When the Department of Government Efficiency was announced in November 2024, it arrived with a number large enough to transform the United States government: $2 trillion.
Elon Musk argued that a team of outsiders could identify waste, eliminate unnecessary programs, modernize obsolete systems and dramatically reduce federal expenditure. The promise appealed to anyone who had watched the Pentagon fail audit after audit, agencies make improper payments, technology projects consume billions without working and contractors charge the government far more than private buyers would tolerate.
The diagnosis was not imaginary. The federal government had serious efficiency problems.
But DOGE’s proposed cure rested on a much more questionable assumption: that administrative waste, political spending choices and America’s structural budget deficit were essentially the same problem.
They were not.
By the time DOGE’s temporary mandate ended on July 4, 2026, the organization’s public dashboard claimed an estimated $215 billion in savings. Some contracts had been cancelled. Leases had been terminated. Government systems had been examined, employees had been removed and agencies had been forced to justify spending that had long escaped scrutiny.
Yet DOGE never came close to eliminating $2 trillion in annual expenditure. Federal outlays continued rising, the budget deficit remained enormous and the centralized organization itself disappeared before its original charter expired. The administration also chose not to publish a comprehensive closing assessment reconciling DOGE’s claimed savings with implementation costs, service disruptions, rehiring and money actually prevented from leaving the Treasury.
That leaves a more complicated verdict than either DOGE’s supporters or critics usually offer.
DOGE was not a complete fantasy. It found genuine waste, challenged complacent institutions and produced some reforms that should outlast it. But it was never a plausible solution to America’s broader fiscal problem. It possessed enough power to disrupt agencies, not enough to rewrite the laws that determine most government spending.
Its record shows that making government more efficient is both possible and necessary. It also shows why efficiency alone cannot repair a political system that promises more than it is willing to tax, prioritise or give up.
Why DOGE Existed
DOGE emerged because public frustration with government spending had accumulated for decades. Americans repeatedly encountered examples of failed procurement, unaccountable programs, obsolete software and agencies that could not explain where their money had gone.
It was easy to conclude that the federal deficit existed because the government was careless.
That conclusion contained an important truth. It also concealed several different problems beneath the single word “waste.”
Waste Was Real
The Department of Defense offered the most obvious case for aggressive scrutiny.
The Pentagon controls one of the largest budgets of any institution in the world, manages vast inventories of equipment and relies on thousands of contractors, subcontractors and information systems. Yet it failed to obtain a clean opinion in its seventh consecutive department-wide financial audit.
That did not mean the entire defence budget had disappeared or been stolen. An audit failure can reflect incomplete records, incompatible systems, problems valuing assets and an inability to trace transactions to acceptable accounting evidence.
But those explanations were hardly reassuring. An institution responsible for weapons systems, property, inventory and contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars should know what it owns, what it owes and whether money is being spent as intended.
The audit process did produce improvements. The department gained better visibility over some assets, corrected weaknesses and retired certain deficient systems. Still, repeated failure demonstrated that financial control remained far below the standard expected of an institution handling such enormous resources.
The problem extended beyond defence.
According to GAO’s FY2024 improper-payments assessment, federal agencies reported approximately $162 billion in improper payments across 68 programs. These included payments made in the wrong amount, payments to ineligible recipients, insufficiently documented transactions and money sent through processes that did not meet program requirements.
Some errors involved benefits reaching people who should not have received them. Others involved overpayments, duplicate payments or inadequate verification. Even when no deliberate fraud occurred, the scale revealed fragmented data, weak controls and administrative systems that struggled to manage complex national programs.
DOGE therefore began with a legitimate question: why should taxpayers accept preventable losses simply because they occur inside a vast government?
Unused software subscriptions, vacant buildings, duplicative contracts and antiquated administrative procedures may look small compared with Social Security or the Pentagon. Across hundreds of agencies and years of spending, however, repeated inefficiencies can accumulate into substantial sums.
A government that cannot reliably track payments or assets is not merely wasting money. It is losing the information required to decide where money should go.
Waste, Fraud, and the Deficit Were Different Problems
The difficulty began when several distinct categories were treated as interchangeable.
An improper payment is not automatically fraud. Fraud requires intentional deception. Improper payments can also result from clerical mistakes, missing documents, outdated eligibility information or agencies following procedures that fail to satisfy technical requirements.
