DOGE Gutted American Science. 5,000 NASA Workers Gone. 14,000 from NIH's Parent Agency. The $1 Trillion Goal Was Never Met.

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The gap between DOGE's promised $1 trillion in savings and its actual ~$160 billion in documented reductions — about $840 billion short — is one of the defining frauds of the second Trump term's economic narrative. The administration spent a year disrupting the federal government, creating massive legal battles, terrorizing the civil service, and destroying institutional knowledge — and ended up with savings equivalent to 0.5% of the national debt. For context, as CBS News noted: it was like a family with $10,000 in credit card debt paying it down by $50.

But the human and institutional costs were real regardless of the savings fiction. At NASA, nearly 5,000 employees were fired — representing approximately a quarter of the agency's workforce. The proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 would nearly halve NASA's budget from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion. Scientists who study climate, planets, and space science lost their jobs or had grants terminated. Missions in development were canceled. The Planetary Society's space policy chief called it "an extinction-level event for NASA science." At the National Science Foundation, over 600 workers were gone and research grants across universities were being canceled mid-project, leaving researchers without funding they had already committed to projects and graduate students.

DOGE also proposed capping the "indirect cost" rates that universities charge on federal research grants — the overhead costs that fund the facilities, equipment, and administration that make research possible. The proposed 15% cap would devastate research-intensive universities like MIT, Johns Hopkins, and public universities that have overhead rates of 50-65%. These rates exist because it actually costs money to run labs, maintain equipment, handle regulatory compliance, and pay staff who support research. Cutting them doesn't make research cheaper — it makes it impossible for universities to host federally-funded research at all.