Eggs-pensive Mistake: How Cutting Federal Jobs Could Hike Egg Prices and More
DOGE’s Spending Cuts Will Raise the Price of Your Eggs and Other Catastrophes While Real Government Waste Remains Unchecked
Imagine YOU were tasked with cutting $2 trillion in government waste. Here's your federal budget:
Social Security & Medicare: 40%
Defense & Veterans: 15%
Federal Contracts: 12.4%
Interest on Debt: 8%
Federal Employee Salaries: 4.3%
Other Programs: 20.3% (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget)
Where would you start looking for waste?
DOGE's answer? The 4.3% of the budget that pays federal salaries.
Let's be crystal clear: federal employee salaries are the most transparent, lowest-risk category in the entire federal budget. Every salary is capped by law and publicly disclosed (Office of Personnel Management - Federal Salaries). There's no hidden markup, no profit margin, no mysterious overhead - just direct compensation for essential work. When a dollar is budgeted for federal salaries, you know exactly where it goes and what it pays for.
Federal salaries are the last place anyone serious about cutting waste and abuse would look - not only because they're the most transparent expenditures in government, but because of what we get for that money. Let's look at just one of hundreds of areas federal employees manage - our food supply – and how their employment affects the price of eggs.
In 2023, USDA inspectors contained 23 potential bird flu outbreaks across 12 states before they could spread, preventing estimated losses of 12 million birds that would have driven egg prices. USDA scientists traced and contained six major salmonella threats within 24 hours, preventing recalls that would have affected 50 million eggs. Federal crop insurance processors handled 8,450 claims after the Midwest storms, keeping 2,300 farms operational and preventing projected feed price increases of 32% (USDA - Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, USDA - Food Safety and Inspection Service).
And that's just food safety - one small part of what federal workers maintain. In 2023 alone, federal employees:
Prevented 12 potential nuclear plant incidents (U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission - Annual Report)
Blocked 180,000 cyber attacks on banking systems (Department of Homeland Security - Cybersecurity)
Inspected 45,000 aging bridges (U.S. Department of Transportation - Federal Highway Administration)
Processed 78 million international air passengers (U.S. Customs and Border Protection - Travel Statistics)
Contained 15 major disease outbreaks (CDC - Outbreak Response)
Managed emergency response for 28 natural disasters (FEMA - Disaster Declarations)
In 2025 and 2026, there is no doubt the current poorly planned buyout of more than 80,000 federal jobs (and counting) is going to cause a major problem – What will it affect? The price of eggs? A listeria outbreak? An incident at a nuclear facility? The only near certainty is whatever crisis comes it will almost certainly cost the government, and the American people more to clean up than the entire salary savings the buyout will achieve.
Meanwhile, look at where real waste exists in federal contracting and bureaucratic red tape from outdated reporting requirements. At the Department of Energy, a single environmental assessment program paid four different contractors $23 million for work federal scientists previously did for $3.4 million. Each contractor added 27% overhead and 15% profit margin. Three then subcontracted portions, each subcontractor adding their own overhead and profit. One report. Seven companies. Triple the cost (Government Accountability Office (GAO) Reports on DOE).
But even this contracting waste pales compared to the trillions lost to accumulated layers of internal reporting requirements. Each administration adds new requirements without removing old ones:
Clinton gave us GPRA with its 247-page strategic plans (The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA))
Bush added scorecards
Obama introduced Cross-Agency Priority Goals
Trump created new metrics
Biden added equity tracking
No one reads all these reports. No one can even find them all. But they cost $1 trillion annually in direct costs and lost productivity (Office of Management and Budget (OMB) - Performance.gov).Instead of targeting the four pennies that pay for essential workers, we should:
Eliminate redundant reporting requirements ($1.2T annually) (OECD - Cutting Red Tape)
Cancel duplicate agency audits ($670M)
End redundant training systems ($47M per agency)
Kill compliance tracking systems ($220M government-wide)
And consider reducing government contracts wherever possible and instead, have the work performed by direct federal employees. These kind of changes would actually produce real costs savings but it will require something DOGE seems unwilling to do: understand how government actually works. It would mean learning which oversight truly improves performance versus which just creates paperwork. It would mean recognizing that direct federal employment is often the most efficient way to get critical work done.
What we have now instead are reported savings that target the smallest, most transparent part of the budget while ignoring where real waste exists. It's like trying to save money on your household budget by canceling your smoke detector maintenance while ignoring three maxed-out credit cards.
The next time DOGE talks about cutting waste, remember: They're targeting just four cents of every tax dollar - money spent on essential services with full transparency - while leaving bloated contracts and trillion-dollar reporting requirements untouched. That's not reform. That's a shell game where taxpayers always lose - and pay more for everything from eggs to electricity in the process.