Pain without gain
By 
On the one hand, DOGE led to millions of avoidable deaths and shattered lives all over the world. On the other hand, it didn’t save any money:
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.
The story is a good deep dive into how the con worked. One of the central problems with the American polity is the the slippage between “elite experts are not always right” and “any idiot can perform any vital government function.”
Admittedly, “pain and no gain” doesn’t to apply to everyone — if, like Elon Musk, you see a bunch of pointless death and suffering as a good thing in itself as long as it mostly happens to out groups, it’s more of a win-lose.