Some of that increased spending is the result of DOGE cuts. As I explained four months after DOGE closed its doors last year, even if we were to take at face value DOGE’s claim to have saved the taxpayer $215 billion, you’d have to subtract from that the $135 billion that Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, said DOGE cost the government in lost productivity, paid leave, and the rehiring of fired workers. You’d also have to figure in the $597 billion in lost revenue that the Yale Budget Lab now projects for the next ten years due to DOGE cuts at the Internal Revenue Service. That puts DOGE about $517 million in the hole (more than twice the estimate I reported last year).
But Lewis’s answer is incomplete; it turns out there’s also a simpler and more cynical answer. Like so many self-styled crusaders against government spending—indeed, like Musk himself, whose companies, pre-DOGE, extracted somewhere north of $38 billion from the federal government—the Muskrats wanted to suck on the government teat.
[R]oughly two dozen former DOGE staffers have parlayed their government experience into relevant private-sector jobs or investments—becoming founders, securing CEO positions or senior executive roles, amassing large stakes in start-ups looking to win government contracts or approvals, or taking the skills developed at DOGE to the private sector. Though several of the businesses are only months old, with little public activity, at least six DOGE alumni have registered on Sam.gov, a government contracting portal examined by The Post.
One of the teat-suckers is Gavin Kliger, a MAGA true believer who boasted on Substack that he “gave up a seven-figure salary to save America.” Kliger shows up on page 62 of Lewis’s book, demanding entry to the Internal Revenue Service:
I don’t need to do that, he said.
No, I don’t, he said.
Eventually Kliger gets set up in a conference room with an assistant and acquires some computer access, but none to any taxpayer information. “People started getting these calls,” the IRS’s chief privacy officer, Kathleen Walters, tells Lewis. “It was like getting the call from the principal’s office. ‘Gavin wants to see you.’”
In April, Kliger left the Pentagon to co-found, with three other former Muskrats, a startup, Cathedral, that according to Reuters “aims to use AI to expand U.S. military cyber capabilities.” Before he left the Pentagon, Kliger was “involved in the department’s highly publicized legal fight with Anthropic over how its AI technology would be used by the military.” Which would seem to pose a conflict of interest with his new company, no? The rules say senior Pentagon employees may not seek government contracts for up to two years after their departure. But the nonprofit Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser breaks the bad news to the Post that “fundraising for start-ups intending to seek government work” is a probable gray area.
Andreesen Horowitz is also sprinkling its fairy dust on a startup called Special, which “is building an operating system to transform critical American industries with AI,” whatever that means. Special’s founders, DOGE alumni Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, pledge to run the company in “the spirit of DOGE.” They’re starting with health care, which is kind of alarming when you remember that “the spirit of DOGE” killed an estimated 781,343 people, of which 518,428 were children, when it shut down USAID.
Cavanaugh reappears at the end of this chapter being interviewed on Fox News with Elon Musk. At Musk’s prompting, Cavanaugh cites as one of DOGE’s more scandalous findings that the Institute of Peace “had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban.” This is one of the more enraging passages in Lewis’s book. The former Talib, Mohammed Qasem Halimi, quit the Taliban after 9/11 (which happened when Cavanaugh was 5 years old) and became a United States ally—not a spy, exactly, per Lewis, but someone on whom the U.S. relied for important information. The Taliban, Lewis reports, tried to kill Halimi three times. He was evacuated when United States troops left Afghanistan. At the time of the Fox interview, Musk had identified Halimi by name in a tweet, essentially exposing, Lewis writes, “a U.S. asset to enemies of America.”
This is the part of my column where usually I wrap things up by writing something darkly witty and sardonic. But this time I can only say: God damn these people. God damn them to hell.
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