The Price of Disruption

Here is the number that deserves more attention: $14.8 billion. That's what the Deferred Resignation Program cost — paying approximately 200,000 federal employees not to work for up to eight months while the administration figured out who it actually wanted to keep [6]. On top of that, the Partnership for Public Service estimated that firing, rehiring, and putting workers on paid leave during the DOGE process cost taxpayers roughly $135 billion in lost productivity and administrative chaos in fiscal year 2025 alone. Not saved. Cost. More than 24,000 of the firings were later reversed by court order after judges ruled they were unlawful. The government paid those employees not to work, then paid them again when they came back, then paid the legal fees for losing in court. The IRS situation deserves its own paragraph. Under DOGE pressure, the agency planned to cut roughly 40% of its workforce. More than 17,000 IRS employees left in 2025. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that loss will cost the federal government $323 billion in uncollected tax revenue over a decade, as audits decline and high-income filers face less scrutiny [7]. The IRS itself projected an internal revenue loss exceeding $500 billion. Let that land. An initiative launched in the name of fiscal responsibility may have cost the government half a trillion dollars in taxes it will never collect from people who can afford to owe them. Meanwhile, the Iran war has thrown another inconvenient spotlight on which DOGE cuts mattered. The State Department lost 1,107 civil service officers and a quarter of its foreign service personnel — including specialists in Farsi and Arabic who, it turns out, are rather useful when you're conducting military operations in the Middle East [5]. The office tasked with countering Iran-linked terrorism was eliminated. CISA's cyber personnel were cut back, reducing intelligence-sharing with private critical infrastructure firms at precisely the moment Iranian hacking threats escalated. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican and former FBI special agent, said DOGE took "a sledgehammer" to agencies. "I think it went overboard," he said. "Too aggressive, too fast, too soon." That's a polite way of saying it. Some colleagues seem to believe this kind of disruption was inevitable — that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. That's fine, as metaphors go. But in this case, the kitchen staff was fired, the eggs were double-counted in the savings ledger, and the omelet never materialized. Just a very expensive mess.

The Math That Never Added Up

Here is what conservatives need to say clearly, even when it's uncomfortable: the $2 trillion target was mathematically impossible from day one. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and debt service consume the overwhelming majority of the federal budget. President Trump promised repeatedly and explicitly not to touch those programs. He has kept that promise. That means the math for achieving a trillion-dollar cut — let alone two — through discretionary spending was never real. Budget expert Jessica Riedl at Brookings put it plainly: "The only way DOGE-style cuts could reach transformational scale would be to take an axe to programs that tens of millions of Americans rely on daily. Congress facing voters wouldn't do it and didn't." Congress, in fact, rejected most of DOGE's proposed cuts. Of 30 programs Trump proposed slashing or eliminating, Congress eliminated exactly one [8]. The FY 2026 budget bills increased spending from FY 2025 levels in most categories. Conservatives have a legitimate philosophical case for smaller government. I happen to believe that case. The federal bureaucracy does carry genuine overhead. There is real waste to be found. But a serious conservative reform agenda doesn't start by claiming credit for Biden-era contract expirations and calling it a trillion dollars saved. It starts with entitlement reform — which is hard, politically treacherous, and the only path to actual fiscal consolidation. Nobody wanted to say that. So they pointed at the chainsaw instead. The efficiency agency, incidentally, requested $45 million for fiscal year 2026. That's more than double its 2025 budget of $20 million. Even DOGE found a way to grow its own spending.

Reform Without the Theater

DOGE is scheduled to sunset on July 4, 2026. The Trump administration will frame that date as a victory lap. The numbers suggest it should be a moment of reckoning. The case for leaner government didn't die with DOGE's failures. The federal bureaucracy still has genuine overhead. There are real efficiencies to be gained in procurement, IT modernization, and program consolidation. The Cato Institute is right that some of those savings will materialize over time from the workforce reductions that stuck. But any serious effort at fiscal discipline has to start with honest numbers and make honest choices. Claiming $7.9 billion saved from defense contracts that are still running is not fiscal discipline. It's performance art. Real reform means auditing programs rigorously, building the evidence base, and making the case to the public for hard decisions — including the entitlement reforms that both parties have spent decades avoiding. It means having people in government who understand how government actually works before they start canceling its contracts with a keyword search. DOGE set out to be the corrective the federal government needed. What it produced, in the end, was a lesson in why governing is harder than disrupting — and why the numbers have to be real before you can claim them. The goal was right. The accounting wasn't. Conservatives deserve better from both.