Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, SENATE NEWS—Subcommittee minority report details billions in DOGE-generated 'waste’, (Aug 4, 2025)

By Jeff Williams

The ranking member of the subcommittee has asked inspectors general at 27 federal agencies to conduct “comprehensive” reviews of DOGE’s activities.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) has released a report by the minority staff of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) saying that the Department of Government Efficiency (DODGE), “despite its ostensible goal of eliminating waste,” generated at least $21.7 billion in federal government waste between Jan. 20, 2025, and July 18, 2025, including $14.8 billion paid through the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) to employees who are not working.

“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims,” said Blumenthal, the ranking member of the subcommittee. “At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars. As my PSI investigation has shown, DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money.”

Senator Blumenthal also sent letters to inspectors general at the Federal Reserve Board, the Department of Commerce, and 25 other federal agencies urging each of them to “initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s activities within your agency in order to determine the full scope of costs that DOGE’s careless actions have imposed,” including the financial impacts of the “reorganization of federal agencies through mass layoffs, the canceling of grants, contracts, and other projects for partisan reasons, and the stifling of income-generating activities.” The PSI minority staff was “forced to estimate the costs that DOGE has imposed on the American people” because of an “absence of reliable information” from the Trump administration regarding DOGE’s activities, he said.

In addition to the spending attributed to the DRP, the report said that the “DOGE-created waste” the subcommittee’s minority investigation revealed has included:

• $6.1 billion being paid to more than 100,000 employees “who have been involuntarily separated from federal service or who remain on prolonged periods of administrative leave pending separation, many of whom were paid to not do their jobs for weeks or months;”

• the Department of Energy losing $263 million in interest and fee income "due to dozens of loan freezes meant to finance key utility projects supporting energy affordability and grid resilience;”

• “time costs” of $155 million to require nearly 1 million employees to send weekly “accomplishment emails to the Office of Personnel Management (‘OPM') (which has no intention of reviewing them), amounting to millions of hours of wasted time;”

• $110 million in “food aid and medical supplies spoiling in warehouses, set to be destroyed at a further cost to taxpayers;”

• $66 million from "underutilizing thousands of professional staff to perform entry-level duties for weeks on end, including over $138,000 for paying scientists to check guests in at national parks;”

• $41.8 million spent to relocate more than 250 OPM staff members closer to a physical office;

• $38 million in “sunk costs on unrecoverable investments in science and technology" for four projects at the National Institutes of Health and the Internal Revenue Service; and

• $1.7 million in time costs to “require employees to unnecessarily justify routine expenses at three agencies, including window washing at the Federal Aviation Administration.”

The investigation also found that DOGE has generated other “direct and indirect forms of waste that may well reach millions or even billions of dollars but were not reasonably subject to estimate, all of which have hindered the efficiency DOGE claims to champion,” the report said.

Those items included:

• “substantial administrative and legal expenses from dozens of lawsuits coupled with widespread operational dysfunction, resulting in untold hours of lost productivity by creating stress, uncertainty, and disruption at virtually all federal agencies, disrupting essential services and diminishing critical functions;”

• the “undermining of public safety and natural disaster response by hindering forecaster coordination, delaying” the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response efforts, and “squandering crucial hazard mitigation funds, directly increasing natural disaster costs and risks;”

• “massive human costs and health threats from the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development;”

• “stifling innovation and economic growth through the cancellation of grants and the broader interference in federal funding mechanisms;” and

• “hidden economic costs encompassing billions in lost opportunities for savings and growth, evident in lost customer savings from stalled energy investments and reduced returns on vital research funding.”

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