Latest news with #MaxStier
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
DOGE's $160 billion in savings have cost $135 billion, analysis finds
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, says it has saved $160 billion through its push to root out wasteful or fraudulent government spending. But that effort may also have come at a cost for taxpayers, with a new analysis from a nonpartisan research and advocacy group estimating that DOGE's actions will cost $135 billion this fiscal year. The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce. PSP's estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE's actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn't include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE's actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS. DOGE has sought to slash federal spending by urging government workers to accept a deferred resignation plan, which allowed many employees to retain full pay and benefits through September without working. Another 24,000 government employees who were fired as part of the reform effort have since been rehired after a court ruling. Other agencies also have rehired some workers after mistakenly firing them, such as bird flu experts who were dismissed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Federal workers have also had to take on tasks such as documenting their weekly accomplishments, which has lowered productivity, Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, told CBS MoneyWatch. "We haven't seen much focus on the waste [DOGE] is creating," Stier told CBS MoneyWatch about his group's decision to analyze the costs of DOGE's cuts. "This is an effort that was created to address waste, but we were seeing the opposite." "Ultimately it's the public that will end up paying for this," he added, noting that he expects the taxpayers costs to grow after other DOGE cuts take effect. The White House took issue with the analysis. "The continued attempts to sow doubt in the massive accomplishments of this never-before-seen effort to make government more efficient speaks more about the illegitimacy of those peddling these falsehoods than good work of DOGE," White House spokesman Harrison Fields said. "The American public are in lockstep with the president's mission and will not be swayed by more lies coming from the legacy media." Why job cuts could raise costs The IRS, which is planning on cutting roughly 40% of its workforce, could forego $323 billion in tax revenue over the next decade due to lower tax compliance and a decline in audits, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. To be sure, the DOGE cuts could pay off over time, with a leaner, more focused federal workforce. For example, the direct savings from those layoffs will amount to $38 billion over 10 years, the Partnership for Public Service estimated. But Stier maintains that the costs for taxpayers could grow as they ripple through the economy, such as reductions in funding of health and science research. One analysis by researchers at institutions including the University of Maryland and University of Pennsylvania estimates that cuts to health research will result in a $16 billion annual economic loss, with 68,000 jobs lost. "One can always imagine a miracle occurring, but none of this makes sense on so many different levels," Stier said. DOGE's "wall of receipts" DOGE keeps a running public tally of the federal money the task force says it has saved, posted on its website in what is called a "wall of receipts." But some of those savings have been overstated, a February CBS News investigation found. At the same time, DOGE's $160 billion in savings is far less than Musk's previously stated goal of shrinking annual government spending by $2 trillion, or almost one-third of the federal budget. Many experts say that far more ambitious objective is unlikely to be achieved without cutting major federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, which President Trump has vowed not to touch. Musk said Tuesday that he'll curtail his work at DOGE starting in May. His decision comes as Tesla, the electric vehicle maker he runs, saw a 71% plunge in first-quarter profit and a 20% decline in vehicle sales as some consumers snubbed the brand due to objections to Musk's government work. Musk said he still plans to spend one to two days a week on DOGE-related work, focusing on eliminating government waste. "I'll have to continue to keep doing it for the remainder of the president's term to make sure the waste and fraud doesn't come roaring back," he said during Tesla's first-quarter earnings call on Tuesday. Russian foreign minister on latest Kyiv strikes: "We only target military goals" Judge halts own order demanding Kilmar Abrego Garcia updates Canada sees record-high early voting with liberals ahead in polls as Election Day nears
CBS News
25-04-2025
- Business
- CBS News
DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, says it has saved $160 billion through its push to root out wasteful or fraudulent government spending. But that effort may also have come at a cost for taxpayers, with a new analysis from a nonpartisan research and advocacy group estimating that DOGE's actions will cost $135 billion this fiscal year. The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce. PSP's estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE's actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn't include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE's actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS. DOGE has sought to slash federal spending by urging government workers to accept a deferred resignation plan, which allowed many employees to retain full pay and benefits through September without working. Another 24,000 government employees who were fired as part of the reform effort have since been rehired after a court ruling. Other agencies also have rehired some workers after mistakenly firing them, such as bird flu experts who were dismissed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Federal workers have also had to take on tasks such as documenting their weekly accomplishments, which has lowered productivity, Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, told CBS MoneyWatch. "We haven't seen much focus on the waste [DOGE] is creating," Stier told CBS MoneyWatch about his group's decision to analyze the costs of DOGE's cuts. "This is an effort that was created to address waste, but we were seeing the opposite." "Ultimately it's the public that will end up paying for this," he added, noting that he