"I am compelled to warn about what is happening there and is being concealed from us," Yaalon told Israel's public broadcaster Kan on Sunday. "At the end of the day, war crimes are being committed." Yaalon is a former army chief of staff who served as defence minister under Netanyahu from 2013-16, and has been a fierce critic of the prime minister ever since. Netanyahu's Likud party accused him of spreading "slanderous lies", while Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, head of a small rightist party, said his accusations were baseless. "Everything Israel does is in accordance with international law and it is a pity that former minister Ya'alon does not realise the damage that he has done and retract his remarks," he told a conference hosted by Israel Today newspaper. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last month issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence chief Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.

"DOGE is not a serious exercise," said Jessica Riedl, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank that supports streamlining government. She estimates DOGE has only saved $5 billion to date, and believes it will end up costing more than it saves. The examples - previously unreported - span 14 government agencies and were described in Reuters interviews with three dozen federal workers, union representatives and governance experts.

At the Social Security Administration, in a four-day period in the first week of March, computer systems crashed 10 times. Because a quarter of the agency's IT staff have quit or been fired, it's taking longer to get the systems online again, disrupting the processing of claims, one IT worker told Reuters. Few dispute the SSA's computer systems are old, often crash and need updating. Musk told Baier the agency's computer systems are "failing", and "we're fixing it."

Since its founding on Trump's first day in the White House, DOGE has largely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world's needy, canceling more than 80 percent of its humanitarian programs. Almost all of the agency's employees will be fired by September, all of its overseas offices shut, with some functions absorbed into the State Department. At home, the government overhaul has resulted in the firing, resignations and early retirements of 260,000 civil servants, according to a Reuters tally. Over 20,000 probationary workers - recently hired or recently reassigned employees - were fired in February. After court rulings they were reinstated but most were sent home on full pay. Most are now being fired again after further court decisions.

Trump and Musk have said the U.S. government is beset by fraud and waste. Few civil servants and governance experts dispute efficiencies can be made, but say there are already people inside the federal bureaucracy trying to save taxpayer dollars. Yet some of these offices have been targeted for cuts by DOGE.