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DOGE’s Fuzzy Math

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 02 › doge-government-fraud-national-debt › 681725

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Last week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the national debt “one of the biggest betrayals against the American people,” suggesting that Americans’ anger about debt “gave birth to the concept of DOGE.” The idea that Elon Musk and his band of government-efficiency crusaders can bring down the debt is a tidy one. But DOGE’s current plans would hardly put a dent in the deficit.

Musk has lamented that America is “drowning” in debt, which has indeed ballooned over the past decade: As of this month, the federal debt is $36 trillion, about $13 trillion higher than it was five years ago. Debt has not been a priority of either major political party for some time, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economics, told me. And despite Taylor Greene’s claims about American anger over the debt, it’s not a top-of-mind issue for people at the polls, either, Annie argued.

If Musk’s team were serious about reducing the deficit, it could explore some unpopular but effective options: reduce spending for the military and the entitlement programs that make up the bulk of the federal budget—Medicare and Social Security—or simply raise taxes, Annie suggested. Instead, what Musk and DOGE have done thus far is ravage government agencies and departments (USAID, for example, which makes up a tiny portion of the budget, and the destruction of which won’t lead to major savings). They’ve also focused on slashing the federal workforce by offering buyouts to 2 million federal workers (and, over the weekend, axing thousands more federal-agency employees); so far, salaries for the workers who have accepted the buyout offer make up a minuscule portion of the national budget in total.

Musk, Trump, and their allies have also turned to a bit of magical thinking, claiming that rooting out fraud in the government is the key to saving money. In a meandering address from the Oval Office last week, Musk claimed without evidence that USAID workers were raking in millions in kickbacks, and that people as old as 150 were claiming Social Security benefits. He wrote on X last week that “at this point, I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR.”

Stumbling upon, and reclaiming, trillions of fraudulently spent funds would be rather convenient, and crying “fraud” is a useful way for Musk and his defenders to cast DOGE’s actions as in service of the American people. Trump has touted this same shaky logic, asserting that uncovering a bunch of fraud could mean America has less debt than previously thought. Fraud does exist in parts of the government: Some people intend to defraud government programs; others accidentally sign up for benefits they’re not actually eligible for. And the government does sometimes make payment errors—federal agencies estimated that more than $200 billion was lost in fiscal year 2023 because of such mistakes, and in past years fraud losses accounted for 3 to 7 percent of the budget. But there is no evidence that lowering the deficit is as simple as tamping down on fraud—or that fraud exists to the extent Musk claims.

Plus, by whacking the bureaucracy, Musk and his team are weakening programs that are already working to tamp down fraud. All federal programs have fraud-detection mandates. The Treasury, for example, announced in October that it had recovered or prevented $4 billion in fraud losses in the prior fiscal year, in part from employing AI machine-learning. And as he rails against what he calls fraud, Musk and his associates have effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose mandate is to crack down on fraud in businesses (and which might have regulated Musk’s own companies).

The rhetorical trick of politicians referring to unpopular or disliked government spending as fraud isn’t new. But in an era of rampant scamming, claiming that the American government is swindling its own people hits on a salient national fear. Musk’s first few weeks running DOGE don’t bode well for his ability to solve the debt crisis. He may succeed, however, in further eroding trust in government, which could give him and his team even more leeway in their attempts to dismantle it.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

How MAGA is reimagining foreign policy January 6 still happened. Want to change your personality? Have a baby. Frozen food’s new wave

Today’s News

Top representatives from Russia and the U.S. met in Saudi Arabia to discuss strengthening economic and diplomatic relations between the two countries and assembling a team to start peace negotiations in the Ukraine war. The Trump administration fired thousands of probationary federal workers over the weekend in departments including the FAA, Health and Human Services, and Energy. The acting head of the Social Security Administration resigned after DOGE requested access to sensitive personal information about millions of Americans.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains how COVID pushed a generation of young people to the right.

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Evening Read

NBC

Saturday Night Live Played the Wrong Greatest-Hits Reel

By Esther Zuckerman

Fifty years is a long time. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from large portions of SNL50: The Anniversary Special, the much-hyped celebration of the long-running sketch show that aired in prime time last night. SNL50 was meant to commemorate the program, created and executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, for achieving five decades of cultural relevance. But the evening’s rundown suffered from a severe case of recency bias, with sketches that were more inclined to play it safe than honor the show’s extensive, complicated, and fascinating history.

Read the full article.

