Elon Musk’s five-month tenure in the Trump administration provided the country a funhouse mirror version of technocratic governing. Here was a supposed expert in efficiency, a genius brought into to make the fixes politicians couldn’t. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency that he may or may not have led promised to slash $2 trillion in wasteful spending from the United States budget. According to its own “Wall of Receipts” website, it cut at most $215 billion, or about 11% of that initial projection.
DOGE’s failure at its task is about all we know about it. A new report from the Government Accountability Office explains that the quasi-agency vastly exaggerated the savings it produced. Some of the claimed cuts are impossible to verify. Despite promising transparency and a data-driven mindset, DOGE was a jumbled mess, and we’re left with little understanding of what it did or didn’t do. Indeed, a month after it officially shuttered, we’re still struggling to figure out exactly how much harm was caused by Musk and his similarly unqualified wrecking crew.
Despite promising transparency and a data-driven mindset, DOGE was a jumbled mess, and we’re left with little understanding of what it did or didn’t do.
We’ve known for months there were major issues with the numbers DOGE released. GAO’s report homed in on roughly $110 billion of the savings DOGE claimed in canceled contracts, grants and leases, but investigators couldn’t assess how much money was actually saved.
As the GAO noted, 108 of the 264 leases posted on DOGE’s website were “were already in process for termination when DOGE was established.” Missing data prevented the GAO from identifying roughly one in every five grants DOGE said were canceled, which “accounted for more than 50% of the reported grant savings.” Nor could investigators piece together which contracts were eliminated, given that roughly 60% of the savings DOGE posted didn’t follow DOGE’s own methodology.
Such carelessness was most evident in the hasty shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The GAO report’s authors report that they “met with the Department of State to discuss USAID contracts and grants and were informed that the Department of State does not have access to information on terminated contracts and grants included in USAID legacy systems.”
GAO investigators were eventually able to piece together information on all but 13.8% of the contracts DOGE posted. But even then, GAO had difficulty parsing out real savings from potential savings in DOGE’s claims:
For example, DOGE reported $1.7 billion in savings on the Department of Defense’s Defense Health Agency contract for IT services at more than 700 military treatment facilities worldwide. While DOGE initially identified the contract for termination, in the end, no action was taken to terminate the contract, or to reduce scope, value, or funding. Thus, no savings were achieved.
Beyond those potentially hallucinated savings, DOGE also led the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal workforce. A February 2025 executive order titled “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative” ordered departments and agencies to gear up for mass layoffs. Tens of thousands of federal workers were laid off. Some experienced the rollercoaster of being fired and rehired. Some people were rehired after courts ordered it. Others were returned to the federal payroll after one official or another belatedly realized their roles were indispensable.
We may not have seen the full impact of those personnel cuts. In a separate report also released last week, the GAO assessed that staff reductions at the Federal Emergency Management Agency have left a potentially dangerous gap in disaster preparedness. President Donald Trump had long ago determined that FEMA should be eliminated when the layoffs began, and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem professed a willingness to be the executioner.
During its brief existence, DOGE was a bastion against expertise and was seemingly allergic to good data management.
The agency still exists, but between the implemented cuts, a hiring freeze that only ended this May and the absence of a strategic plan, FEMA is “wandering around in the dark,” FEMA officials told GAO. The disaster agency has itself been through an entirely manmade disaster that was done, as the report concluded, “without considering its long-term mission needs” and is accordingly “at risk of being unprepared and under-resourced to effectively respond to future disasters.” It’s a terrible place to be during hurricane season and with climate change making natural disasters a more common occurrence.
During its brief existence, DOGE was a bastion against expertise and was seemingly allergic to good data management. It may take years to piece together the damage DOGE wrought domestically and to calculate how many people worldwide died because of USAID’s sudden demise. The Trump administration will be no help in this process, having already said that there will be no after-action report for DOGE. We’re left, then, to comb through the remains of this project — like archaeologists picking through the ruins and trying to figure out what happened.
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