The bromance between the tech right and populist right is over, and DOGE appears to be both a cause and casualty of the schism. Elon has watched a lack of Congressional codification of the DOGE cuts — and the price tag of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — amount to a massive, metaphorical middle finger to the agency’s core mission. A paltry $9.4b rescissions package with an uncertain future represents the full extent of efforts to codify DOGE-identified spending cuts, tens of thousands of federal worker firings are already being reversed, and the Big Beautiful Bill stands to add trillions of dollars to the deficit if passed. The debt bender rages on, it seems, and so-called sober minds can kick rocks!

From the beginning, Elon’s tenure was limited to 130 days, but DOGE was always meant to persist (at least until its preordained July 2026 dissolution). And sure, DOGE will continue to exist, but even with renowned DOGE employee “Big Balls” (engineer Edward Coristine) receiving full-time employment status, the agency may become more impotent than ever. Even before the Elon-Trump fallout, DOGE was not finding tangible success anywhere near its intended scale. Its original goal was to cut spending by $2 trillion. That became $1 trillion. Then $150b. Polymarket’s “how much spending will DOGE cut in [sic] first 6 months?” market is currently sitting at 97.2% “<$250b” (the lowest available option) and set to resolve in less than a month. The market for “Will Trump & Elon reduce the deficit in 2025?”, a retrospectively unfortunate pairing, is at a mere 8.4%. As recently as May 13th, it was at 20%.

The official DOGE savings tracker currently pegs costs cut at $180b. While it seems impossible to know how accurate that number is, independent estimates of “verified” and ostensibly retainable savings from DOGE cuts range everywhere from the single-digit-billions to around $60b. Studies out of Yale and UPenn are even claiming that some of DOGE’s actions will cost us billions of dollars (e.g. IRS firings could result in lower tax collections, research cuts will lead to future economic losses, etc.). But the question of which cuts will remain, or how it is even technically possible to shrink the budgets of these various agencies without congressional rescissions (the cancellation of previously appropriated funds), still appears largely unanswered. Under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the executive branch cannot unilaterally withhold funds Congress has appropriated without passing corresponding rescissions.

Last week, The White House sent a $9.4b rescissions package to Congress, asking them to codify cuts to USAID and public broadcasting (including NPR and PBS). This represents the first major legislative effort to solidify DOGE-identified cuts. The deadline to pass the rescissions bill is July 18th, and while House Republicans like Speaker Mike Johnson seem eager to bring it to a vote, there are already murmurs of GOP hesitancy afoot. In the House, Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) has publicly opposed the rescissions plan due to its public broadcasting cuts (though House Republicans expect the proposal to pass without his vote). In the Senate, the fate of these rescissions is less certain: the proposal, originally set to go to Congress in April, reportedly did not have the requisite GOP Senate support required to pass at that time (despite 53-45 Republican control). As a result, certain cuts are liable to be removed entirely, including those to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (a ~$6-7b annual program for HIV/AIDS treatment in sub-Saharan Africa), about which Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said, “it has literally saved millions of lives.” Additionally, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) recently defended public broadcasting funding, one of the rescissions’ primary targets.

Thus, even the passage of these relatively paltry $9.4b cuts seems uncertain. The last successful rescissions package was passed in 2000 under the Clinton administration ($6.7b proposed, $3.6b accepted). President Trump’s 2018 attempt to cut $15b of spending was blocked, despite Republicans controlling both the House and Senate at the time (Richard Burr and Susan Collins voted against it in the Senate). For context, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to add $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. If some tax cuts persist, estimates are upward of $5 trillion by 2034. This $9.4b, even if pushed through, would represent roughly 0.1% of annual federal outlays.

If the rescissions package does make it through both the House and the Senate, White House Budget Director Russ Vought has publicly stated his willingness to double-down and attempt to pass even more cuts. Vought, ironically a vocal proponent of the Big Beautiful Bill, disputes the CBO’s claim that it will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit, instead claiming that it will lower the deficit by $1.4 trillion, a figure The White House doubled-down on in a June 7th memo (citing arcane methodological disputes with the CBO about baseline assumptions). What a spread! In any case, the $9.4b number needs another zero or two to feel material, and the political hurdles involved in passing even these small rescissions packages appear nontrivial.

Federal courts have also reversed a number of DOGE-recommended actions, moving to reinstate tens of thousands of federal employees with full backpay. These reversals involve at least 18 different federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense. There are even reports that the Trump administration itself is “scrambling” to rehire fired federal workers across the FDA, IRS, State Department, and Department of Housing and Urban Development. It seems, when all is said and done, that the DOGE cuts could end up being little more than a rounding error on the American budget.

Elon is probably the world’s most successful operator. If even he was slain by the ponderous weight of government bureaucracy and perverted democracy-inherent incentives to infinitely increase spending, how could DOGE’s path improve without him at the helm? Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill not only erases any financial impact DOGE might have had, it demonstrates a rejection of the ethos underlying DOGE. Trump never cared about fiscal conservatism. He cared about building a relationship with Elon, one of the most powerful men on earth and (at the time of the election) an ardent supporter of the Trump admin. Since Elon cares about the deficit and cutting waste, Trump gave him DOGE, as a treat, before using the situation as political leverage to win over the tech right. DOGE, and perhaps Elon, are no longer useful to Trump.

Beyond this, the pH of the political environment surrounding DOGE has shifted for the worse. Now that Elon has attacked Trump, the agency is even less habitable for anyone who might take it over. The fallout of last week’s public blowup may also mean less Trump-led pressure on the Senate to support DOGE-affiliated rescissions. My one (optimistic, if cynical) counter to this blackpill being that DOGE having massive success after the departure of Elon would be a clever (albeit petty) way for Trump to twist the knife.

But this issue is larger than Trump, Elon, and DOGE. The impossible inertia of the American government, the ease with which programs and spending can be ratcheted up (and the corresponding infeasibility of ratcheting them down), and the democracy-led path to infinite benefits spending all come together to create a beast which may be impossible for the current political and Constitutional structure to slay. Politicians who run on real austerity — i.e. a significant reduction of government benefits like welfare, healthcare, and Social Security — don’t win elections. People like free stuff, and they don’t vote for people angling to take it away, reasons and logic be damned. Some, Elon included, interpreted Trump’s desire to dismantle the Deep State as a predisposition toward fiscal responsibility — but this has turned out to clearly not be the case.

So, what happens to DOGE now? My best guess: it will be quietly put down, ending our most recent dreams of radical fiscal responsibility. Barring some sort of miraculous economic growth spurt, national debt will continue compounding, interest payments will eat discretionary spending, and the banality of our dire situation will render it perennially unresolved. The relative failure of DOGE may signal that we are going to simply ride the high-speed debt train forever — at least until the unstoppable force hits an immovable object, pulverizing the skeleton of our nation into dust!

— G. B. Rango