Slashing Science Funding Is the Opposite of Efficiency

found 11 Feb The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › nih-nsf-science-doge › 681645

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The Trump administration has set its sights on basic science. Last week, the National Science Foundation revealed plans to lay off between a quarter and half of its staff, and the National Institutes of Health announced that it would drastically reduce grants to university research programs. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has nominated the longtime NIH critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees NIH funding, and the president’s initial budget request will reportedly ask Congress to slash the NSF’s budget by as much as 66 percent.

The cuts are being justified in terms of efficiency. The change at NIH will cap payments for administrative support—known as indirect costs, or “overhead”—at 15 percent of direct funding. (Last night, a federal judge temporarily blocked the NIH policy from going into effect—but only in the 22 states that sued to stop it.) The administration claims that this will save the government more than $4 billion a year. Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has been empowered by executive order to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” has already taken a victory lap. “Can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60% of research award money for ‘overhead’?” he wrote on X. “What a ripoff!”

Let’s set aside the arguments about the constitutionality or wisdom of turning Musk loose on the federal bureaucracy. With its attack on research, DOGE is failing on its own terms. Cutting basic science funding violates its mandate to make government more efficient. If they survive legal challenges, the moves might save money in the short run, but in the years and decades to come, they will cost taxpayers dearly by slowing down innovation and making America’s future less prosperous.

[Ian Bogost: The chaos in higher ed is only getting started]

Many breakthrough technologies began as highly speculative, taxpayer-funded projects with no immediate practical value. The first computers were connected in 1969 through ARPANET, a Department of Defense–funded communication network. ARPANET’s narrow purpose at the time was to facilitate the sharing of costly computing resources across project sites. In the 1980s, the NSF funded an expansion of the ARPANET concept to more than a dozen universities and, eventually, a nationwide network of supercomputing centers. This became the backbone of the modern internet when it was opened up to commercial activity in the 1990s.

The practical value of a connected computer network did not become apparent until decades after the early ideas were funded. If DOGE had been around in the 1980s, cuts in the name of “efficiency” might have prevented or greatly delayed the development of one of the most important technologies in human history. Similarly, an NSF-funded project on the chopping block today might be on track to unlock future breakthroughs in clean energy or artificial intelligence.

In medicine, too, government funding of abstract, seemingly useless research can lay the groundwork for transformative discoveries. To take just one recent example, the development of Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs originated in NIH-funded research into reptiles. In the early 1980s, Jean-Pierre Raufman, a scientist doing postdoctoral research at NIH, discovered that Gila-monster venom stimulated cell growth in the pancreas, the organ that synthesizes insulin. A few years later, Raufman and John Eng, an endocrinologist at a Veterans Affairs hospital, discovered that the venom contained a peptide that stimulates insulin production for much longer than the natural GLP-1 produced by the human body. Eng patented the peptide and licensed the patent to Amylin Pharmaceuticals, which developed it as a diabetes treatment with NIH support. Twenty years later, pharmaceutical companies realized the drug’s revolutionary potential for weight loss.

Scientific discovery is unpredictable and haphazard, with many surprises and dead ends. You can imagine a member of Congress in the 1980s denouncing the NIH’s wasteful spending on useless studies of Gila-monster venom. But Musk and his Silicon Valley allies should know better. Like scientific research, venture capital is built on funding lots of ideas that go nowhere. Most venture-capital investments fail, but the small number of wild successes makes the whole enterprise worthwhile. These successes are hard to predict because they can arise from seemingly outlandish new ideas, such as a virtual yearbook for college students.

The public has a right to demand that its tax dollars are spent wisely. One good measure of the efficiency of government spending is whether it beats the alternative: returning the money to citizens as a tax cut.

Funding for basic research is efficient by this very strict definition. Multiple studies have concluded that $1 spent on research typically returns several dollars of value to society through increases in private-sector innovation. Nearly one-third of NIH grants over a 27-year period led to the publication of research that was eventually cited in commercial patent applications, and one in 10 NIH grants was cited in a patent directly. One cleverly designed study estimated that an additional $10 million of NIH funding generates about $23 million in sales of newly patented drugs. And a working paper posted a few weeks ago found that major NSF investment in science and engineering infrastructure at non-elite research universities increased the annual patenting rate in the surrounding local economy by 18 to 32 percent. The overall picture is very consistent: Government funding of basic science research generates very large social returns, even when we can’t accurately predict the good ideas ahead of time.

[Ian Bogost: A new kind of crisis for American universities]

This makes indiscriminate cuts harmful and inefficient. Consider the NIH’s proposal to limit university research funding. Government research grants provide funding for both direct costs—meaning personnel and material support, such as lab equipment, for specific projects—and indirect costs, which it calculates as a percentage of the direct costs. Indirect costs fund the infrastructure that makes projects possible, including lab facilities, heat and electricity, finance and administration, data privacy, and compliance with regulations. In announcing the new policy, the NIH said that the average indirect grant in recent years was about 27 to 28 percent of direct funding.