Nor does identifying a $1 million improper payment necessarily produce $1 million in future budget savings. The government may recover part of the money, fail to recover it, spend money investigating it or correct the process while continuing to fund the underlying program.
A cancelled contract creates another accounting problem. If an agency cancels a contract with a maximum ceiling of $100 million, that does not prove the government has saved $100 million. The agency may never have intended to spend the entire ceiling. Some work may already have been completed. The government may need to hire another contractor, perform the work internally or pay termination costs.
Fraud prevention, payment accuracy, procurement reform and budget reduction are all valuable. But they operate differently.
The federal deficit measures the gap between total government revenue and total outlays. Closing that gap requires reducing actual expenditure, increasing revenue or combining both. It cannot be solved merely by publishing the theoretical value of cancelled agreements.
This distinction became the central weakness in DOGE’s original promise. It assumed that because the federal government contained enormous inefficiency, an enormous amount of annual spending could be removed quickly.
The first claim was true.
The second did not follow from it.
What DOGE Actually Was
Before Donald Trump returned to office, DOGE was widely described as an external advisory commission led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Under that model, it would study the government, identify waste and recommend changes that elected officials and agencies could accept or ignore.
The organization that emerged after January 20, 2025 was considerably more powerful than that description suggested.
It was still far less powerful than its public image implied.
More Than an Advisory Commission
Through the executive order that formally created DOGE, the Trump administration renamed the United States Digital Service as the United States DOGE Service and established a temporary DOGE organization within the Executive Office of the President.
Federal agencies were directed to create DOGE teams, typically involving a team lead, engineer, human-resources specialist and attorney. Agency heads were instructed to coordinate with the DOGE Service and provide access to unclassified records and software systems where legally permitted.
That arrangement gave DOGE something earlier reform commissions often lacked: an operational presence inside the government.
Its personnel were not limited to writing reports. They could examine contracts, payment systems, staffing structures, leases and technology. They could work with political appointees, push agencies to terminate agreements and influence how executive departments interpreted the administration’s priorities.
DOGE also inherited a modernization mandate. It was supposed to improve government software, increase interoperability between systems, enhance data integrity and replace obsolete technology.
That made it fundamentally different from the Grace Commission of the 1980s. DOGE had direct White House backing, embedded agency teams and access to administrative machinery.
Ramaswamy left around the beginning of the administration and did not play a meaningful role in the federal operation that followed. Musk became the project’s dominant public figure, but DOGE’s activity depended on a wider network of White House officials, political appointees and agency personnel.
The organization therefore had enough authority to matter.
It simply did not have authority over the entire federal budget.
Still Bound by Congress and the Law
The executive branch can manage agencies, negotiate contracts, reorganize certain administrative functions and decide how to implement some programs. It can often freeze hiring, close offices, reduce discretionary activities and decline to renew agreements when existing law allows.
It cannot independently erase legislation.
Congress creates entitlement programs, approves appropriations and establishes many of the obligations agencies must fulfil. A president may propose eliminating a department, reducing a benefit or cancelling previously approved spending, but permanent changes frequently require Congress to act.
That distinction became visible when the administration sent Congress a $9.4 billion rescissions request. The package sought legislative approval to claw back money that Congress had already authorised.
The amount was meaningful in isolation. It was tiny compared with the roughly $7 trillion scale of annual federal spending and far removed from DOGE’s original $2 trillion ambition.
The administration could pressure agencies and recommend that funding be withdrawn. It could not always make those reductions legally permanent without lawmakers.
Even executive actions that appeared straightforward could generate litigation over statutory duties, employee protections, privacy, data security and congressional intent. Courts did not need to decide whether a program was efficient. They needed to decide whether the executive branch possessed the authority to change or terminate it in the chosen manner.
DOGE therefore occupied an awkward position.
It was powerful enough to move quickly and disrupt normal processes, but not powerful enough to redesign the government on its own. Its success depended on cooperation from agency heads, Congress, courts and the political system it had been created to challenge.
Why the $2 Trillion Target Never Added Up
The most damaging problem with DOGE’s original ambition was not bureaucratic resistance. It was arithmetic.
The federal budget was not a single pool of money from which Musk could remove unnecessary expenses. It was a collection of legal commitments, benefit formulas, defence obligations, interest payments and discretionary programs, each governed by different institutions and political constituencies.
