A look at the first 100 days of DOGE. Wired’s Makena Kelly has the details. Israel has prevented almost all aid from reaching Gaza for close to two months. This week, the International Court of Justice began to weigh in. The Washington Post reports. Reuters also finds that community kitchens in Gaza may close due to dwindling supplies. The Trump administration’s deportations and detainments have left families shattered. Time looks at some of the more prominent cases. Plus, Trump scales back auto tariffs, a detained Columbia University student speaks, and Bob Ross gets his own museum exhibition. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Full Episode
Good morning. It's Wednesday, April 30th. I'm Shemita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, the U.N. weighs in on Israel's humanitarian aid blockade, how the families of deportees are coping, and everyone's favorite TV painter Bob Ross gets his own happy little exhibition.
But first, when Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency got to Washington at the start of Trump's second term, they made some big promises, chief among them to cut waste and fraud from federal spending and make the government more efficient in order to save American taxpayers money. Musk originally said Doge would find $2 trillion in savings.
Then he lowered the goal to $1 trillion, then again to $150 billion. But Doge has struggled to reach even that very lowest target. The Doge team claims to have saved $160 billion, but reporting shows their accounting is inflated and riddled with miscalculations and errors, so it's hard to know what exactly they've accomplished.
Doge's goals are hitting up against what budget experts and the government's own watchdogs have long said. Finding and eliminating waste, fraud and abuse isn't a path to big fiscal savings. There simply isn't enough of it. The bulk of federal spending is associated with Social Security and Medicare, two programs that Trump has promised he won't touch.
Still, Wired senior writer McKenna Kelly tells us Doge, with Trump's support, has had a profound effect on the federal government over the last 100 days.
helping to lay off tons of government workers. And we've seen attempts to shut down agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, USAID, and just trying to completely redo the United States administrative state in Silicon Valley's image, really.
Kelly is part of the team at Wired that's been closely reporting on what Doge has been doing, speaking to current and former federal workers. In total, Doge has shrunk the federal workforce to 1960s levels by either firing or pushing out nearly a quarter of a million workers.
Doge has hollowed out or shut down 11 federal agencies, and the team says it has cut more than 8,500 contracts and 10,000 grants. Last month, as Doge was getting more scrutiny, Trump said they would use a scalpel to make cuts. But Kelly says that's not what's happened so far.
Elon Musk got on Sage's CPAC holding this chainsaw. And really, that's emblematic of what Doge has done to the federal government.
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