Did DOGE actually cut spending? The numbers say no

Did DOGE actually cut spending? The numbers say no

When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was launched, its ambition was sweeping. It promised to slash waste, bring Silicon Valley precision to Washington, and cut as much as $1 trillion from US federal spending. By the end of its run, it had certainly disrupted the machinery of government. What it did not do, according to a detailed New York Times examination of federal records, was reduce spending in any meaningful way.

DOGE claimed credit for more than 29,000 cuts across the federal government, ranging from billion-dollar defence contracts to small grants supporting local services and foreign aid. But overall federal spending did not fall during its tenure. It rose. The gap between DOGE’s promises and its results, the analysis found, lay in a pattern of errors, exaggerations, and accounting practices that inflated savings on paper while producing little real fiscal impact.

The problem with the biggest claims

At the heart of DOGE’s credibility problem were its largest savings claims. Of the 40 biggest cuts listed on its public “Wall of Receipts,” only 12 appeared to reflect genuine reductions in government commitments; 28 were inaccurate in whole or in part.

The most striking errors involved defence contracts. Two large Pentagon contracts, one for information technology and another for aircraft maintenance, were listed by DOGE as terminated, with claimed savings of $7.9 billion. In reality, both contracts were still active. The supposed savings came from lowering their “ceiling values,” the maximum amounts they could theoretically reach, not from reducing actual spending.

Together, these two incorrect entries outweighed the savings claimed from roughly 25,000 of DOGE’s other cuts combined.

How savings became an accounting mirage

Many of DOGE’s claimed savings relied on a similar accounting method. Instead of cutting what the government was actually spending, the group reduced the upper limits of long-term contracts. In practice, this often changed nothing. Contractors continued to be paid as before, and agencies retained the ability to raise ceilings again if needed.

The same approach appeared in contracts across departments, including a long-term technology contract at the Pentagon and a major U.S. Agency for International Development project. In both cases, DOGE treated unspent, hypothetical future amounts as money saved, even though those sums were never likely to be fully spent.

Other errors were more basic. DOGE double-counted at least one energy grant, claimed credit for contracts that had already ended under the previous administration, and listed several pandemic-era agreements that expired on schedule as major cost-cutting victories.

Thousands of small cuts, real-world pain

While the headline savings were often overstated, DOGE did make thousands of smaller cuts that had immediate consequences. Many were grants of $1 million or less, sums trivial in the context of a multi-trillion-dollar federal budget but significant to those who relied on them.

Foreign aid organisations saw food, education, and health programmes abruptly halted. Local museums, libraries, and community services received termination notices with little warning. In some cases, services stopped entirely before court rulings or political pressure forced partial reversals.

For organisations on the ground, the effect was sudden and destabilising. Staff were laid off, programmes suspended, and beneficiaries left without support. Even where funding was later restored, the disruption itself carried costs that DOGE never accounted for.

A chaotic process behind the cuts

Much of this flowed from how DOGE operated. Staffed largely by outsiders from the business and technology worlds, the group worked with limited familiarity with federal contracting rules. Agencies were given numerical targets for savings and formulas to calculate them. Officials scrambled to meet those targets, sometimes offering up contracts that were easiest to cancel rather than those that would meaningfully reduce spending.

In some cases, agencies steered DOGE toward contracts with high ceiling values but little expected future spending, knowing they would look impressive on paper. Litigation later reversed many of DOGE’s broad cuts, but the group did not update its public claims to reflect those outcomes.

Big promises, narrow scope

Perhaps most revealing was what DOGE never touched. The largest drivers of federal spending like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the national debt remained untouched. The US Congress, which ultimately controls the budget, passed only limited legislation to claw back spending during DOGE’s tenure.

By the time Elon Musk left the group in May, DOGE’s budget-cutting mission was effectively over. Some staff remained in government, mainly on technology projects, but the Wall of Receipts stopped updating in early October.

Disruption without efficiency

DOGE’s record leaves a paradox. It caused widespread disruption, especially for smaller programmes and vulnerable communities, yet delivered little in actual savings. Its biggest claims were often wrong. Its smaller cuts were real, but fiscally marginal.

In trying to show progress, DOGE inverted its own promise of transparency and precision. What remained was not a leaner government, but a lesson in how easily bold numbers and chaotic execution can obscure the difference between cutting costs and merely cutting noise.