The Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency has been a project largely defined by ever-diminishing expectations. At the outset of DOGE’s journey, its chief operator, Elon Musk, famously claimed, in a bout of wild optimism, that he hoped to cut “at least” $2 trillion out of the federal budget. Not long after the election, Musk reduced his ambitions to $1 trillion. Throughout the first few months of Trump’s second term, DOGE claimed to be saving Americans billions, but analyses repeatedly showed the organization was wildly inflating its savings and often making rudimentary math mistakes. In May, the billionaire claimed that DOGE had saved Americans $160 billion, but admitted that his org was “not as effective” as he’d hoped. At the time, the New York Times reported that DOGE had only publicly accounted for $58 billion of the savings Musk alleged and that even those purported savings had been “significantly inflated, by including outright errors and guesses about the future.”
Now, yet another fact-checking effort aimed at Musk’s initiative has resulted in greatly reduced facts and figures. An analysis by Politico claims that, of some $52.8 billion that DOGE purports to have saved Americans by cancelling various government contracts, only a fraction appears to have been realized. The report states that, of the savings bragged about on DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” website, only “$32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings” could be verified. On top of that, the news outlet found that “DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.”
Politico further notes that none of those savings will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money went back to the respective agencies to which it had been allotted. In other words, DOGE basically did nothing. The apparent blunder was achieved through a poor grasp of timetables, the report claims:
DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out. Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.
“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.”
Also relevant is another recent report that claims DOGE spent substantially more money attempting to downsize government than it saved by destroying public programs. Authored by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the analysis claims that DOGE blew through some $21.7 billion in taxpayer money as it attempted to downsize the federal workforce. Between January and July, DOGE spent some $14.8 billion through its Deferred Resignation Program, which paid public employees “not to work for up to eight months.” DOGE allegedly spent another $6 billion on “100,000 employees who have been involuntarily separated from federal service or who remain on prolonged periods of administrative leave pending separation, many of whom were paid to not do their jobs for weeks or months.” The organization spent hundreds of millions more on various inefficient and wasteful policies.
The Senate committee notes that the amount that DOGE spent in this fashion is more than double the amount that DOGE has definitively culled from the government ($9 billion, via cuts to NPR, PBS, and foreign aid) through the rescission package voted for by Republicans this summer. Meanwhile, as DOGE has continued on with its questionable antics, its own staff have continued to suck taxpayer money out of the government. In March, NPR reported that $40 million in public funds had been apportioned for DOGE’s activities, but much about the cost of the initiative remains unclear. That same month, Wired noted that some DOGE staffers were making six-figure government salaries for their slash-and-burn work. The money often appeared to be coming from the very agencies that DOGE was butchering, the outlet noted.
If both the recent studies are accurate, they reveal the very ironic contours of DOGE and its activities—an organization that claims to be rooting out governmental waste and fraud, but whose operations appear wasteful and whose public statements are frequently, according to many journalistic analyses, fraudulent.
At this point, it’s unclear what the heck DOGE is even doing. The organization isn’t dead, but with the loss of its Supreme Leader (Musk), its mandate has become increasingly unclear, and its activities are now shrouded in mystery. Like a computer virus, the organization continues to worm its way through the bureaucracy’s guts, servicing nebulous projects, like the creation of a national citizenship database that has alarmed privacy activists.
Some of DOGE’s former members continue to prove useful to the administration in other ways. Last week, the 19-year-old former DOGE-ling known as “Big Balls” (real name Edward Coristine) managed to get punched in the face by a group of juveniles while out for a stroll in the nation’s capital, according to Washington D.C. police. The spectacle of Coristine’s bloodied visage was shared widely on Musk’s X platform and other social media sites, and the incident has since served as a justification for Trump’s authoritarian-style federalization of local police forces in D.C. The episode shows that, while DOGE has been an utter trainwreck from a governance and policy standpoint, it continues to serve certain functions deemed critical to the success of the current regime: namely, those of the public relations (i.e., propaganda) department.
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