When Donald Trump took the presidency again in 2025, he appointed Tesla CEO Elon Musk to run an operation informally known as DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) with the goal of slashing federal spending. Musk initially purported to be able to cut up to $2 trillion dollars of the more than $7.57 trillion in federal spending. Musk certainly was able to spearhead cuts, but critics argue that not all of his cuts were effective in the long run. Here’s a breakdown of how things have panned out.
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How Much Was Actually Saved?
By the end of Musk’s slash and burn, though the DOGE website claimed to have saved $175 billion, or just over $1,000 per person in the country, CBS News pointed out that there’s not enough documentation to back up that final figure.
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Most Effective
Federal leases: By cutting jobs and downsizing departments, DOGE saved around $145 million in money on office space, in essence, according to CRE Daily.
Unspent contract money: DOGE claims it saved $6.4 billion by cancelling contracts for pandemic era contracts that it claims are no longer needed with the Department of Health and Human Services for COVID-19 testing and treatment for people who were uninsured or underinsured during the pandemic.
Least Effective
Shutting down USAID: DOGE shut down a long running, bipartisan supported agency — The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), first opened in 1961, which funded humanitarian aid to impoverished countries around the world. This agency had a budget of $63 billion as of 2023, according to OXFAM, and these cuts negatively impacted more than 95 million people, 23 million of whom are children, removing their access to essential healthcare and food. The medical journal The Lancet even commissioned a study finding that these cuts are likely to cause millions of unnecessary deaths.
Loss of jobs: DOGE slashed hundreds of thousands of federal jobs. Not only did this have an immediate negative impact on those people who now were without work, according to NPR, the government has recently been spending money to rehire back many of the people they initially fired over the last eight months.
In the end, DOGE may have delivered headline-grabbing cuts, but the true measure of its legacy will be whether those savings were real, lasting and worth the human and global costs.
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: DOGE’s Most and Least Effective Cost Cuts of 2025
