The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25

This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was slashing more than 80% of the programs funded by USAID. The move comes as the Elon Musk-led Doge continues to add to its running list of cost-saving measures, which it says have now topped $100 billion.
In this episode, we sit down with the Government Accountability Institute's Eric Eggers to discuss the accomplishments of Doge as well as the headwinds it faces in the coming months. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe.
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Joining us now is Eric Eggers, Vice President of the Government Accountability Institute and co-host of The Drill Down with Peter Schweitzer. Eric, thank you so much for joining us.
Always great to talk to you. Hey, John.
It's my pleasure. So look, you guys have been tracking the Doge accomplishments so far.
There's a lot of pressure on Doge, a lot of backlash from the left, some maybe not so organic backlash. But what's the truth? How much has Doge and Musk actually accomplished so far? So I guess it depends on how you want to measure accomplishments.
If we're talking just dollars and cents, I think that their accomplishments are quite quantifiable. They've identified something like $105 billion worth of things that can be cut between a combination of lease terminations, contract cancellations, and then federal employees who will be, let's call it excused from the federal workforce.
And obviously some of those federal government leases can amount to almost a half a billion dollars. They've identified things like software licenses with at least a couple of agencies where you have twice as many software licenses.
I think 37,000 WinZip licenses in the General Services Administration for 13,000 employees. So the examples like that are quite obvious.
but I think they've actually been more successful, John, in changing the way we have conversations about budgeting in the federal government. I'm old enough to remember when Mitt Romney essentially ran for president on this back in 2012 with the platform of we're spending more than we're making.
Our budget deficits are leading to death. It's costing us way too much money and interest.
And the American people largely yawned. And so fast forward 13 years later, now it's something that's leading the news.
You're reporting on this and it's become a focus of the current presidential administration. That's ultimately the success I think Doge has had.
We're making cutting spending cool again, or they are, and we're happy for it. Yeah, I want to talk about that more, the messaging on this.
And X plays a major role in this. We have the guy leading this charge, leading Doge unofficially or officially, however you want to see it, Elon Musk, has his own platform that is constantly pumping out information on this thing.
The American people now are seeing a lot of things exposed in the federal government that's never been exposed before. It wouldn't have been able to be exposed because of the gatekeepers in the legacy media.
Tell us about the impact of social media, also just the marketing sort of wing of the Trump administration. They're very effective.
How has that changed the conversation? Yeah, I think the Trump administration has become the most radically transparent

administration in recent memory, potentially even in American history. I think certainly

in American history, when you consider the fact that everything's being exposed in real time.

And so things like even his conversation with President Zelensky a couple of weeks ago,

it make more sense if you look at it in the context of no, things are no longer pre-packaged

And I think that's quite honestly quite deceitful as certain things were in the Biden administration. Now you're seeing for yourself, you are the first consumer of the organic material and you can decide, hey, what, you know, was President Trump and J.D.
Vance rude or was President Zelensky rude? What happened there? And that's exactly what's happened here. They're saying, listen, we have lots of ridiculous contracts to do things like pay for military members to have conversations about how to have DEI conversations with online avatars.
And you've heard the number of examples of, you know, transgender studies in different countries. And so it's all quite ridiculous.
And so the fact that Elon Musk and his team at X can take the specific examples and give them directly to the American people. I mean, remember, it wasn't that long ago where a lot of other media platforms had employees threatened to quit if anything in a non-complementary way was said about members of the trans movement.
So that's how dramatically different the conversation even is. Not only are we willing to say, listen, I'm not sure spending money on trans related issues is worth tax dollars and you're not threatened with a boycott or being canceled.
That actually now gets elevated by a significant percentage of the American people because that's ultimately what they chose when they chose Donald Trump as president. They said, listen, we just want people to be honest.
We want to stop playing games, not just in terms of what people are told to be our values, but then what they're spending our money on towards those values. Now, to drill down a little bit here, you mentioned leases.
This is something that I know you guys have looked at closely, the cost savings from Doge's reassessment of leases. There's 360 million square feet of real estate that the government has control over.
What are we seeing on that front from this administration? Yeah, so they're willing to cut or proposing to cut up to 25% or a quarter of that space. I think that they're targeting something like a 63% reduction in the public building services division, according to the general services agency, which oversees the federal real estate.
Something like a thousand workers are estimated to be removed from the workforce. And this is just one of a number of agencies that are saying, listen, we're going to take this quite seriously.
Some people have suggested that it's all sort of smoke and mirrors and there's no real follow through. And the fact that there was and will be a vote on a continuing resolution by Congress suggests, well, there was an effort to try to fund everything this year at last year's levels, which some said would maybe neuter Doge's efforts.
But then no less than Secretary of State Marco Rubio has come out and said, listen, USAID, which is under the Department of State, that was the first agency

to be targeted for a thorough analysis by Doge. And Marco Rubio said, listen, now after a six-week

review, we're going to cancel 83% of the programs. That's tens of billions of dollars in savings

represented by 5,200 contracts. And so I think that just shows you that the process is working

