DOGE’s quest for ‘efficiency’ falls flat as its interference makes federal worker lives much, much harder

Elon Musk likely thought he was in for an easy ride with DOGE and its quest for efficiency – how hard can it be to cut down on federal spending right? Well, it turns out it’s not an easy feat as unforeseen circumstances and lack of foresight on Musk and Donald Trump’s behalf more often than not lead to DOGE making embarrassing mistakes and making things worse for workers.

In one instance, a fed up worker took to Reddit to complain about a decision from DOGE which ended up making their job much more difficult. According to the individual, “Whumpiegirl,” Trump and Musk took away her agency’s Adobe Acrobat license, leaving her unable to edit documents. According to her, something like combing documents, which once took five seconds in Acrobat, now takes her and other workers in IT around 45 minutes. The OP claims, “I’m working double time just to keep up with what they are doing.”

A five-second task being turned into a 45-minute saga? That doesn’t sound efficient to me, but hey, I guess the government is at least saving a few dollars on the Adobe Acrobat subscription right? Yep, Elon can pat himself on the back and tell everyone what a good job he’s done now.

DOGE claims the government is paying for thousands of unused Acrobat accounts

Earlier this month DOGE claimed that U.S. departments such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development were wasting a lot of money on software licenses that were not being used. According to an article from MSN.com, DOGE said that there were “11,020 Acrobat licenses with zero users.”

It seems like Musk was trying to save money by cancelling these subscriptions. However, the decision has led to a less efficient workforce which could end up costing the government even more.

If the original poster on Reddit is to be believed then it raises some serious concerns. Cancelling inactive subscriptions makes sense, but how does DOGE really know if a subscription is being used or not? DOGE has a history of making disastrous decisions, could this be another example? Clearly, in this case, the department has removed a necessary tool for the OP’s agency – how many others could this have happened to? 

Other workers shared similar stories

In the replies underneath the post, others shared similar experiences, one person wrote, “OMG, I thought I was the only one with that issue. All damn day I’ve been trying to figure out the problem.” Another asked, “Are you at GSA? Ours was ripped away this week.” Evidently, this isn’t an isolated incident, Musk has taken away a very vital tool from these employees, which will only make the government less efficient now that everything takes much more effort and way too much time to be accomplished.

So I ask again, were DOGE and Musk 100% confident all of those 11,020 subscriptions weren’t being used? How did they arrive at that number? And how did they know they weren’t being used? A little transparency would go a long way here, otherwise it sounds like the department is just arbitrarily removing necessary software from workers who need it without considering the consequences.