Because that is not what happened or what they were doing or even what they were claiming to be doing.

They let essentially college students feeding questions to LLM access data they never should have had access to and then let them decide the details of cutting at the broad direction not to save money but cut the things that the administration just didn't like, without regard for law.

Ultimately resulting in no significant savings, lots of good work being undone to the point of people dying for lack of aid.

In theory, a well experienced group operating within the confines of law to identify inefficiency with how the mission is accomplished might be good. DOGE was not this.

The biggest and most obvious clue, it was all Musk wanting to backronym something to DOGE. Nothing good comes out of musk trying to so something like a 14 year old kid would.

Others have covered the most obvious flaw: it was 100% ineffective, causing chaos in government without any meaningful spending decrease.

But here's the real reason, and it comes together with the other real reason: DOGE was never intended to be about "government efficiency". It was intended to give Elon Musk access to all the information he could get his grubby little hands on for private enrichment and to shut down the very government departments that were in a position to regulate his companies.

Instead of eliminating programs that actually were wasteful, they cut aid, education, and science programs.

And the programs that were wasteful that they claimed to have cut just weren't. They straight up lied about cutting billions in contracts