The Trump administration argues that a 15 percent cap on indirect costs is reasonable because that is the rate typically paid by private foundations. But private-foundation grants can be so low only because of the existence of larger government grants that support basic research infrastructure. Lowering the NIH rate to 15 percent will force universities to spend much more of their own money to support basic research. Even if rich private schools like Harvard, where I teach, can take the hit, most NIH funds go to cash-strapped public universities without big endowments. If government funding goes away, so will much of the research. The long-run cost will be staggering. We’ll have fewer medical breakthroughs, the progress of lifesaving medical treatments will stall, and America may fall behind in its efforts to train the next generation of great scientists and engineers.

There are many ways to make government funding of scientific research more efficient. The nonpartisan Institute for Progress commissioned a series of papers about how to improve NIH funding, including speeding up grant review, funding riskier but higher-upside research, and smoothing the path to commercialization. One could even lower NIH spending by creating categories of grants with different indirect rates that depend on the scale and scope of the project. Doctoral-training grants, for example, might not really justify high overhead costs. But the biggest, most ambitious projects require substantial investments of energy and space that a 15 percent rate will not begin to cover. DOGE should focus on these and other reforms, rather than confusing efficiency with ill-conceived budget cuts that will make us sicker, poorer, and less innovative in the years to come.

The Era of Risk-Averse Super Bowl Ads

found 11 Feb The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 02 › super-bowl-ads-2025-politics › 681640

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Every year, Super Bowl advertisers pay millions to appear on screens for a minute or less. The ad slots tend more toward the upbeat than the controversial. But even by the low bar of Super Bowl advertising, this year was rather risk-averse. Sweet animals and mascots abounded. Multiple ads featured vaguely old-timey montages. At a certain point, the commercials started to blend together. (The two different ads featuring flying hair certainly did.)

In past big games, some companies have attempted to speak to the zeitgeist by addressing civic or political themes in their ads. In 2017, just after Donald Trump was inaugurated for the first time, some major Super Bowl advertisers addressed politics head-on: Budweiser released an ad portraying the founder of the company encountering discrimination as he immigrated to America. Airbnb’s spot that year seemingly criticized Trump’s then–travel ban.

In the past decade or so, in particular, some brands have embraced explicitly political marketing, giving credence to the idea that consumers “vote with their wallets.” Some shoppers have said that they do: A 2018 survey from the communications firm Edelman found that nearly 60 percent of American consumers would buy or boycott a brand “solely because of its position on a social or political issue,” up 12 points from the year before. Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, many consumers (and employees) demanded that major corporations, even those whose businesses didn’t directly relate to social issues, take a stand on topics such as race, voting rights, and abortion—even if some suspected that companies were responding to pressure rather than acting on genuine principle.

This year’s Super Bowl advertisers showed little interest in going near any of that. Few made explicit reference to politics (excepting nonprofits). Timothy Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern, told me that he sees the 2023 Bud Light imbroglio, in which the company faced massive backlash over partnering with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social-media video, as a shift. By 2023, Americans had started to soften on their interest in companies taking a stand on social issues, according to Gallup. Flickers of a move away from political ads were apparent last year; during both the 2023 and the 2024 games, Budweiser made a nostalgia play, focusing its ads on the brand’s classic Clydesdale horses.

The NFL, for its part, decided this year to remove the message “End Racism,” which had been stenciled onto the edge of the end zone for the past four Super Bowls, and replace it with “Choose Love.” Donald Trump attended the game, the first sitting president to do so; the league has denied that the timing of the change was related to the president’s attendance.

Super Bowl ad space was available for purchase well before the presidential election: Skechers, back in May, became the first brand to confirm that it had bought a national spot. By mid-2024, about 85 percent of the ad units were sold out, and by early November, all of the slots had sold. A bit of reshuffling followed—State Farm pulled its ad after the Los Angeles–area fires—but for the most part, companies have been prepping for many months. Still, Calkins told me, every advertiser likely took a closer look at their cuts after the election, to make sure that nothing would spark too much controversy, given the new administration.

Super Bowl ads cost so much—more than $8 million this year for some national slots, nearly double what they cost a decade ago—and a misstep can pose a dire risk for companies. But many still find the huge audience, a rarity in our fractured media environment, worth the potential treachery, Calkins told me. The challenge for brands going forward, he said, is to find the balance of being “safe” without losing creativity. This year, lots of ads were uncontroversial—and uninspired. Maybe next year, more of them will surprise us.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

How progressives froze the American dream Trump signals he might ignore the courts. A new kind of crisis for American universities The Christian mandate is more arduous than J. D. Vance allows.