and the That's tens of billions of dollars in savings represented by 5,200 contracts. And so I think that just shows you that the process is working.
You have Doge come in from the outside. They identify these things.
They hold them up. And then at President Trump's direction at a recent cabinet meeting, the agency heads themselves are the ones that are going to ultimately kind of put into place those actual cuts.
So I think that's actually how the government is supposed to work. And so I think we're seeing that happen in real time, kind of for the first time in American history.
And now to your point, John, about the pushback, I think that's another sign of how successful Doge has been, because the conversation has changed even around that. So the conversation is no longer like, oh, is that something we should be spending money on? The conversation is, well, yeah, sure, Doge is being effective, but it's a drop in the bucket as compared to what the actual federal deficit is, as if the goal of Doge was something other than just to identify things that the American people would say, we don't want our tax dollars spent on that.
The goal of Doge is not to single-handedly rescue the American budget deficit. The goal of Doge is to eliminate wasteful spending and getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse, and that's what they're doing.
Now, the Internal Revenue Service is another major focus of the administration. What are we seeing in terms of estimates on reduction of staff there? Yeah, it's significant.
It started the Second Trump administration with 100,000 employees, and they're prepared to cut that in at least half, according to some reporting. And so there was a very high profile example of the Biden administration hiring 88,000 more IRS agents.
And there was some talk about giving them weapons. But as of right now, we've got 100,000.
They're suggesting cutting it in half. And of course, some people will say, well, that's no way to run a government.
The Trump administration is making noise about replacing the internal revenue service with the external revenue service with the implementation of new tariffs. It remains to be seen if that happens, and if it does, how much revenue they'll actually bring in.
but the IRS is another one. And based on what we've been able to identify, it does seem,

if you can believe it, John, that cutting the IRS staff by half does seem to be something in a majority of Americans' favor. Wow.
Can't believe it. You know, you mentioned some of the ways this is being reported on and pushed back against by the Democrats, the talking points we're hearing.
We have a legal effort that's a major part of that. Where do do you see the vulnerabilities for Doge and where do you see the clear wins in the future for them? So I would say this is another example of just having an honest conversation in a transparent way about the way government's supposed to work.
We all heard the fact that democracy was on the ballot during the election last year. The fact that Donald Trump won, you saw Democrats protesting during his most recent congressional address that he's a dictator.
The fact that the Supreme Court actually sided with a lower court judge in stopping the freeze on some USAID funding suggests that the multiple levers of government continue to work and that it's not just a unilateral effort on behalf of President Trump to just decree what he wants to happen and everyone else complies. The Supreme Court obviously did not in that instance.
But Congress does appear to be willing to come to his rescue. So there's an effort this week to do something called rescission.
And this is basically, it's an executive order that Ronald Reagan used a lot. In 1981, he proposed 133 rescissions and Congress approved 101 of them.
Basically, it just, he says, listen, I think this is a specific thing that we should no longer fund. We should rescind the funding of it.
And so Congress has the opportunity to do that. There's an expectation that they will attempt to do that on the budget for things like those proposed cuts.
And the good news for congressional Republicans and for the Trump administration is it requires only a simple majority on behalf of Congress to do that, which is good for Republicans because that's all they have. Yeah.
And so far they've held together better than I think a lot of people feared in some of these early challenges that they faced with their very thin majority in the House. We'll see how the Senate holds up.
But so far we've seen all of Trump's nominees get through pretty easily. And I think that's surprised a lot of people.
Well, John, just to your point about the role that Elon Musk is playing, not just from an identification of wasteful spending, but also as essentially a chief marketing officer for this effort. The reason why I think they've had so much success in anything they've attempted to do, including getting his nominees passed and having votes held in a way that's favorable for the Trump administration is largely due to the unwavering support of Elon Musk and the fact that he can use Twitter to put pressure on

vulnerable and potentially weak members of this Trump coalition. And so I think there's the fact

that you saw people like Joni Ernst vote in favor of someone like Pete Hegseth when she'd previously expressed a significant reluctance to do so does speak in part to the power of, let's call it a transparent effort to elevate. Here's somebody who's potentially pushing back on this and they hear from a lot of their constituents and it seems to be working so far.
Yeah, that's a great point. Final question.
In terms of the messaging that Democrats are trying to coalesce around that we're at the whim of a billionaire oligarchy, Bernie Sanders is using that talking point, as are many other Democrats and legacy outlets. Do you see that being effective in winning a significant number of Americans over to their side against the sort of Trump-Musk initiatives? I would say it's at least as effective as creating social media content where you have female members of Congress bouncing up and down as if they were video game avatars.
They should continue to do more of that. It seems to be incredibly effective.
Nothing the Democrats appear to be doing seems to be effective right now. They've gone so far as to suggest that the biggest thing that the doge cuts are doing is hurting veterans it's 2025 john and democrats are now very concerned about the plight of veterans in the federal government 30 of civil service employees are veterans and many have lost jobs and the trump administration is the line you will read in a number of mainstream media reporting accounts of what's happening here.
And the reality is, is that whomever the background is of the people that work for the federal government, at the end of the day, everything that's being done in the name of cutting spending is being identified and posted on the Doge website. And then you have conversations.
And at the end of the day, we we live in a democracy and so people have a chance to see what it is and decide for themselves because you're now seeing local media reporting doing the work of saying listen this these are cuts that are results of what's happened at the federal government and people decide that's hitting too close to home then i think you'll see public effort coming the other way organic grassroots pushback on this And then we'll see if their elected representatives are responsive to that or not. That's how it's supposed to work.
And I think that's where the conversation is today. And meanwhile, for the vast majority of Americans who work in the private sector, seeing cost-cutting measures and downsizing of staff like this, it's nothing new.
In fact, many are left asking, why hasn't the government been doing this all along? Yeah, I totally agree, John. In fact, I plan on sending you an email when we're done with this interview asking what are the five things you think you accomplished during this conversation? Oh, yeah.
So I look forward to your response. I've got a ready list.
I had ChatGPT created for me. Eric, thanks so much for joining us.
Always informative and fun to talk to you. That was GAI Vice President Eric Eggers,

co-host of The Drill Down with Peter Schweitzer, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.