Get Rich While Putting Thousands Out Of Work
DOGE employees drawing six-figure taxpayer-funded salaries.
After Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election and chose Elon Musk to run a new advisory group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Tesla/SpaceX/X.com CEO claimed that working at DOGE would require altruistic motives. DOGE, Musk warned, would require a selfless commitment to cutting waste from the United States' federal government — not a desire for cushy, easy employment.
On November 14, 2024, Musk cryptically tweeted, "Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero. What a great deal!"
But according to Forbes' Beatrice Nolan, some DOGE employees are drawing "six-figure taxpayer-funded salaries" — while putting thousands of federal government employees out of work.
In an article published on March 5, Nolan — drawing in part on recent reporting from Wired — reports, "Musk had initially claimed positions within DOGE would be 'tedious work' where 'compensation is zero'…. While DOGE has aggressively downsized government offices, some of its own members are earning top-tier federal salaries, Wired reported."
Nolan continues, "Jeremy Lewin, a key figure in dismantling USAID and reshaping other agencies, makes over $167,000 per year, the report said — while Kyle Schutt, a software engineer working within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, takes home $195,200, per Wired, which is the federal pay ceiling. Others, including 28-year-old tech entrepreneur Nate Cavanaugh, also earn six-figure salaries."
Nolan notes that DOGE employees Luke Farritor, Edward Coristine and Derek Geissler "appear to be unpaid volunteers" but adds that "a full picture of the department's salaries has been difficult to establish."
"It was instrumental in shuttering various government agencies, including USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and has overseen the firing of thousands of federal employees," Nolan observes. "The department has also accessed sensitive citizen data within The Treasury and IRS, raising concerns from Democratic lawmakers and prompting legal challenges. It recently played a key role in shutting down 18F — a government tech unit focused on improving digital services — and has overseen mass layoffs within the General Services Administration (GSA)."
The DOGE America:
Taking stock of Trump's economic policies as a whole, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk's slash-and-burn approach to federal workers, Paul Krugman argued that the United States right now is "trapped in a burning Tesla."
"If you don’t know this, the doors on Musk’s cars are designed to open electronically; if they have manual releases at all, they’re difficult to get at and use," he explained. "As a result, there have been multiple instances of people burning alive inside Teslas when the engines catch fire. Well, large parts of the U.S. economy and government appear to be on the verge of self-immolation. And given the combination of arrogance and ignorance shared by Musk and Trump, it’s hard to see how we get out."
Krugman explained how car production in the United States will be hampered by the tariffs on America's two biggest trading partners given the way that cars are assembled across all three countries.
"Automobile production, which is deeply integrated across our northern and southern borders — there really isn’t a U.S. auto industry, there’s a North American industry operating in all three countries — will be especially hard hit," he wrote. "I almost choked when Trump declared last night that 'we are going to have growth in the auto industry like nobody has ever seen.' Well, I guess we’ve never seen a large downturn in auto production outside a major recession, which is not to say that we won’t get a recession too."
