In the three months since Elon Musk and his cadre of tech allies transformed the United States Digital Service into the U.S. DOGE Service, there are few areas of the country untouched by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
But DOGE hasn’t actually cut America’s bottom line.
Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the federal government has spent $171 billion more than the same period in the previous two years, a NOTUS analysis of daily Treasury statements shows.
NOTUS spoke with a range of federal budget experts and reviewed thousands of individual cuts and hundreds of reversals made during the first 100 days of DOGE. The data shows that DOGE has fallen far short of Musk’s October estimate that it would cut $2 trillion from the budget — and may well end up below Musk’s amended prediction that it would hit $150 billion this fiscal year.
“It’s not going to move the bottom line,” said Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, which advocates for steep cuts to government spending.
The largest drivers of federal outlays stem from mandatory spending programs, like interest payments on the national debt and areas Trump has vowed not to touch, like Medicare and Social Security benefits. The Defense Department, which is classified under discretionary spending, is looking to boost its budget to a trillion dollars under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — increasing spending by well over $100 billion.
“The government is too big; the cuts that DOGE has done are too small,” Nowrasteh said. “We’re going to see some small changes here and there, the shuttering of a few small agencies here and there, like we already have, but in terms of showing up on the federal budget line, on their baseline, it’s a rounding error.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
DOGE’s biggest impact, some critics say, may be less on government spending and more on dismantling agencies and institutions Trump and Musk oppose.
“If you say to people, ‘Hey, let’s cut waste, fraud and abuse,’ they say, ‘That sounds great,’ and Elon kind of pretends everything is in that category, and then goes out for things he hates,” said Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress.
Musk’s impact on Washington and federal services across the country is undeniable.
DOGE has pulled federal funds from health agencies in every state. Hundreds of universities and research centers have lost out on millions. In Washington, federal agencies are under strain as tens of thousands of workers have been fired or taken buyouts. Diversity initiatives, research focused on LGBTQ+ people and services for immigrants have been cut. Boosted by an all-in president and a GOP-led Congress uninterested in acting as a check, DOGE wields enormous power to order layoffs and program cancellations at a breakneck pace.
Musk himself is a fixture of the Trump White House. He has a setup in the Secretary of War Suite of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where he keeps a desk adorned with a golden DOGE placard and a curved Samsung ultrawide monitor rigged to a gaming PC.
He overshadowed confirmed secretaries at Trump’s first cabinet meeting. And despite Trump’s public claim that they all are “EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON,” public and private blowups with senior White House officials have increasingly defined Musk’s dynamic with members of the administration.
Some of DOGE’s employees have been given senior roles with broad mandates at major federal agencies. DOGE’s actual acting director, Amy Gleason, hasn’t made a peep as the endeavor she purportedly leads tears through the federal government and directs cuts that touch almost all parts of the country.
Although DOGE has divisions at dozens of federal departments, the majority of its line-item “savings” stem from deep cuts at just two agencies: The Department of Health and Human Services and the United States Agency for International Development.
At HHS, DOGE stripped billions of dollars from state health agencies, along with funding for pandemic preparedness programs and substance abuse centers. The administration pulled funding for research, including on HIV in minority groups most affected by the disease.
Under the leadership of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS is shedding 20,000 workers, around 24% of its staff, with widespread layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As DOGE cut probationary workers in February, National Institutes of Health employees focusing on preventing lab leaks were among those let go.
Employees have been ordered to quickly carry out cuts to programs marked for termination by DOGE, with little room to object. And in some cases, DOGE staffers were seen reprimanding NIH workers who were not at their desks, NOTUS previously reported.
Nearly all USAID workers were fired as the Trump administration worked to effectively shutter the agency, citing examples of “wasteful spending” that oftentimes had no ties to USAID whatsoever.
Some Republican lawmakers have urged the administration to continue programs that feed impoverished areas overseas. Aid groups aligned with Trump’s efforts have found themselves swept up in the fray as well. (The man who oversaw USAID’s gutting was himself canned by the Trump administration this month.)