Today’s News

Hamas alleged that Israel broke the cease-fire deal and has indefinitely postponed the hostage release scheduled for this Saturday. A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had failed to comply with his court order to restore federal funding after the recent freeze. President Donald Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports.

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Work in Progress: Tom Brady could be worth $375 million in the booth, Derek Thompson writes. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal rounds up essays in which Atlantic writers travel near and far to find what’s missing.

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What It Takes to Make Flying Safe

found 3 Feb The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › airline-safety-aviation-system › 681543

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Wednesday night’s deadly airplane crash was tragic—and, to many experts, not altogether surprising. The collision between a commercial airplane and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C., has led many people to take a closer look at the complex systems that commercial flying relies on, and the strain that some of those systems are under. I spoke with my colleague Ian Bogost, who writes often about the airline industry, about the factors that shape our perceptions of flying.

Lora Kelley: This incident is not an aberration, but rather something experts seem to have seen coming. What were some of the warning signs?

Ian Bogost: Aviation experts had been fearing that something like this would happen not just at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, but all across the country. Near misses have been on the rise, as have “runway incursions”—planes accidentally sharing the same space with other planes. I won’t pretend to understand all of the reasons for that—and that’s part of the problem. The issues here aren’t as simple as something like screws falling off. Rather, near misses and accidents have to do with the whole system of aviation management: pilot experience; air-traffic-control staffing; the number of planes in the air; the complex airspace around Washington, D.C., in this case. More Americans are flying too, and growing demand puts new pressure on all of these systems in invisible ways.

Lora: How should people think about flying at this moment?

Ian: Commercial airlines want you to feel comfortable flying, because their business depends on it. The evolution of commercial air travel, especially in America, has made it so you don’t even have to look at or smell or hear the equipment to the same extent that passengers once did. You’re protected from many things that remind you that you’re in a machine hurtling through the air at 500 miles per hour.

Commercial air travel really is quite safe. When I say commercial air travel, I mean when you fly a major carrier on a scheduled flight that’s regulated. Safety in the cabin has also improved. Flight attendants worked very hard over many decades to establish themselves as safety professionals and not just service staff. The flight crew is trained to act in case of an emergency, and they’re highly prepared to do so. But because travel is so safe, you never get to see them perform that expertise—God forbid you see them perform that expertise.

Lora: Airlines are quite consolidated, and the system of flight relies on a range of factors beyond just individual companies. How does consolidation factor into safety?

Ian: We have fewer choices in flight than we used to—fewer airlines, fewer routes, fewer airport hubs. That does have an impact on safety. One way this plays out is, if you have fewer options for direct flights, you might have to opt for a layover. Takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous part of air travel. So if you can reduce takeoffs and landings—for example, by taking one flight instead of two—you’re safer, at least statistically. This is all still safer than driving somewhere in a car.

It’s really difficult for consumers to make rational decisions about safety today. Especially because we don’t really know what happened yet with this incident, we don’t know how great the risk is of it happening again. I’ve heard people start to consider making changes to their habits, although I don’t think we’re going to see many folks change their plans in the long run. After a door plug blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight last year, I started to see people saying they would try to avoid the aircraft in question, a Boeing 737-9 MAX. Are those people actually safer? Who knows.

Lora: Why do people often pin their safety fears on airplanes themselves, rather than focusing on the people or systems that operate them?

Ian: In the case of flying, people tend to target their concern toward the concrete, visceral problems they can see and touch: Is there a screw loose? Is my seat broken? We mostly don’t consider the more systemic, intangible ones, such as staffing issues and maintenance routines and airspace-traffic patterns.

When an accident like this week’s happens, however, we get a brief insight into just how complex modern life is. For all of us, it’s certainly much easier not to have to think about that complexity.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

FBI agents are stunned by the scale of the expected Trump purge. CDC data are disappearing. Trump has created health-care chaos. Legal weed didn’t deliver on its promises.

Today’s News

The Trump administration will impose a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on goods from China tomorrow, according to the White House. Some hospitals across the country have suspended gender-affirming care for people under 19 years old while they assess how to comply with Donald Trump’s recent executive order. North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia have been pulled off the front lines in the Ukrainian war, according to Ukrainian and U.S. officials.

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Work in Progress: DeepSeek has already hit the chipmaker giant Nvidia’s share price, but its true potential could upend the whole AI business model, James Surowiecki writes. The Books Briefing: In Catherine Airey’s new novel, a young person’s curiosity about a life lived without social media or streaming is deployed to superb effect, Emma Sarappo writes.

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