DOGE Isn’t Saving Money, So What’s It Really Doing?

Just before the election last fall, Elon Musk predicted that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. By early January, a couple of weeks before President Donald Trump returned to the White House and appointed Musk head of the newly created not-quite-department dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, he was calling $2 trillion “the best-case outcome” and saying “we’ve got a good shot” at getting $1 trillion in cuts. In late March, he said DOGE would deliver $1 trillion in deficit reduction by the end of May. By April 10, that was down to savings of $150 billion. Draw a trendline through Musk’s pronouncements so far, and it shows the DOGE savings number going negative on May 21 and becoming a deficit increase of more than $2 trillion on Dec. 1.

This is not meant as a serious forecast. But with Musk’s time as a “special government employee” due to end this month, and the Partnership for Public Service estimating that the cost in lost productivity, rehiring of fired workers and other side effects of his chaotic approach will top $135 billion this year, it does seem fair to conclude that the direct annual savings from DOGE’s efforts will be less than $150 billion, which amounts to about 2% of federal spending. And with spending up 10% since President Trump took office relative to the same period last year; the “one big beautiful bill” addressing taxes and spending currently working its way through Congress almost certain to increase the deficit; and a tariff-induced, tax-revenue-reducing recession perhaps on the horizon, I guess it’s not impossible that deficit will rise by $2 trillion.