expects the taxpayers costs to grow after other DOGE cuts take effect. The White House took issue with the analysis. "The continued attempts to sow doubt in the massive accomplishments of this never-before-seen effort to make government more efficient speaks more about the illegitimacy of those peddling these falsehoods than good work of DOGE," White House spokesman Harrison Fields said. "The American public are in lockstep with the president's mission and will not be swayed by more lies coming from the legacy media." Why job cuts could raise costs The IRS, which is planning on cutting roughly 40% of its workforce, could forego $323 billion in tax revenue over the next decade due to lower tax compliance and a decline in audits, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. To be sure, the DOGE cuts could pay off over time, with a leaner, more focused federal workforce. For example, the direct savings from those layoffs will amount to $38 billion over 10 years, the Partnership for Public Service estimated. But Stier maintains that the costs for taxpayers could grow as they ripple through the economy, such as reductions in funding of health and science research. One analysis by researchers at institutions including the University of Maryland and University of Pennsylvania estimates that cuts to health research will result in a $16 billion annual economic loss, with 68,000 jobs lost. "One can always imagine a miracle occurring, but none of this makes sense on so many different levels," Stier said. DOGE's "wall of receipts" DOGE keeps a running public tally of the federal money the task force says it has saved, posted on its website in what is called a "wall of receipts." But some of those savings have been overstated, a February CBS News investigation found. At the same time, DOGE's $160 billion in savings is far less than Musk's previously stated goal of shrinking annual government spending by $2 trillion, or almost one-third of the federal budget. Many experts say that far more ambitious objective is unlikely to be achieved without cutting major federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, which President Trump has vowed not to touch. Musk said Tuesday that he'll curtail his work at DOGE starting in May. His decision comes as Tesla, the electric vehicle maker he runs, saw a 71% plunge in first-quarter profit and a 20% decline in vehicle sales as some consumers snubbed the brand due to objections to Musk's government work. Musk said he still plans to spend one to two days a week on DOGE-related work, focusing on eliminating government waste. "I'll have to continue to keep doing it for the remainder of the president's term to make sure the waste and fraud doesn't come roaring back," he said during Tesla's first-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.
Washington Post
11-04-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Optimism lives despite Trump's ‘arson of our public infrastructure'
Max Stier might keep a closer eye on federal agencies and their employees than anyone else not in government. A former employee of all three federal branches who worked for Democrats and Republicans, Stier is the founding president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that promotes good governance. Among its projects are the annual Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings and the Service to America Medals, a.k.a. the Sammies, which honor federal workers.
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
More Like the Department of Government Waste
As the Trump administration widened its campaign against the civil service, my mind kept turning to an old source, Max Stier, who has earnestly devoted his life to making government work better. Like his great passion, the bureaucracy, he's relatively anonymous. In 2001, he founded an outfit called the Partnership for Public Service, a name that suggests an almost lyrical devotion to the gritty stuff of government. His organization is a font of ideas for making bureaucracy more effective. Over the years, it has trained thousands of government employees and helped agencies devise modernization plans. Hoping to understand the damage that President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have managed to inflict, I called Stier this past weekend. What was he telling the civil servants who were calling him in a state of panic? Because he is levelheaded and committed to a nonpartisan agenda, I trusted him to deliver a measured assessment. That he seemed so profoundly alarmed was itself terrifying. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Franklin Foer: I'm sure your phone is constantly buzzing. What are you hearing? Max Stier: I've fielded calls from Forest Service workers in Idaho and health-care workers in Georgia. It's important that people know that the bulk of civil servants are not in D.C. Eighty percent of the feds are outside of D.C. They're in every community in our country—and they used to be in a lot of communities globally too. Some people have been chased away. Some people have been directly fired, largely illegally, or put on administrative leave or sidelined. But there is no part of the workforce that is immune from this profound distraction and fear. [Read: It's time to worry about DOGE's AI plans] Foer: Okay, survey the totality of the wreckage for me. Stier: There is just a series of hammer blows that have been wielded against the civil service. The so-called deferred-resignation offer is their attempt to create a stampede out the door, to make it easier for them to get rid of the apolitical expert civil service. And then, on the other end, they're creating a system that enables them to politicize the hiring and the management of the workforce. Certainly there are parts of our government—and most obvious ones, like USAID and the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that are taking it on the chin even harder. Some of the most frightening things are happening at the FBI. Right now, we're seeing the destruction of infrastructure, but also a culture that focuses on the public good and the commitment to the rule of law. What we are going to see next is the use of government authority that is possible because that culture has been eradicated—the use of government authority for improper purposes. And so when you think about what's happening, for example, with prosecutors who were fired because they investigated or prosecuted January 6 rioters or the president himself, these events foretell the use of government authority to pursue a personal agenda and to go after perceived