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DOGE Eat DOGE World

On November 25, The Wall Street Journal commented on the DOGE Eat DOGE World

The Department of Government Efficiency is officially disbanded—with eight months remaining in its mandate. The original vision of $2 trillion in cuts inspired awe. After the inauguration, the $2 trillion figure was replaced with $1 trillion.

In October, DOGE claimed to have saved American taxpayers $214 billion, or 5% to 10% of original estimates.

What Was Real Saving?

The Wall Street Journal did a miserable job of fact finding.

But I do give them credit for this accurate subtitle “Elon Musk and Donald Trump set out to shrink big government. They did not succeed.”

The New York Times did a much better time of parsing the results.

How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?

Please consider the New York Times report How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little? That’s a free link.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government — slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants.

But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

How is that possible?

One big reason, according to a New York Times analysis: Many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong. And while the group did make thousands of smaller cuts, jolting foreign aid recipients, American small businesses and local service providers, those amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.

In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect.

At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Mr. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations,” and said their demise had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.

Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.

Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate — reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend.

To sort DOGE’s bogus cuts from its successes, The Times looked at federal records for the 40 largest items on the “Wall of Receipts.” In at least 28 cases, DOGE got it wrong.

Its errors included:

• Double-counting. DOGE took credit for canceling the same Department of Energy grant twice, adding $500 million in duplicate savings.
• Timeline errors. One contract that DOGE claimed credit for ending had actually been terminated by the Biden administration, weeks before DOGE began its work. Three more items on DOGE’s list had simply expired. These were pandemic-era contracts with pharmacies that provided free Covid-19 testing for the uninsured. They were originally allowed to spend up to a combined $12.2 billion, but they never came close to that level. Then, in May, the three contracts ended on schedule.

• DOGE still claimed credit for killing them, highlighting $6 billion in savings.

• Misclassifications. Seven programs that DOGE claimed to have terminated are not dead, including four that were resurrected by court rulings.
• Exaggerations. In 16 cases, DOGE greatly exaggerated its cuts. Many, including those two large Defense Department contracts, relied on an accounting trick that produced “savings” with little real-world effect. DOGE lowered the official “ceiling value” of contracts — reducing the theoretical limit on what the government could eventually pay — without changing its actual spending.

On the day the list first appeared, the largest claim was an $8 billion Department of Homeland Security contract that was wrong by a factor of 1,000. The contract was worth only $8 million. That mistake and others were deleted after news reports revealed them.

The power to cut the federal budget was never truly in Mr. Musk’s hands — it belongs to Congress. And since the start of DOGE’s work, legislators have only once passed a law devoted to clawing back appropriated spending, defunding foreign aid and public broadcasting. In two mostly short-term spending bills, they have declined to make steep additional cuts.

A Chaotic Process

Many of the errors DOGE has left in its wall were rooted in the chaotic process of how it identified cuts — or told agencies to.

DOGE was staffed by outsiders from the business and tech worlds, without much experience in the arcana of government programs. The early approach to measure savings by subtracting spent money from ceiling values helped drive its choices, and its high error rate.

The DOGE wall shows that it canceled more than 1,000 I.M.L.S. grants to local museums, libraries and history centers. States and the American Library Association sued, and courts required the grants to be reinstated. The Baltimore museum later received most of its funds. And on Dec. 3, I.M.L.S. announced it was reinstating all grants. But those grants still appear as cuts on the DOGE website, collectively “saving” the government about $134 million.

In still other cases, DOGE claimed credit for canceling projects it never touched.

There’s more to the article including charts of alleged savings and what really happened.

The lead chart shows $35 billion or so in inaccurate claims.

DOGE was a disaster. I wanted it to succeed. But the agency focused on firing people & chasing culture war wins instead of cutting regulatory bloat. So we got a less efficient government for…the same price. A total failure. https://t.co/8kBSO41S7E

— Billy Binion (@billybinion) December 24, 2025

Unfortunately the NYT never published a final estimate. But the purported $214 billion in savings is nonsense.

I asked Chrome AI “How much did DOGE really save?” Here’s the answer.

• DOGE’s Claimed Savings: The official DOGE website (doge.gov/savings) has listed a total of approximately $214 billion in estimated savings through a combination of contract cancellations, workforce reductions, and other changes
• Independent Estimates: Multiple reviews by news organizations (NPR, The New York Times, Politico) and budget experts have found that the documented, verifiable savings are far lower. Analyses suggest the actual savings from canceled contracts are closer to $2 billion to $7.3 billion, with one Politico analysis finding less than 5% of claimed contract savings were verifiable.
• Net Impact: Overall, some independent analyses have concluded that the costs associated with DOGE’s actions, such as lawsuits, rehiring, and lost productivity, may be greater than the cuts themselves, potentially resulting in a net cost to taxpayers in the long run. 
• Ultimately, while DOGE has caused significant disruption and focused attention on government spending, independent experts widely agree that its claims are overstated and have not led to a meaningful decline in overall government spending, which has continued to rise. 

