The Wall Street Journal posted a story about a tax economist who bet his life savings ($342,000) that the DOGE cuts would have no impact on government spending. He won. His bet returned $470,000, but the Journal pointed out that he probably didn’t win much because he took his money out of the stock market and missed gains and his winnings would be taxed. So there.

But seriously, what did Musk and his DOGE team accomplish?

Musk began his stint as leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency soon after Trump was inaugurated. Trump gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted so long as he cut the federal budget.

Musk boldly proclaimed that he would slash $2 trillion in government spending. He soon cut projected savings to $1 trillion. He didn’t come close to meeting his goal.

Analyses since then have concluded that his young team of computer nerds saved nowhere near that amount and that many of their “savings” were either overstated or false.

DOGE did fire hundreds of thousands of civil servants, but the cost of firing them was high and did not produce savings. As a result of losing senior civil servants, many government agencies may be less efficient today because of losing their knowledge and experience. Unions went to court; workers were fired, rehired, fired, rehired.

Musk boasted about shutting down foreign aid (USAID), but the cost there will be in loss of human life. International authorities believe that 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, will die by 2030 because of the cut-off of U.S. food and medicine.

The study, by researchers from the United States, Spain, Brazil and Mozambique, estimates that 91 million deaths were prevented between 2001 and 2021 in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) due to programs supported by USAID, the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid worldwide. However, recent U.S. foreign aid cuts could reverse this progress and lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5.

The cost of USAID to each American: $0.17 per day. Despite the sure death of people who needed USAID to survive, Musk celebrated the death of USAID at the national conservative political conference, dancing around with a jewel-encrusted chainsaw in his hands.

David Farenholdt and three colleagues at the New York Times published a summary of the impact of DOGE in December 2025. The title was “How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?”

The overview: The group’s biggest claims were largely incorrect, a New York Times analysis found. And its many smaller cuts added up to few savings.

The story begins:

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.

[graph of cuts, by size]

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….

In total, the Trump administration terminated more contracts this year than the government did last year. But the actual dollars “de-obligated” — money the government had committed to spend but then pulled back — were at most a couple of billion dollars higher in 2025 than in recent years, according to contracting experts. 

For decades, the government has funded outside analysts to study whether taxpayer-funded programs actually work, and how to improve them. It is the kind of work that would seem to serve DOGE’s mission of making government more efficient.

But DOGE canceled some of these contracts as well.…

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.

Dr. Sunny Patel, who was a top official at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said he and his colleagues were given a dollar target and an Excel formula for calculating savings. DOGE officials suggested contracts to cancel, and agency officials fought to protect ones they viewed as most critical by offering others instead.

“You had to hit the hard number, and there’s only so many things that you can cut,” he said. “So it was like, ‘Oh, I guess we’re going to offer this up,’ because this is the least bad thing to do.”

In other cases, government workers came to understand DOGE’s process and fed the group nearly finished contracts with high ceiling values, rather than contracts that would significantly reduce spending.

Many of DOGE’s initial broad cuts and layoffs were later put on hold or reversed by litigation — a fact DOGE never went back to the wall to update. That litigation also cost the government money.

The Port Discovery Children’s Museum in Baltimore had won a $200,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (I.M.L.S.) to fund a program in which museum staff members went into child care centers connected to public schools in Baltimore. There they would teach parents how playing with their children could foster child development and family relationships.

On April 28, the government sent the museum a form letter terminating the grant and half its funds. The program no longer met agency priorities, the letter said, “and no longer serves the interest of the United States.”

“We were serving low-income families in Title I schools,” said Sonja Cendak, the vice president for development and marketing for the museum. “I don’t know what to say.”

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.

But DOGE achieved one of its undisclosed aims: It gained access to confidential Social Security files, which were quickly hoovered up by the tech-savvy DOGE kids. According to the Washington Post, “Members of DOGE …had obtained one of the government’s most protected databases, risking the security of hundreds of millions of Americans’ private Social Security records.” The Justice Department admitted “that the Social Security Administration had discovered a secret agreement between a DOGE employee and an unidentified political advocacy group. The agreement called for sharing Social Security data with the aim of overturning election results in certain states.”

DOGE busted government unions, wrecked the civil service, and demoralized career employees in every department.

DOGE created confusion and chaos in the federal workplace; certainly it demoralized career workers, who didn’t know from day do day whether or not they were still employed. They were fired, recalled, fired, recalled.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) conducted a study of DOGE’s activities and concluded that DOGE had wasted $21.7 Billion.

Blumenthal asserted that DOGE was actually a huge money-waster:

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) released a Minority staff report today unveiling that Elon Musk’s brainchild, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has generated at least $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government between January 20, 2025, and July 18, 2025. The report, “The $21.7 Billion Blunder: Analyzing the Waste Generated by DOGE,” follows a months-long investigation into Elon Musk and DOGE and is the most comprehensive effort to date to quantify taxpayer dollars squandered by DOGE despite its ostensible goal of eliminating government waste.

“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims. At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars,” said Blumenthal. “As my PSI investigation has shown, DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money. I urge Inspectors General to take up our investigation’s findings and initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s careless actions.”

PSI’s comprehensive review of publicly available resources and independent analysis has found that DOGE has generated $21.7 billion in waste so far this year, including:

• $14.8 billion through its Deferred Resignation Program for paying approximately 200,000 employees not to work for up to eight months.

• $6.1 billion for over 100,000 employees who have been involuntarily separated from federal service or who remain on prolonged periods of administrative leave pending separation, many of whom were paid to not do their jobs for weeks or months.

• $263 million in lost interest and fee income at the Department of Energy due to dozens of loan freezes meant to finance key utility projects supporting energy affordability and grid resilience.

• $155 million in time costs to require nearly a million employees to send weekly accomplishment emails to the Office of Personnel Management amounting to millions of hours of wasted time.

• $110 million on food aid and medical supplies spoiling in warehouses, set to be destroyed at a further cost to taxpayers.

• $66 million by underutilizing thousands of professional staff to perform entry-level duties for weeks on end, including over $138,000 for paying scientists to check guests in at national parks.

• $41.8 million to relocate over 250 staff members at one agency closer to a physical office.

• $38 million in sunk costs on unrecoverable investments in science and technology across four projects at the National Institutes of Health and the Internal Revenue Service.

• $1.7 million in time costs to require employees to unnecessarily justify routine expenses at three agencies, including window washing at the Federal Aviation Administration.

PSI’s estimate of DOGE-generated waste does not include other direct and indirect forms of waste that may add millions or even billions of dollars to projected waste, such as substantial administrative and legal expenses, undermining public safety and natural disaster response, human costs and health threats, and other hidden economic costs.

Open the link to read the full report.