DOGE and Elon Musk keep making mistakes. How many can America afford?

“We will make mistakes,” said Elon Musk during an Oval Office press conference last week, a toddler son slung on his shoulders like a shield. “But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

His remarks came in response to a reporter who’d noted Musk’s previous incorrect claim that the U.S. had spent $50 million on condoms for Gazans. (On X, Musk even suggested this money had actually ended up with Hamas.) Since then, his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has made severe mistakes, some of which are reportedly still being corrected as of this writing.

Slipups are, of course, expected in the heady early days of a startup, and perhaps even in a new administration. But the mistakes Musk’s DOGE are making are the kind that have catastrophic consequences hanging in the balance, seemingly without any corresponding appreciation of their magnitude.

What happens when his team makes one that can’t quickly be corrected?

As if we never said goodbye

Just days after Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins acknowledged that Musk’s DOGE team had been working with the department for weeks, the USDA announced on Tuesday that it had mistakenly fired “several” agency employees over the weekend.

Those employees had been working on the government’s response to the current, increasingly worrisome bird flu outbreak. The agency has since realized its error, and is now in the process of reversing those firings.

Still, it seems like an extraordinary lapse in judgment to fire such essential workers in the first place—and evidence of profoundly misguided and underinformed cost-cutting efforts.

It was not an outlier, however. The USDA firings marked the second announced instance of DOGE mistakenly cutting essential personnel just since last week’s press conference.

On Friday, the Trump administration scrambled to reinstate a group of nuclear safety employees it had let go the day before, halting the firings of 350 federal employees (or those whose correct contact information it could find, anyway). Although DOGE has been cleaning house throughout the government since Trump’s January 20 inauguration, last week was a particularly busy one, as DOGE executed mass firings across multiple federal government agencies.

But only after workers with sensitive jobs involving, say, the U.S. nuclear arsenal were let go did anyone at DOGE seem to understand that those roles might be important.

As the Associated Press reports, National Nuclear Security Administration deputy division director Rob Plonski described the firings on LinkedIn as “undermining the very systems that secure our nation’s future.” Plonski also added: “Cutting the federal workforce responsible for these functions may be seen as reckless at best and adversarily opportunistic at worst.”

“”The previous week, a few hundred employees at the Small Business Association (SBA) were also “accidentally” fired . . . three days before they were then officially fired.

Why this sounds so familiar

All of these mistakes echo what happened at Twitter after Musk took over in 2022, when it turned out that some of the people he mass-fired were actually keeping Twitter functional, and he had to hire some of them back. (“Babies got thrown out with the bathwater” is how he later described those indiscriminate firings.)

Musk’s recent mistakes, though, aren’t just limited to firings. A 25-year-old DOGE staffer named Marko Elez was mistakenly given read/write access to part of the payments system for the U.S. Treasury—a system that disburses trillions of dollars every year.

Elez’s access was quickly rescinded, but it’s unclear whether his receiving it actually was a mistake, or if DOGE simply got caught. (Apparently, keeping on a worker who trumpeted his flagrant racism online is not considered a mistake by Musk. When Elez resigned after the Wall Street Journal exposed his racist tweets, Musk made a public display of hiring him back.)

And what are all these mistakes even in service of? When will the supposed spoils from the great austerity push make a demonstrable difference?

Musk claims DOGE has already uncovered tremendous fraud, but the proof does not support those claims. Most recently, on Sunday, he declared, “This might be the biggest fraud in history,” when tweeting about a perceived discrepancy in Social Security records. His claim proved easily debunkable.

Musk and Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt mainly seem to apply the “fraud” label to anything they find merely disagreeable, like $57,000 worth of spending relating to climate change in Sri Lanka. And some of DOGE’s line-item savings announcements are riddled with mistakes—like an $8 billion contract for the Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agency that turned out to be $8 million.

It should be no surprise Musk has already walked back his earlier vow that DOGE would cut about $2 trillion from the federal budget—or that these cuts may not be as beneficial as advertised. Musk has a long track record in the tech world of overpromising and under delivering. In 2019, for instance, he confidently predicted Tesla would produce a million autonomous Robotaxis by the end of 2020. He reiterated that done-by-next-year promise in an earnings call last year, when he promised that Robotaxis would be coming in 2025.

Even accounting for pandemic-related delays, and assuming his latest promise holds up later this year, Musk’s original pledge is still off the mark by miles.

For now, it’s mainly just Democratic politicians, critical press outlets, and massive public demonstrations sounding alarm bells over Musk and DOGE’s recklessness. No elected Republican officials who might hold any sway seem to be pushing back. (At least not officially; reports describe Republican lawmakers privately warning Trump officials about reckless DOGE cuts.) The question now is whether it will take a true catastrophe for top lawmakers to realize it was a mistake to ever toss Musk the keys to the U.S. government—and whether we’ll even be able to afford it if that does come to pass.