Largest Peacetime Workforce Cut on Record

On the plus side CATO reports DOGE Produced the Largest Peacetime Workforce Cut on Record, but Spending Kept Rising

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) first set a goal to balance the budget by cutting $2 trillion in waste, fraud, and abuse. This goal was later reduced to $1 trillion and then again to just $150 billion. DOGE also aimed to reduce the size and scope of the administrative state, improve the procurement process, reform regulations, eliminate certain small agencies, use technology to cut costs, and shrink the federal workforce. Cato scholars supported all these objectives. With DOGE now disbanded as a single entity, the main question is whether DOGE achieved its goals.

This analysis only focuses on federal outlays and employment. DOGE did not reduce spending, but it did reduce federal employment by nine percent in less than 10 months. A decline that large has not happened since the military demobilizations at the end of World War II and the Korean War.

Federal spending data are compiled by the Monthly Treasury Statements (MTS) published by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. We focus exclusively on outlays, not budget authority, and on executive branch spending because that was DOGE’s jurisdiction. All dollar amounts are reported in 2021 dollars, adjusted using the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index. Federal employment data are from the Current Employment Statistics, which are monthly job surveys run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monthly data on the number of federal jobs is available here from January 1939 to November 2025.

The federal government spent $7.6 trillion in the first 11 months of calendar year 2025, approximately $248 billion higher by November of 2025 compared to the same month in 2024 (Figure 1). Cumulative spending in every month of 2025 was greater than in every other year and was approximately as much as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected in June 2024, or slightly less in real terms. There is no visible structural break in 2025 spending that coincides with DOGE’s start date. An observer who did not know when DOGE started could not identify it (figure 1 above).

It is important to note that DOGE’s target was to reduce the budget in absolute real terms without reference to a baseline projection. DOGE did not cut spending by either standard.

Although DOGE didn’t reduce outlays by November, it sizably cut federal employment by 271,000 (Figure 2). That’s a nine percent decline since January 2025.

It is not surprising that such a large reduction in the federal workforce did not lead to lower outlays, since most federal expenditures are transfer payments rather than salaries. According to Cato’s report to the DOGE Commission last year, a 10 percent cut in the federal workforce would only save about $40 billion annually. The 3.8 million federal defense and nondefense employees, excluding postal workers, account for around 8 percent of total spending.

It helps explain why reducing the workforce does not result in large savings. Additionally, the feds may hire contractors to fill some of the space vacated by former federal employees. 

Elon Musk recently said that DOGE was only “a little bit successful” and that he wouldn’t do it again. The evidence supports Musk’s judgment. DOGE had no noticeable effect on the trajectory of spending, but it reduced federal employment at the fastest pace since President Carter, and likely even before.

DOGE did not reduce federal spending because most outlays are entitlement-driven and require congressional action, but it did help engineer the largest peacetime workforce reduction on record.

Every bit of that was understood (or should have been understood) from the very beginning.

I covered that several times.

Can DOGE Cut $2 Trillion Out of $1 Trillion?

On December 27, I asked the seemingly nonsensical question Can DOGE Cut $2 Trillion Out of $1 Trillion?

The answer to the first question is obvious. So let’s discuss what’s reasonable.

Unlike DOGE, I did balance the budget but it took some hard work.

I threw away Trump’s majorly expensive TCJA extension, cut military spending, and assumed a near miraculous $630 billion in DOGE cuts (or other revenue increases wherever DOGE failed).

Click above link for details.

January 10, 2025: Elon Musk Admits DOGE Can’t Find $2 Trillion In Budget Cuts

Anyone with an ounce of common sense knew that wasn’t possible. He won’t find $1 trillion either.

“I think we’ll try for $2 trillion, I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” Musk told Stagwell CEO Mark Penn during an X Spaces conversation. “If you try for $2 trillion you have a good shot at getting $1 [trillion]. So that, I think, would be an epic outcome.”

Yes, That Would Be Epic

The “new” epic outcome would require cutting $1 trillion out of $1 trillion in discretionary non-defense spending or cutting defense spending that Trump wants to dramatically increase.

Cutting $1 Trillion Out of $1 Trillion

Musk says that if we aim for $2 trillion we have a chance for $1 trillion. Why not aim for $6 trillion and settle for $3 trillion?

No matter. Let’s presume DOGE can cut $1 trillion by aiming for $2 trillion.

Voila! The entire non-discretionary non-military budget is now zero.

In normal circumstances it would have been amazing for anyone to believe such bullsheet.

But millions of people inflicted with Trump Worship Syndrome TWS believe anything.

And they still do.

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