DOGE Finds Fraud, but Makes No Arrests; What Gives?
Despite headline-grabbing claims, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has yet to produce criminal charges; spoiler alert: There's very little prosecutable fraud.
Something that’s bothered me since the Trump administration took office and handed control of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to Elon Musk is the frequency and volume of claims about uncovering fraud, waste, and abuse in federal spending.
Among DOGE’s earliest revelations was a supposed $50 million earmark to buy condoms for Hamas – a U.S.-designated terrorist organization operating in the Gaza Strip, currently at war with U.S. ally Israel.
Over the weekend, a photo on X.com (formerly Twitter) caught my eye. The caption read: “No one seems to be getting arrested over the corruption that Elon uncovered. Why not?”
It’s a fair question. Why aren’t people being arrested? Why aren’t more former government officials being hauled off in irons and sent to the gulags? Why isn’t there more punishment for Deep State actors allegedly spending taxpayer money on unauthorized programs, like the creation of transgender mice? (Spoiler Alert: There’s no such thing as transgender mice; the government funded programs to develop transgenic mice, which are used in medical research.)
“The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government, it is astonishing — it’s mind-boggling. We routinely encounter wastes of $1 billion or more — casually,” Musk said at the launch of DOGE.
So what have DOGE and the Trump administration actually uncovered?
The “condoms for Hamas” claim was debunked rather quickly. The administration ultimately admitted it had made a mistake. The money was earmarked to support a sexually transmitted disease (STD) prevention program in Africa.
DOGE is canceling contracts across the government, labeling them as waste and abuse. So far, the agency claims to have terminated between $100 billion and $150 billion in spending on private contractors supporting federal programs.
The administration also shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), calling the foreign aid agency a waste of taxpayer money. The estimated savings: around $40 billion.
DOGE further claimed to have uncovered more than $300 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims. Except that particular fraud had already been detected and addressed years earlier by federal and state agencies.
“They’re trying to spin this narrative of, ‘Oh, government is inefficient and government is stupid and they’re catching these things that the government didn’t catch,’” says Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues at the U.S. Department of Labor during the administration of former President Joe Biden. “They’re finding fraud that was marked as fraud and saying they found out it was fraud.”
Other claims of fraud, waste, and abuse exist – and some are likely valid. In any large organization, a certain amount of inefficiency is inevitable. Most studies suggest fraud and abuse in federal programs range from 1 to 3 percent. There will always be examples of people exploiting loopholes and blind spots in public spending.
But none of this adds up to the trillions of dollars in waste that the administration suggests.
“Nothing they have identified is, to my knowledge, evidence of ‘fraud’ or ‘corruption.’ Fraud and corruption are crimes,” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law at George Washington University, in an interview with Al Jazeera America. “This administration simply has different spending priorities than the last administration. But to label all of it as fraud or corruption is extremely misleading.”
So why amplify the narrative that government bureaucrats exist solely to burn billions – if not trillions – of taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars?
From the conservative perspective, the federal government has two legitimate roles: foreign relations and national defense. Everything else is considered extraneous. As Grover Norquist has advocated for decades, “I don’t want to abolish government. I want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
The reality is that the government is, in many respects, relatively efficient in how it spends money. Critics argue that the challenge isn’t waste, but the complexity and rigidity of bureaucratic processes. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that excessive red tape hinders both public programs and the private contractors hired to implement them, ultimately stalling progress.
The Trump administration is attempting to close the gap between federal spending and tax revenue — a gap that currently stands at roughly $2 trillion annually. They’re doing so through cuts, but even with aggressive reductions, they’ve only identified a few hundred billion dollars. Even the administration admits that achieving a full trillion in cuts is practically impossible.
Nothing about government spending is inherently fraudulent or wasteful. Government expenditures — authorized through congressional appropriations — reflect policy choices. The fact that the federal government spends more than it collects in taxes and fees is also a choice. None of it constitutes fraud. And if blame is to be assigned for fiscal excess or budgetary imbalance, it rests squarely with Congress — including the very officials now railing against spending.
What many people fail to understand is that the only power the government has is to spend money. As a public policy professor I had in college said to me, “Whenever you ask the government to do something, you’re asking it to spend money?” While someone may not appreciate or like the government spending money on foreign aid or reseaching the orgins of clown fish, those appropriations were approved by the people elected to office.
Calling every dollar a failure, every program a scam, and every agency a sinkhole for corruption doesn’t make government more efficient — it just makes governing harder. Real oversight requires precision, not political theater. If the goal is to make government work better, it starts with understanding how it works — not dismantling it for applause. That’s also why no one has been charged with a crime: because disagreement over policy or priorities isn’t criminal. It’s politics.