Other agencies are facing remarkable staffing shortfalls. The Department of Veterans Affairs is set to lose over 80,000 employees. The Department of Education lost roughly half its workers amid Trump’s quest to shutter it entirely.
Zach Moller, the director of Third Way’s economic program, told NOTUS the cuts are “harming the ability of the government to provide the customer service side of what it does.”
“That lowers trust in government, and so it creates this vicious cycle,” he said. “DOGE doesn’t think government works, so it breaks government, so people don’t think government works, so there’s more incentive to try to cut down on government, and we have this kind of spiral.”
Critics of Musk’s approach have warned that broad layoffs at the Internal Revenue Service threaten to entirely undo what savings he may have been able to achieve. Reversing IRS modernization efforts could allow more people to get away with underpaying or skipping out on their taxes, costing the government much-needed revenue.
“You might save hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe a billion dollars in salaries and expenses, and then you might lose tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars in no longer stopping very rich people from cheating on their taxes,” Kogan said. “If he were really interested in efficiency and fraud, he wouldn’t be getting rid of the people whose job it is to catch fraud.”
At its inception, Trump cast DOGE as being “potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.” Musk recently said it “might be the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution.”
But in recent weeks, Musk has sought to lower expectations as to how much it will actually be able to achieve.
In October, Musk estimated $2 trillion could be cut out of an annual $6.5 trillion budget. By February, that total had fallen to an estimate of $1 trillion (“knock on wood,”) Musk said. That expectation fell to just $150 billion this fiscal year, Musk said in a later cabinet meeting.
DOGE retreated from many of its cuts. It backed away from most of its previous plans to cut Social Security Administration offices across the country — a move that was poised to hit red states hardest. DOGE sought to close a New Mexico site that manages highly radioactive nuclear waste, but reversed course two days after NOTUS first reported on the plan.
“DOGE has achieved some good things — not nearly as much as they promised, and they keep reducing their goals,” Nowrasteh said. “I’m pretty disappointed, but there are still some wins.”
DOGE’s central accounting of what it is cutting and how much it is saving is riddled with errors, from typos and the mislabeling of canceled grants to the overstating of claimed savings by billions in some cases and claiming credit for Biden-era cuts.
In one late-night update, it erased nearly a billion dollars worth of previously claimed cuts without explanation.
Kogan said DOGE has triple-counted savings on grants and taken credit for already-canceled funds, and in doing so, often vastly overstated its numbers.
“It’s not real,” Kogan said.
Hundreds of millions more of currently claimed “cuts” could be undone in the near future. DOGE is counting $400 million in frozen funding to Columbia University among its “savings.” Those funds, however, could eventually be restored given that the university agreed to several of the administration’s demands.
Columbia is just one of a handful of campuses seeing hundreds of millions in federal funding frozen, and one of over 400 universities to see some amount of funding pulled. Among the programs canceled at Columbia: Alzheimer’s and cancer research.
Before Trump took office, Republicans in Congress flocked to join the DOGE caucus. After DOGE kicked off, much of their interactions with the effort have been to request officials reverse or avoid cuts that affect their constituents.
Moderate Republicans have grown increasingly critical of DOGE’s cuts as Democrats excoriate the effort.
Meanwhile, cuts to federal contracts disproportionately affect areas represented by Democrats, who have less ability to influence the Trump administration, NOTUS found.
Congress has yet to formally endorse DOGE’s cuts, but the Republican-controlled branch has made no push to prevent it from halting congressionally mandated spending. (The Musk-floated prospect of DOGE stimulus checks has all but evaporated.)
Musk is preparing to wind down his tenure as a “special government employee” amid cratering Tesla profits and a run of spats with White House officials, though Trump insists he was always set to leave around this time.
“In May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” Musk said during a Tesla earnings call this month.
Surveys show faltering popularity for the centi-billionaire, who has consistently polled worse than the president himself. (Musk claims protests against him are fueled not by discontent with his work, but illicitly funded by groups that have lost funding.)
“The actual reason is because those receiving the waste and fraud wish to continue receiving it; that is the real thing that’s going on here, obviously,” Musk said. “The protests that you’ll see out there, they’re very organized. They’re paid for that.”
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.