Elon Musk’s DOGE Was a Cost-Cutting Failure But That Wasn't the Point

DOGE promised $2 trillion in savings. Federal spending rose instead.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was created with one stated mission. Cut federal spending.

It failed. Well, it succeeded in other ways, which I’ll get to a bit later.

According to an investigation by The New York Times, overall federal spending increased during the period DOGE was operating, despite Musk’s repeated claims that his team was delivering massive savings.

Treasury Department data shows the federal government spent $6.95 trillion in fiscal year 2024. In fiscal year 2025, spending rose to $7.01 trillion.

That increase happened on DOGE’s watch.

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Fiscal year 2025 ran from October 1, 2024, through September 30 of this year. Donald Trump was president for most of that period. Musk launched DOGE in January, after Trump signed an executive order creating it on Inauguration Day.

DOGE publicly bragged it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government, including canceling contracts, slashing grants, and firing civil servants. The Times reviewed those claims and found that most did not hold up.

DOGE published a list of contracts and grants it said had been canceled. The Times examined that list. The 13 largest cuts were all incorrect.

The two biggest claims involved Department of Defense contracts Musk said had been “terminated,” supposedly saving taxpayers $7.9 billion. In reality, those contracts were never canceled. The Defense Department still has them.

Only 12 of DOGE’s top 40 claimed cuts were accurate. The rest were inflated, misleading, or false.

The Times found DOGE repeatedly exaggerated savings, double-counted cuts, and took credit for contracts that had already been canceled during the Biden administration. In some cases, DOGE claimed the full authorized value of a contract as savings even though actual spending was far lower. In others, DOGE claimed contracts were canceled when courts later reinstated them.

Four contracts DOGE said it had cut were brought back by judges.

Musk’s promises shrank as reality set in. He originally claimed DOGE would save $2 trillion. That figure dropped to $1 trillion. Near the end of DOGE’s run in the Trump White House, Musk claimed the project had cut $150 billion, but provided no detailed accounting to support that number.

DOGE launched with…“spectacle.” Musk went from giving a Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration to waving a chainsaw onstage at CPAC emblazoned with words that translated to “Long live liberty, damn it.” The chainsaw was a gift from Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, whose Musk-style cuts helped crash his country’s economy and forced Argentina to rely on a roughly $40 billion bailout from Trump’s administration (a move that helped Milei’s party win Argentina’s midterms).

This image wasn’t irony. It was foreshadowing. It showed what happens when someone who claims “superior intelligence” has no understanding of how government programs actually work and starts cutting blindly (Twitter 2.0 anyone?). Programs get axed without knowing their purpose. Costs get shifted instead of reduced. Damage gets rebranded as efficiency. And taxpayers end up paying more to clean up the mess.

The message was clear. Washington was about to get carved up. What followed was lawsuits, reversals, and higher costs for taxpayers.

DOGE oversaw the firing of thousands of federal workers and targeted congressionally appropriated funds. Courts later ruled that many of those firings were improper and ordered agencies to rehire employees. During that process, workers were placed on paid leave and later received back pay.

According to the Partnership for Public Service, the combined cost of firings, re-hirings, paid leave, and lost productivity exceeded $135 billion in the last fiscal year alone. So much money saved…NOT!

But as the cost-cutting story fell apart, another issue drew growing scrutiny. DOGE was not just cutting budgets. It was gaining access.

From the start, DOGE staff, many of them young and politically connected, were embedded across federal agencies with broad access to internal systems. That access included Treasury spending databases and federal payment infrastructure, not just high-level budget figures. Critics warned that concentrating that kind of data access in the hands of Musk’s operation, alongside allies in his billionaire orbit like Pete Thiel, posed serious privacy and security risks. The arrangement raised immediate concerns among watchdog groups, privacy advocates, and federal employee unions.

DOGE justified that access by claiming it was uncovering widespread fraud but reporting found no evidence DOGE exposed fraud at the scale Musk suggested. Instead, routine spending, long-approved contracts, and legally required programs were often framed as suspicious simply because they were large or too complex for Musk to understand. In multiple cases, those claims collapsed under scrutiny.

Courts repeatedly stepped in to block or reverse DOGE actions, questioning whether the agency had the authority it claimed, both over personnel decisions and over sensitive government systems. Remember when Musk fired US nuclear experts and then rushed to re-hire them? That was fun.

DOGE defenders and Musk sycophants argued the access was necessary to identify waste. The truth is that DOGE never meaningfully reduced spending and never touched the largest drivers of the federal budget, including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the national debt.

Instead, DOGE focused elsewhere, expanding its footprint deep inside the federal government, often with little transparency and mounting legal resistance.

If DOGE were simply a failed cost-cutting experiment, that would be bad enough. Instead, it paired exaggerated savings claims with sweeping authority, aggressive firings, and access most Americans never agreed to and never voted on.

The chainsaw made headlines. The numbers told a different story. And the access was the point.