According to the article, Donald Trump and DOGE adviser Elon Musk were pictured on May 30, 2025, in the Oval Office. The ostensible point of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” was rooting out trillions of dollars of government waste, fraud, and abuse. Musk promised to cut at least $2 trillion from the U.S. budget with his DOGE gang but came up largely empty-handed, saving around $20 billion a year by eliminating USAID, a program costing $5 billion, roughly 0.08% of federal spending. The article argues that when Republican politicians claim to save billions by rooting out fraud, they imply Musk and his team were too incompetent to find it. Specifically, when Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn claimed 12 million people were fraudulently added to the Affordable Care Act exchange, she claimed Musk missed that number, roughly half of all people on the exchanges. When Speaker Mike Johnson claims he will deal with a projected $370 billion annual shortfall in Social Security by eliminating waste and fraud, he claims Musk missed that amount, equal to roughly 15% of the program’s spending. When Trump claimed Minnesota had $19 billion in fraud in its Medicaid program, roughly equal to the state’s entire annual Medicaid budget, he claimed Musk and DOGE found nothing despite looking into it.