enemies. One other point: Sometimes even the media describes this as an effort to cut costs. This is not an effort to cut costs. This is going to cost the American taxpayer and the American public in huge ways. Foer: Wait, explain that to me. Stier: If you really wanted to reshape the federal workforce, you would start with an actual investigation of all the talent that you have—and then all the talent that you need. You would develop a plan. But what they've done is a random exercise. They are going after people without any sense about whether they're the best performers or the poor performers. It's probably a little worse than that: The people who may be the most talented have a larger propensity to leave, because they'll have more options. And the administration is creating liabilities. It will now owe money to people who are put on the sideline for no reason, and it will have to fill gaps that are created that they don't even understand, which will mean eventually going out to hire contractors. There will be lawsuits—and lawsuits that are meritorious. Guess who pays for that? The American taxpayer is going to be funding the defense in those cases and will pay the payoff. If your intent were to shrink the workplace in a cost-effective way, this is a crazy way to do it. Foer: But that's the Silicon Valley way—moving fast and breaking stuff. Stier: That may or may not be a smart strategy in Silicon Valley. It is not in the government, because there are real consequences. People get hurt in a different way when public capability is broken. One of the challenges in our government is that when it tries to modernize technology, it has to build up a new system alongside the legacy system. That's how it manages to keep functioning. Our government is about creating good outcomes; it's not about throughput. So the objective is wrong here. The public sector has accountability, transparency, reliability issues that are simply not the same as in the private sector. Foer: All the focus has been on DOGE, understandably. But what does the focus on Musk leave out? Stier: Most democracies count their political appointees in the tens, not the thousands. We have a government where there are 4,000 political appointees that a president makes. That's a vestige of the spoils system that actually creates a lot of grief. Only 1,300 of them require Senate confirmation. The remaining appointees are a bit invisible. The public isn't seeing that they are the ones doing a lot of the damage right now. [Read: The government's computing experts say they are terrified] Foer: Trump's are qualitatively different from the appointees who show up in every administration? Stier: It is qualitatively different. In modern times, there's never [before] been a collection of political appointees where personal loyalty to the president has been the paramount value that has been used to select them. They swear an oath of office, when they take these jobs, to defend the Constitution. So they should be following the policy direction of the president within those constraints, but that is not how they were selected and not how they have begun to operate so far. Foer: What do you make of DOGE's efforts to gain access to government databases? Stier: I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with the community of chief information-security officers. They've never seen anything like this, and it terrorizes every bone in their body. These are not just people who are trying to protect the status quo. These are people who would have been good allies for reform. Foer: What are some of the scariest risks that you've heard described that these actual practitioners see as plausible? Stier: Chinese control over vital assets of our government and our country, because DOGE has opened the door for that to happen. Selective attacks on enemies lists. Breakage of systems that have consequences for vulnerable Americans. And it's not like, Oh, here's a mistake. They are engaging in the same practice everywhere—and they are not asking for advice or help from people who know what those risks are. Foer: What would a responsible government-reform agenda look like now? Stier: Ask Americans what they think about our federal government, and they think about bickering politicians in Washington. They don't actually think about civil service. And that's part of the challenge here. The opportunity is hopefully they will begin to understand who those folks are and appreciate what they have, even if we can do better. But a place to begin is tapping into the very best technologists in Silicon Valley to modernize government systems. We need to have a reorientation toward the customer. In the private sector, we've seen improved customer service that is created by the digital universe we live in. Our government needs to be much more customer-focused. And at the end of the day, we need to see the reform of leadership. We have too many political appointees. The folks chosen for these jobs are chosen and rewarded for a policy announcement, not actual policy execution. We have short-term leaders aligned to long-term organizations. Take the Veterans Health Administration, which is a hospital system run by a political appointee. Much of the time, there's no one in that job. And when they're there, they're there for two years. And you can't run an operationally complex system with short-term leaders. [Read: If DOGE goes nuclear] Interestingly, every career civil servant has a performance plan that they have to commit to. We need to hold political leaders responsible for real performance. Foer: When civil servants ask you for advice about staying or going, what do you tell them? Stier: The first thing I say is, this is a personal choice. No judgment from me. A third of the civil service are veterans. Coming out of the military, they want to continue to serve. That is the dominant ethos in our government. So I say: Remember the sense of purpose that you carried into government. The longer you can stick it out, the longer you will continue to be able to help the American people. Systemically, we need the civil service committed to stay as much as possible—to ensure that the rule of law and the Constitution are actually followed. Our government is the only tool for collective action that we have as a society. We live in a phenomenally dangerous world that has gotten scarier. Harms have metastasized. Our government needs to actually get better at meeting the set of risks that we face. Civil servants are the best tool we have for actually making our government better. Article originally published at The Atlantic
