This is the astonishing salary that Elon Musk’s DOGE workers could be receiving

Elon Musk used his immense fortune to help elect Donald Trump in 2024 to the tune of around $288 million according to analysis by The Washington Post. That largesse bought him an office in the West Wing and oversight of the Department of Government Efficiency, a non-official new federal agency tasked with rooting out waste and cutting federal spending.

Calling on people to join his efforts, he posted on his social media platform X in November, “This will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero. What a great deal!” However, the often-bungled slashing of government agencies and employees by the chainsaw-wielding billionaire and his staff have drawn much scrutiny, some of which has found that DOGE staff have compensation with more than one zero, many more.

DOGE staff earning six-figure salaries

WIRED published a story in March which reported that some staffers at DOGE were “drawing robust taxpayer-funded salaries from the federal agencies they are slashing and burning.” They gave the examples of Jeremy Lewin, Kyle Schutt and Nate Cavanaugh.

All three were listed as drawing six-figure salaries through the General Services Administration. WIRED reported that the DOGE staffers Lewin, Schutt and Cavanaugh were earning slightly more than $167,000, $195,200 and $120,500 per year, respectively.

For context on how their salaries compared with those federal employees they were firing, WIRED looked at the 28-year-old tech entrepreneur Cavanaugh, who has been interviewing GSA employees. His salary was nearly as high as the $128,565 of the average GSA employee who has worked at the agency for 13 years according to information posted on DOGE’s official website.

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An analysis by the Partnership for Public Service as reported in The Economic Times as well found that some DOGE staffers were taking home handsome salaries in the six-figures range. Furthermore, some of these staffers’ roles, that were initially listed as volunteers, are now presented as full-time salaried positions.

DOGE: costing taxpayers and missing targets

DOGE’s budget has ballooned to $40 million while these staffers, that have no experience in the agencies in which they are tasked with getting rid of wasteful government spending, have slashed the jobs of tens of thousands of skilled federal employees. The damage they are causing to agencies like Social Security are already being felt.

Thousands of Social Security beneficiaries have been pronounced ‘dead’ by DOGE staffers creating serious problems for the people affected who are very-much alive. Those trying to fix that situation, or any other, are finding SSA offices that were understaffed before, are even more so after DOGE fired thousands of Social Security employees.

Elon Musk originally said that he could cut $2 trillion in “wasteful” spending by the US government. He revised that number down to $1 trillion, but now says congratulatory that he has saved the US taxpayer $160 billion, although one should take that with a pinch of salt as DOGE’s numbers have had to be corrected due to poor math on several occasions.

While Musk says he has saved that meager sum, his pseudo-government agency will cost the US taxpayer “upward of $135 billion this fiscal year,” reports The New York Times based on findings from the Partnership for Public Service.

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