MS Now's Ali Velshi with a recap of the real costs from Elon Musk and his DOGE wrecking crew. I don't know if we'll ever get a real accounting of the damage done in dollars, but the human toll alone is horrific.

Velshi walked his viewers through reporting from The New York Times, CATO, the Partnership for Public Service, and a recent op-ed at The Hill, and it's just a sickening reminder of what a soulless ghoul Musk is.

VELSHI: Remember DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency? It was the Elon Musk-led federal initiative that wreaked all kinds of havoc in the name of saving money by reducing waste, fraud and abuse.

The Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank, found that DOGE reduced the federal workforce by 271,000 jobs. Right now on the DOGE website, it claims to have saved the taxpayers $215 billion, which is a far cry from the two trillion dollars in federal spending that Musk originally promised to reduce.

And now a New York Times analysis finds the actual number is still a fraction of that $215 billion dollars that it currently claims to have saved. The New York Times analyzed 40 of DOGE's top savings claims, the contracts and grants that DOGE says it canceled to save the government money.

It found that only 12 of the 40 were accurate. The Times attributes DOGE's inaccuracies to either double counting, misclassifying, claiming cuts that actually happened in the Biden era, or grossly exaggerating the savings.

For example, the Times writes, "At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Mr. Musk's group listed them as terminations and said their demise had saved the taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage. Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE's other claims combined." quote.

Nonetheless, DOGE did actually make some cuts to the federal government and they had devastating ripple effects. One of DOGE's most high profile and consequential casualties was the United States Agency for International Development, USAID. It was our country's premier provider of humanitarian aid worldwide. It was a beacon of American values and soft power that started in the Kennedy administration and enjoyed bipartisan support for more than six decades.

DOGE dismantled it. A team of researchers from Boston University estimates that the cuts to USAID have led to 740,000 deaths across the globe, most of them children who, without USAID, died from pneumonia, diarrhea, and starvation.

The dismantling of USAID could have even broader consequences. Two former USAID administrators, one a Democrat, one a Republican, co-wrote a piece in The Hill this week where they said, quote, "Starting in the Reagan administration, for 40 years, USAID developed and managed the Demographic and Health Surveys Program: a health statistics reporting system in 90 developing countries. It tracked death rates, birth rates, disease incidence and novel disease outbreaks. This was our early warning system for novel diseases; its destruction could lead to a new pandemic."

It's important to note, USAID was not some random target. It was singled out in the ultra conservative 922 page policy memo called Project 2025. In fact, DOGE's mass firings, shuttering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, slashing the Department of Education, these were all aims of or bodies that were targeted by Project 2025.

To add insult to injury, the end of the day, DOGE likely cost taxpayers money. According to an estimate last year by the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, DOGE cost the government $135 billion in unpaid, I'm sorry, due to paid leave for federal workers, lost productivity, and the costs of rehiring mistakenly fired workers.

That analysis doesn't even include litigation costs incurred because of DOGE's actions or the effect of its cuts to the IRS, which ultimately reduced revenue collected by the government.

This was all part of Project 2025's grand plan, which was discussed by Velshi's two guests, Steve Benen and Angelo Carusone later in the segment: