The Cost of Efficiency

I was on a video call with my team at the IRS when it happened. One of our newer employees — still probationary — was mid-sentence when she suddenly stopped speaking. She’d just received an email. It said she was being let go. On the call, in real time, she began to cry. Then she began to sob. It wasn’t loud or dramatic. Just a quiet unraveling.

It was one of the most vulnerable things I’ve ever witnessed on a government call. And one of the most humiliating things I’ve seen done to someone who took an oath to serve

That was the real face of Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative — the “Department of Government Efficiency” that promised to reinvent the federal bureaucracy with speed and style.

What began with rhetoric about cutting waste and boosting productivity quickly turned into something else: mass firings, broken systems, and entire agencies struggling to function.

So the question now is simple. Was it worth it?

Some gains are undeniable. Ending the minting of pennies saved money. Cutting leases on half-empty buildings was overdue. There was real waste, and some of it was cleaned up. Musk forced a conversation that many in Washington had long avoided: How bloated is the federal government? How much of its work is essential? And how do you measure “efficiency” when the product isn’t profit, but public trust?

But those silver linings sit atop a heap of wreckage.

The financial gains were relatively modest — maybe tens of billions, most of them one-time savings. The disruptions, meanwhile, were enormous.

Skilled personnel exited in droves. Critical systems buckled. Entire agencies were hollowed out with no plan to rebuild. In some places, the legal fallout alone could wipe out any fiscal benefit. In others, it already has.

The idea that government should be run like a business is not new. It’s also never quite worked. That’s because government isn’t a business. It has obligations, not just objectives. Its shareholders are also its customers. Its employees are also its citizens. A business can fire half its staff and pivot to a new model. A government that does the same might miss a pandemic warning or delay benefits for millions of veterans. The cost isn’t just inefficiency — it’s harm.

And harm was done.

For federal employees, DOGE was traumatic. For citizens, the promised dividends — better service, lower taxes, faster responses — mostly failed to arrive. For Musk, the political capital he once wielded is now tangled in lawsuits and Senate hearings. And for the broader economy, the chaos only deepened uncertainty. Even those who celebrated the cuts now face a sobering truth: many of them might not stick.

What remains is a kind of ideological satisfaction. A leaner government. A symbolic win. But symbols are poor substitutes for systems. And what DOGE demonstrated, more than anything, is that cutting alone is not reform. Real reform is slower. More boring. More technical. It happens in rooms with spreadsheets, not viral tweets.

It asks not just what can be eliminated, but what must be preserved.

In the end, the first 100 days of DOGE will be remembered less for what it fixed and more for what it broke. It was a lesson in what happens when speed trumps sense, when boldness outruns wisdom, and when we treat institutions as inefficiencies instead of inheritances.

Sometimes, what gets labeled as waste is actually the muscle that holds the whole thing together.