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Rather than set government straight, Elon Musk is leaving Washington with the federal budget all cattywampus. Deficit spending is increasing, not waning, and there is a growing school of thought that his “efficiency” effort could end up costing the government as much as or more than it saved.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO came to Washington with a cut-till-it-hurts mindset and carte blanche from President Donald Trump. Musk quickly dialed back his campaign-trail bravado of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget, but as recently as a Fox News interview in March, he said that by the time he left government, his Department of Government Efficiency “will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars….”
Instead, Musk will leave government work “disappointed” that the Republicans he helped put in power are working to pass a bill that is estimated to add some $3.8 trillion in deficit spending and which Trump calls “big” and “beautiful.”
‘Disappointed’: Watch Musk react to Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ bill
There’s no accounting trick to correct that imbalance. The budget is trillions out of whack, and the shock-and-awe campaign Musk and Trump imposed across the federal workforce has led to some serious PTSD for federal workers and contractors while claiming only to have saved $175 billion.
That’s not chump change, but it’s not going to radically reform the US government. What’s listed on the still-rudimentary DOGE website is also not an accurate reflection of what the group might actually have accomplished.
DOGE will live on in the White House, “like Buddhism” without Buddha, Musk has said, and CNN has reported that more cuts are planned after his departure. But the pace of DOGE activity has slowed, at least as reflected on its website. Musk’s departure is an opportunity to consider whether the Department of Government Efficiency has lived up to its name.
CNN’s Casey Tolan is among the reporters who have been trying to match what DOGE claims to have saved or cut with what has actually been trimmed.
Picking apart the “estimated savings” of $175 billion on the DOGE website, Tolan told me that less than half that figure is backed up with even the most basic documentation. That means it’s possible only even to start investigating about $32 billion of savings from terminated contracts, $40 billion of savings from terminated grants and $216 million of savings from terminated leases that DOGE claims.
Plus, some of the specific terminations that are included in those numbers have no details at all. And Tolan has reported on the fact that DOGE’s tally has “been marred by various errors and dubious calculations throughout the entire time they’ve been releasing this info.”
Probably not. The figure is based on “161 million individual federal taxpayers,” according to the DOGE website, which drastically undercounts taxpayers in the US. That 161 million figure is more likely a reflection of individual tax returns and would not reflect married people who file jointly, according to Betsey Stevenson, a former chief economist at the US Department of Labor during the Obama administration who is now a professor at the University of Michigan.
“This distinction is about trying to get that number as large as possible. If instead it was expressed as per American then it would be $514,” and only if you assume DOGE has saved $175 billion, which it probably has not, she told me in an email.
Workers who generated revenue from the government have been fired, Stevenson points out. For example, staffing cuts at the IRS will mean the US brings in less revenue — but so will operating national parks short-staffed. Plus, a universe of litigation related to DOGE’s efforts to cancel contracts and fire workers seemingly without cause is percolating through courts.
“In total, estimates suggest that what has been spent to generate these cuts may be as great as the cuts. In the long run, it’s not clear that DOGE generated any savings,” she said.
Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, has estimated in a back-of-the-envelope way that DOGE cuts could end up costing the US $135 billion simply because it will need to retrain and rehire elements of the work force that have been let go.
The federal workforce is literally in trauma — something Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, said was an aim of his.
Stier estimates the federal workers will be much less productive after DOGE’s efforts, for a variety of reasons. Workers are now worried about losing jobs; their morale is depleted; they are distracted from their work; and many top performers are being reassigned or are leaving entirely.
In a previous interview, Stier described the DOGE effort to me as “arson of a public asset.”
We probably can’t, according to Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has tried to keep track of DOGE’s accounting for its cuts.
While Musk has promised maximum transparency, it has been impossible to verify much of what DOGE has said it has done.
“We expect the government to show receipts,” Malkus told me in a phone interview. “And the receipts that DOGE has shown that are posted publicly are nonetheless woefully inadequate to back their claims,” he said.
Far from fundamentally changing government, the savings DOGE claims won’t actually be realized unless and until Congress, which has the power of the purse in the Constitution, passes a rescission bill to claw back the funding.
“So far, we’ve just canceled contracts,” he said. “The money is still spent because Congress spends the money.”
The DOGE effort has certainly changed the tenor of the conversation around government spending. Its aggressiveness came as a shock to many Americans.
“They have shown that they’re willing to inflict pain in the pursuit of reducing government expenditures,” Malkus said, adding that most Americans think the government spends too much money. “That resolve is something rare and potentially valuable,” Malkus said.
DOGE also brought in a tech mindset of cutting more than is necessary with the aim of building back, something that could be argued occurred with the rehiring of nuclear safety workers, for instance, or the reinstatement of certain contracts.
Jessica Tillipman, an expert in government procurement law at George Washington University, is troubled by the idea that the government has gone from being the best business partner to one contractors approach with caution.
“The government’s not acting like a good business partner right now,” Tillipman said. “They’re squeezing contracts that have been fairly negotiated between the government and contractors.”
It’s always possible DOGE could end up reforming government in positive ways, but the evidence is not yet there, Tillipman said. “What have we seen? You require everybody to come back to work and you don’t have office space,” she said as one example.
“You have people doing work that they’re not trained to do. You have talent drains,” Tillipman said, pointing out that most of the government firings so far were among recently hired workers often brought on with a particular expertise.
“Half the training programs for the government have been canceled, so these pipelines that the government spent decades working on to make sure that there’s a steady supply and the government’s an attractive place for high-quality talent have gone away.”
The long-term effect of those changes will not be clear for some time.
“There’s a long way to go before this is going to actually shift the way agencies work,” Malkus said. “It just takes longer than four months.”
Stevenson pointed out that despite everything DOGE claimed to do, government outlays are on track to rise by 9% in 2025 compared with 2024. That’s because Americans are living longer and drawing more from programs like Medicare and Social Security. It’s those programs that are driving the deficit and debt, not the discretionary spending Musk targeted.
“Chainsaws and bluster can’t solve the yawning gap between revenue and spending that has led American debt to rise to unsustainable levels,” Stevenson said.
