Government spending under the Trump administration has increased in 2025, despite a pledge from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to drastically cut it, according to new analysis.
The world’s richest man, who dramatically exited the White House in May after a public feud with President Donald Trump, initially promised that DOGE would slash $2 trillion in “waste, fraud and abuse,” a goal that was later reduced to $1 trillion and eventually $150 billion.
DOGE claimed to have slashed tens of billions of dollars in expenditures, but it was impossible for outside financial experts to verify that because the agency did not provide detailed public accounting of its work.
But analysis by think tanks and The New York Times concluded that, despite DOGE’s claims, spending actually went up in 2025.
“DOGE did not reduce spending,” according to analysis by the CATO Institute, which focused on federal outlays and employment, and on executive branch spending that was in the organization’s jurisdiction.
“The federal government spent $7.6 trillion in the first 11 months of calendar year 2025, approximately $248 billion higher by November of 2025 compared to the same month in 2024,” the analysis said.
A Brookings Institution Hamilton Project tool that tracks spending in real time found that as of December 19, government spending went from $7.135 to $7.558 trillion — nearly a 6 percent increase.
“DOGE failed to cut spending because most federal spending was for entitlement programs, where spending remains high due to structural reasons and policy autopilot,” CATO’s analysis continued. “Congress alone has the authority to cut these programs, so it’s unsurprising that DOGE did not reduce spending.”
While DOGE did make thousands of cuts, namely to foreign aid recipients and small businesses and local service providers, some of the biggest savings the Musk-led team claimed “turned out to be wrong,” according to the Times.
In a list of canceled contracts and grants published by DOGE, the newspaper claimed the 13 largest were all incorrect, which is one of the main reasons why the organization failed to cut federal spending.
Two Defense Department contracts listed as “terminations” claimed to save the American taxpayer $7.9 billion, but according to the Times, the contracts are still active and the savings were “an accounting mirage.”
The reported two false entries were larger than 25,000 of the organization’s other claims put together, the newspaper reports.
In response to the newspaper’s findings, a White House spokesperson said that “President Trump pledged to cut the waste, fraud and abuse in our bloated government.”
DOGE did, however, reduce federal employment by 9 percent in less than 10 months, according to CATO, which noted “a decline that large has not happened since the military demobilizations at the end of World War II and the Korean War.”
The Trump administration celebrated the cuts on its Rapid Response X account. “Federal employment is now at the lowest level since 2014 — down by 271,000 jobs since President Trump took office,” it said. “Promises made, promise kept.”
DOGE is no longer a “centralized entity” and staffers have been folded into other departments since Musk’s exit - amid his public falling out with Trump. The two have appeared to reconcile in the months that followed.
In an interview with Katie Miller, wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Musk claimed that DOGE was “somewhat successful” in reaching its cost-cutting goals but said he wouldn’t launch the initiative again if given the chance.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles portrayed Musk’s leadership of DOGE as a messy and poorly-managed initiative, which she described as a “move fast and break things” motif, stopping only to inform the White House after plans were already in motion.
That applied to USAID, which the chief of staff said that Musk told the White House he was dismantling as he was “already into it”.
