When President Trump returned to the White House in January, he promised to “restore competence and effectiveness” to the federal government by establishing a Department of Government Efficiency.
In the lead-up to his inauguration, DOGE evolved from a meme to an outside commission to a White House office given carte blanche to upend the executive branch in the name of combating perceived waste, fraud and abuse.
A small cadre of software engineers and others with connections to billionaire Elon Musk quickly fanned out across federal agencies, where they have encouraged the firing of tens of thousands of federal employees, overseen the effective dismantling of agencies, slashed spending on foreign food aid, medical research and basic office supplies and burrowed into multiple sensitive data systems.
Last week, Musk said he would spend less time on DOGE and focus on Tesla, as the 130-day clock on his appointment as a “special government employee” runs down. “The DOGE team has made a lot of progress in addressing waste and fraud,” he said.
In an interview with TIME last week, Trump called DOGE a “very big success.” “We found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse,” he said. “It’s a scam. It’s illegal, in my opinion, so much of the stuff that we found, but I think DOGE has been a big success from that standpoint.”
Despite those claims, 100 days into Trump’s second term, DOGE has not delivered on its promised savings, efficiency or transparency in meaningful ways.
Musk’s vision of DOGE taking a chainsaw to government spending has hit repeated snags. An initial savings goal of $2 trillion was lowered to $1 trillion before being downgraded again recently to $150 billion, less than a tenth of Musk’s original promise. Even that number may be difficult to reach, given DOGE’s history of inaccurate and overstated claims combined with Trump’s desire to shield spending on Social Security and Medicare, which are major drivers of the federal budget.
Many of DOGE’s initiatives have been reversed or delayed after legal setbacks and backlash in the court of public opinion. Since Jan. 20, dozens of federal lawsuits have challenged DOGE’s activities or mentioned its actions, according to NPR’s review of district court dockets across the U.S.
Still, DOGE has already reshaped the federal government in significant ways — and is amassing unprecedented power over government data. With Trump’s blessing, Musk’s group has tried to grant itself virtually unfettered access to the most sensitive personal and financial systems the federal government maintains.
From a meme to the White House
DOGE’s very genesis was marked by inefficiency: A week after the November election, Trump announced the entity would be co-led by Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate.
“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Not only did DOGE have two leaders, they had competing visions of how to accomplish its goal. Ramaswamy pushed to work through the courts and Congress, WIRED and The Washington Post reported. But by Inauguration Day, Ramaswamy had left and Musk’s version prevailed: directly reshaping the federal bureaucracy through mass firings, similar to what he did when he bought Twitter in 2022, and by seizing control of technology across agencies.
While DOGE was originally described as operating outside the government — a sort of blue-ribbon commission that would make recommendations — an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office gave DOGE a home in the White House and a mandate for direct action.
But the DOGE spelled out by Trump’s order and the DOGE that has embedded itself across and beyond the executive branch share few similarities, NPR’s reporting over the first 100 days of the administration has found.
Some agencies have upwards of a dozen DOGE-affiliated personnel, while others have just one or two. A small number of DOGE-linked staffers have been working at multiple federal agencies at the same time.
DOGE’s nebulous organizational structure extends beyond rank-and-file employees: Musk’s role as the de facto head of DOGE has been touted by the White House but downplayed by Justice Department lawyers when legally expedient. Still, Trump has repeatedly described Musk as leading DOGE, and the bulk of its work has been in service of Musk’s stated goal to dramatically slash the federal deficit by the Sep. 30 end of the fiscal year.
‘Savings’ claims were off from the start
There’s little evidence to support the claim that DOGE is saving agencies significant money or changing the fact that the federal government spends more money than it collects, mainly on non-discretionary programs like Medicaid and Social Security. In fact, as of March 31, government spending is up 10% from the same period last year while revenue is only up 3%, leading to a 23% increase in the deficit, according to Treasury Department data.
Even after Musk’s latest downward revision of DOGE’s savings goal to $150 billion, that number is unlikely to be reached.
On its website, DOGE claims $160 billion has been saved through canceling contracts, firing workers and other measures. As NPR has reported, that tracker is plagued with inaccuracies, errors, omissions and overstatements.
As of late April, out of $160 billion in claimed savings, DOGE’s “wall of receipts” has data to account to just $63 billion in purported claims.
The five contract cancellations with the most claimed savings, accounting for nearly $7.5 billion in the DOGE tracker, actually amount to just under $1 billion in potential savings. They include a contract that was never awarded, one that was already terminated and another that doesn’t appear to be canceled at all, as DOGE continues to use misleading math.
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