“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims. At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars,” said Blumenthal. “As my PSI investigation has shown, DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money. I urge Inspectors General to take up our investigation’s findings and initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s careless actions.”
PSI’s comprehensive review of publicly available resources and independent analysis has found that DOGE has generated $21.7 billion in waste so far this year, including:
$14.8 billion through its Deferred Resignation Program for paying approximately 200,000 employees not to work for up to eight months.
$6.1 billion for over 100,000 employees who have been involuntarily separated from federal service or who remain on prolonged periods of administrative leave pending separation, many of whom were paid to not do their jobs for weeks or months.
$263 million in lost interest and fee income at the Department of Energy due to dozens of loan freezes meant to finance key utility projects supporting energy affordability and grid resilience.
$155 million in time costs to require nearly a million employees to send weekly accomplishment emails to the Office of Personnel Management amounting to millions of hours of wasted time.
$110 million on food aid and medical supplies spoiling in warehouses, set to be destroyed at a further cost to taxpayers.
$66 million by underutilizing thousands of professional staff to perform entry-level duties for weeks on end, including over $138,000 for paying scientists to check guests in at national parks.
$41.8 million to relocate over 250 staff members at one agency closer to a physical office.
$38 million in sunk costs on unrecoverable investments in science and technology across four projects at the National Institutes of Health and the Internal Revenue Service.
$1.7 million in time costs to require employees to unnecessarily justify routine expenses at three agencies, including window washing at the Federal Aviation Administration.
PSI’s estimate of DOGE-generated waste does not include other direct and indirect forms of waste that may add millions or even billions of dollars to projected waste, such as substantial administrative and legal expenses, undermining public safety and natural disaster response, human costs and health threats, and other hidden economic costs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 