DOGE's Misplaced War on Software Licenses

image via WIRED

February 28, 2025, 9:47 PM

• •Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has found large batches of unused software licenses.
• •The agency says it has deleted 114,163 unused software licenses and 15 underutilized or redundant software products, for a total annual savings of $9.6M.
• •Critics say that DOGE is doing cursory work with limited knowledge and that the purported discrepancies between licenses and employees may not be as problematic as Musk's government wrecking crew has made them out to be.

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has announced this week that it discovered large batches of unused software licenses as it continues to hunt for examples of waste in Washington. On Monday, DOGE alleged that the General Services Administration has 37,000 licenses for the file compression and encryption tool WinZip, even though the agency has only about 13,000 employees.

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