So After All That, How Much Money Did DOGE Really Save?

 Elon Musk’s stay in Washington comes to an end, as he falls far short of his hope to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget.

He came, he saw, but he didn’t conquer at all.

Billionaire Elon Musk was allowed by law to serve  just 130 days in President Trump’s administration as a “special government employee.” His work as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, charged with rooting out government waste and fraud, officially ends on Friday, but Mr. Musk couldn’t wait to skedaddle out of Washington.

“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Mr. Musk posted Wednesday evening on X. He said the DOGE mission “will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”

So just how much did the world’s richest man accomplish in his short time in the swamp? The short answer is, not much, but as he said in his departure note, the effort to trim the budget will live on.

Mr. Musk came to Washington with stars in his eyes. He planned to take a chainsaw to the budget, slash through the red tape and make heavy cuts across the board. “We’ll try for $2 trillion. I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” he boasted in a live interview on X in October, even before Mr. Trump was elected. “I think if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one.”

That lofty goal didn’t last long (and it was, perhaps, too much to bite off, as $2 trillion is nearly one-third of the annual federal budget). Once he was mired in the swamp, Mr. Musk quickly ratcheted back his expectations, saying that cutting more than $1 trillion would be “epic.”

“If we can get, drop the budget deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion, and kind of free up the economy to, you know, have additional growth such that the output of goods and services keeps pace with the increase in the money supply, then there will be no inflation,” he said in another live interview in January. “So that, I think, would be an epic outcome.”

If that number was epic, what he achieved was barely ordinary. The DOGE website, which has purportedly been keeping track of every nickel the group has saved, puts the total at $175 billion. That includes savings from “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

Of course, $175 billion — which comes out to roughly $1,087 per taxpayer — is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s a far cry from $2 trillion. Yet don’t try to verify that number because you won’t get very far. A watchdog group called Open the Books reports that “fewer than half “of the cuts can be “confirmed with a simple review of public records. Joe Taxpayer could likely verify just 42 percent of contracts and 27 percent of grants with a simple review of the records.”

“The DOGE website listed 9,521 federal grants that they claim generated savings on behalf of taxpayers – either from cancelling them before they got off the ground, or more commonly by halting them midstream,” Open the Books reports. “But only 2,643 of those had claimed savings that the average American taxpayer could easily review and verify. That’s just a 26.76 percent success rate.”

What makes it all weirder is that DOGE has, officially, not saved a dime. As Governor Ron DeSantis pointed out on Tuesday, “We have a Republican Congress and, to this day, we’re at the end of May, past Memorial Day, not one CENT in DOGE cuts have been implemented by the Congress!”

While the charge is true, that is, apparently, about to change. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday announced that he plans to put into law some of the cuts reportedly made by DOGE. 

“The House is eager and ready to act on DOGE’s findings so we can deliver even more cuts to big government that President Trump wants and the American people demand,” Mr. Johnson wrote on X. “We will do that in two ways: 1. When the White House sends its rescissions package to the House, we will act quickly by passing legislation to codify the cuts. 2. The House will use the appropriations process to swiftly implement President Trump’s 2026 budget.”

Yet that first wave of rescissions is also expected to fall far short of the $175 billion in purported DOGE savings. The Trump administration will send Congress a package to claw back just more than $9 billion, trimming out money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), dismantled earlier this year by DOGE.

For his part, Mr. Musk seems to have had his fill — and then some — of life in the Washington swamp. A few days before his departure, he moaned that DOGE had become the “whipping boy for everything” and expressed his dissatisfaction with Mr. Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” which has passed the House.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” he said in one of his last interviews. “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both.”

https://www.nysun.com/article/so-after-all-that-how-much-money-did-doge-really-save