Once upon a time, Elon nodded along to the idea that net taxpayers should get a check—a little kickback for all the money DOGE supposedly saved America. And people actually thought that was real. I never took this seriously and thought it was weird when I would search for DOGE information and always saw multiple articles updating or inquiring about these “DOGE” checks, but didn’t think much of it. I wasn’t concerned with imaginary things when real damage was being done, but apparently, a lot of other people were very concerned about it. So much so that in February, there were more Google searches for DOGE checks than there were for actual tax refunds.
For the folks that live in the real world, when Elon was proclaiming he could easily cut $2 trillion from the government budget, a CEO named James Fishback did some quick math and said that sending 20% of those savings back to “net taxpaying households” would amount to a $5k DOGE Dividend check. Per his logic, it wouldn’t go to the ‘poors’, it would go to the people who are taxpayers, people who are supposedly responsible with their money, so they would either save it or pay down debt. Something tells me that it was the people that weren’t going to get this check who were putting in those google searches.
So why is this even a thing? The same people who think the government is useless are now obsessing over a payout from it.
Well, plenty of folks have noticed the attention this has gotten and if you are part of the ‘right’ email lists, you will find some politicians actively using it to fundraise. Many letters have gone out to constituents claiming these checks are at risk from evil Dems. Send money to their campaign and they will make sure the IRS is gutted and federal employees become society’s pariahs, all for a cool $5K. Help yourself to a database of all newsletters sent by a member of Congress.
DOGE Math vs. Reality
Except even the most superficial look at this promise will show that these numbers don’t add up:
So, we’re now in the red.
Turns out, Government is hard
Why did people think Elon was the guy to bring this home? Elon has this reputation of doing amazing things, but really how well does that hold up to scrutiny. His government record is not a good one.
This trend of overpromising has carried on in other Elon/DOGE-ventures. They were supposed to find enormous savings when they cut out all the fraud at the Social Security Association.Their highly touted anti-fraud tool only found 2 potential fraudulent claims after reviewing over 100,000. The tool did manage to slow down processing by 25%, leaving them with a bit of a backlog to make up.
Social Security is actually a pretty solid program, with an amount of overhead that private companies would kill for, but there are other areas where some anti-fraud protections would be really impactful. The Government Accountability Office released a report that the US loses between $200 and $500 billion annually to fraud. This is an area where the government sorely needs their processes updated. The massive aid sent in response to the covid pandemic was a windfall to bad actors. Anytime there are disasters, the government has to balance its desire to get support to people that need it with the measures it takes to keep fraudsters from it. There are also serious issues with Medicare and Medicaid payments. These are well-documented problems with ready-made solutions and huge potential savings, but instead of tackling that, DOGE has focused on ideological boogeymen–imaginary illegal immigrants collecting Social Security benefits.
DOGE is talking a big game about stopping voter fraud, but like the contracts they “canceled”, they seem to be getting credit for an assist that they didn’t provide. Right wing articles like to cite a case where a Russian National pleaded guilty to submitting 100 fraudulent voter registration applications, but this happened in 2023 and processes already set in Florida rejected all of them before a vote was cast. Another commonly cited case is of two Ukranian green card holders that registered to vote and voted in the 2024 election. They claimed they didn’t know they couldn’t, while I can’t find evidence that their votes were not counted, the processes in place have already determined these women were not citizens and have updated their status. Reports have DOGE referring 57 claims of voter fraud to the DOJ, but there haven been no updates on the progress, who those people are, or if they actually voted.
Elon left a lot of people with their hand out during the election too. While the court cases are still grappling with the questions of whether or not Elon’s election efforts were even legal, he definitely owes people money. His PAC is currently dealing with a lawsuit because he promised to pay people $100 for signing a petition supporting the US constitution if those registered voters would refer to voters from one of the seven swing states. He didn’t pay them. He also promised those voters that they would be eligible for a $1 million-a-day giveaway, and he had to admit in another court case that the people that got that award were pre-selected because they were spokespeople for his pro-Trump agenda.
Elon’s professional track record is dubious as well, particularly regarding Tesla. He has been promising Tesla owners an upgrade for full self-driving since 2016. The Tesla Semi which was supposed to go out in 2019 has been pushed back to the end of 2025, only to be stopped again because of Trump’s tariffs. Lastly the most egregious has to be his showing in 2021 of his “robot” that was actually just a person in a suit. In 2024, it appears he upgraded to actual robots, remote-controlled by humans.
An image of Tesla's Optimus robot serving drinks at the company's "We, Robot" event. The robots were remotely controlled by humans.
The Quiet Cost of Loud Leaders
To be sure, there are known problems with how the government works, but we know what they are because the government actively reviews itself and reports on what those problems are. Of course, these reports are boring, detailed, and have specific recommendations and metrics to gauge for success. This garners no anger and sales no advertisement spots. Trump and co. recontextualize this as though it’s just incompetence, change out fraudsters with illegal immigrants, and put it on display in the worst lighting possible, instead of fixing actual problems. This way, they get to focus on their ideological boogeymen. Really, if you compare their track record, it completely makes sense that they became buddies.
In Trump’s first term, he was supposed to build a big beautiful wall (that Mexico would pay for), cut taxes, and kill Obamacare. Of course, he only built 40 miles of new wall and the ACA survived. While his tax cuts made it through, over half of his campaign promises were broken. Even if you focus on immigration, supposedly the area he is most known for, he constantly under-performs in actually enforcing the laws effectively. Both Obama and Biden administrations were better at deporting illegal immigrants. Probably the most effective thing Trump has done in regards to immigration has been to make sure no one wants to come to America at all, but this doesn’t only affect immigration, it also affects tourism and significant parts of the economy.
It seems like the real lesson from this administration, that was very evident the first time around, if you actually like Trump’s policies, you shouldn’t want Trump or Elon in charge of implementing them. They don’t address the problems they find, they inflate them. They are too deep into their ideological bubble to recognize failure and too proud to course correct. All they’ll leave us with is wreckage, resentment, and bigger problems for someone else to clean up.