Despite potentially inducing some stark emotional whiplash vis-à-vis my Valentine’s Day column, I feel the need to write about the egregious mathematical errors being made by President Donald Trump and his legally tenuous Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, run by Elon Musk. The problems with such mathematical mindlessness are legion, so I’ll do my best (though likely fail) to fit the major points in a column.
Start with the only public record we have of the government savings DOGE has produced in the past month, a “wall of receipts” website that claims to have saved a total of $55 billion. While it’s hard to actually verify every receipt on the site (another problem I’ll address shortly), there’s no doubt that this savings total is a gross overstatement. Several contracts are listed multiple times, and others closed out before Trump took office. Additionally, the money used to finance DOGE’s efforts has soared to $40 million – these costs are not included in DOGE’s public ledger.
The agency DOGE claims to have saved the most by cutting is the US Agency for International Development or USAID. The White House and Republican allies have trumpeted several projects as examples of wastefulness by USAID. But make no mistake, about half of the projects they list weren’t even funded by USAID, which the administration has effectively shuttered with most of its workers put on leave; and even the projects with USAID funding have been grossly mischaracterized.
What else is wrong with foreign aid that the US provides? According to Trump, Musk, and other Republicans, anywhere from 15 to 100 million dollars was sent to Hamas and/or the Taliban to buy condoms and $8 million to Politico to publish stories praising Democrats. Also at issue is the “bioweapons research” conducted at a research lab in Wuhan, China. Musk claims to have engineered COVID-19. While there has been growing evidence in support of the lab leak theory, the important fact here is that the lab in Wuhan never received funding from the US government.
Research that does receive federal funding includes the several medical laboratories at US universities and institutions that receive grants from the National Institutes of Health. These grants have included money to cover overhead costs so that universities can run their lab facilities, power the buildings, and replace lab equipment when necessary. The administration has tried to slash the percentage of these indirect costs to 15% of the grant total from the previous range of 50-70% for accepted grants, depending on the host institution. Musk has also consistently mischaracterized how the NIH funding worked, claiming that 50-70% of the grant total went to universities when, in actuality, the indirect costs were tacked onto the main grant money used directly for the research.
All of this is not entirely surprising: Trump and his Republican allies peddled loads of false mathematics on the campaign trail, and DOGE has essentially acted without check, maintaining full support of the administration even as legal challenges and protests mount. The shielding of Musk and his agents as they crunch numbers creates an environment highly prone to mathematical mistakes that will continue to get celebrated as DOGE tries to make itself look effective and competent.
Additionally, now that people with a clear disdain for mathematics manipulate the dials of government, where does it stop? I have written previously about government agencies that publish vital statistics to help better understand the state of the country – Trump and his acolytes could feel free to tamper with the data being published, much like other autocrats do.
I could write several paragraphs more about the very real damage DOGE has already done, and is keen on doing more of. The key first step is to do our utmost in fighting against this onslaught, which, in my mind, is much more about upending American life than promoting a more efficient government.
But, assuming we are (hopefully!) able to salvage our democracy and the institutions that have, despite their numerous faults, made one of the greatest periods of growth and progress in human history possible, we must come to terms with, among countless other things, mathematics’ place in politics and society. Why are politicians consistently given a pass in spewing false or misleading claims that can easily be checked by knowledge of simple arithmetic?
I think the answer lies in part with the fear, or in worse cases, disdain. Many have over mathematics. This hobbles our collective ability to have informed conversations about political matters in particular – reasonable debates about government funding, tax, and economic policy, statistics about the country, which are impossible without the correct mathematical understanding. There are many reforms necessary to bring about this paradigm shift, which will necessarily involve subjects other than mathematics. How does statistics actually help us, for instance, without assigning the proper meaning to the data we collect and the models we produce? We also need a basic understanding of politics and its myriad for this increased mathematical knowledge to matter here.
I’m not trying to argue that a fear of mathematics is the sole or even 10th biggest reason Trump won re-election. But just as we cannot fear standing up to the autocratic approach Trump has taken in his second administration, we must also engage with an alternate vision for the future, trying to tackle difficult subjects involving mathematics, which will help us combat the many pressing issues of the day.
As we obtain degrees from Stevens, showcasing our skills in STEM, I hope that we will form a vanguard in the defense of this mathematical disdain. I am reminded of a quote by James Baldwin, who boldly claimed in Notes of a Native Son, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, insist on the right to criticize it perpetually.” We can all do our part in criticizing the current administration’s faults and keep on criticizing as long as there’s still work to be done.
