What If DOGE Doesn’t Actually Save Any Money?
The Trump administration’s approach so far seems better at generating chaos than reducing spending.
Which Musk is in charge?
Photographer: Oliver Contreras/AFP/Getty Images
Every business day, the Treasury Department releases numbers on how much money the US government took in and paid out the previous one. You can get them straight from the source, or in simplified form at the Hamilton Project’s Tracking Federal Expenditures in Real Time site. What they show so far is that, despite all the noise from Washington about layoffs and canceled programs and other cutbacks, the federal government has been spending money faster since President Trump took office on Jan. 21 than it did over equivalent periods in 2023 and 2024. (Adjust for inflation and the lines come a little closer, but 2025 spending remains higher.)
It’s still early days, of course. The contracts canceled and workers laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and other decision-makers within the Trump administration will show up over time, not all at once. I certainly wouldn’t predict that the lines will never cross. But with Musk promising cuts that, as Bloomberg News put it this week, would surpass those imposed by Margaret Thatcher in the UK in the 1980s as a share of gross domestic product, it’s worth considering a different scenario. What if all DOGE’s work turns out to barely make a dent in federal spending?