As DOGE’s own federal-spending breakdown made clear, most expenditure sat in categories that could not be meaningfully transformed through contract reviews alone.
Most Spending Was Politically or Legally Committed
The largest federal programs operate through laws that promise benefits to people who meet established conditions.
Social Security provides retirement, disability and survivor benefits. Medicare finances healthcare for older Americans and certain people with disabilities. Medicaid supports healthcare for lower-income populations and is jointly administered with the states.
These programs are called mandatory not because Congress is powerless to change them, but because spending occurs automatically under existing statutes rather than being decided from scratch in each annual appropriations bill.
DOGE could identify duplicate records or improve payment verification. It could not raise the Social Security retirement age, redesign Medicare benefits or reduce Medicaid eligibility without legislative changes.
Those reforms would also affect tens of millions of voters.
The fiscal pressure is real. The 2026 Social Security and Medicare trustees’ projections indicated that a hypothetically combined Social Security trust fund could pay full scheduled benefits only until the third quarter of 2034. Continuing payroll income would still finance most promised benefits after that point, but not all of them.
That is a severe financing shortfall, not a moment when Social Security suddenly possesses no money.
Closing it would require some combination of higher payroll taxes, slower benefit growth, a higher taxable wage cap, changes to retirement ages or additional public borrowing. Every option creates identifiable losers.
The political danger is obvious. France’s attempt to raise its statutory retirement age from 62 to 64 produced strikes, demonstrations and a prolonged national crisis. The deeper story of France’s explosive battle over raising the retirement age shows how quickly an actuarial reform can become a struggle over fairness, identity and the social contract.
American voters may express concern about long-term debt. Older voters also participate at high rates and strongly defend retirement and healthcare benefits.
That leaves politicians with a familiar incentive: acknowledge the financing problem, promise not to touch the largest programs and search for savings somewhere less politically dangerous.
Interest payments presented an even more immediate constraint. The government could not simply cancel them. Failing to service Treasury debt would risk default, disrupt financial markets and damage the credit system on which the government depends.
Interest costs can eventually be reduced by borrowing less, lowering the stock of debt or benefiting from lower rates. They cannot be eliminated by an efficiency team examining contracts.
Once mandatory benefits and interest were set aside, DOGE’s available target had already narrowed dramatically.
Defense Was the Largest Plausible Target—and the Hardest to Touch
Defence was the largest remaining pool in which administrative savings could plausibly reach meaningful scale.
It also contained genuine inefficiency.
The Pentagon’s audit problems, fragmented systems and reliance on contractors created obvious opportunities. Procurement arrangements can weaken incentives to control costs, particularly when contracts reimburse allowable expenses and then add a fee or profit margin.
Under a badly designed cost-reimbursement contract, a contractor may not bear the full cost of overruns. Rising input costs can increase the revenue base on which compensation is calculated. The government absorbs much of the risk.
That does not mean every cost-plus arrangement is irrational. When agencies are developing experimental aircraft, advanced weapons or systems whose requirements remain uncertain, fixed-price contracts can force companies to charge enormous risk premiums or abandon the project entirely.
The sensible reform is not to prohibit cost-reimbursement contracts. It is to use them selectively, improve competition, strengthen oversight and ensure that contractors do not profit from avoidable delay or poor performance.
The larger obstacle was political.
Defence spending supports military bases, manufacturing plants, research institutions and suppliers across the country. Members of Congress who disagree on almost everything else often support defence programs that provide jobs in their districts or states.
Contractors also possess technical knowledge that the government has allowed to migrate outside the civil service. Cancelling a company does not automatically eliminate the need for the service it performs.
The full explanation lies in the political system protecting American defence spending: concentrated employment, congressional committees, contractor dependence, strategic commitments and the revolving door reinforce one another.
DOGE could expose expensive contracts and improve procurement. Cutting defence deeply would have required political choices about military strategy, overseas commitments, weapons programs and domestic employment.
That was no longer a government-efficiency exercise.
It was national policy.
The Rest of the Budget Was Too Small
After mandatory programs, interest and defence, the remaining discretionary budget funded nearly everything else associated with the federal government: education, housing, transportation, environmental protection, scientific research, law enforcement, agriculture, public lands, diplomacy and the administrative machinery required to operate national programs.
A government can decide that some of those functions are unnecessary. Libertarians have long argued for eliminating entire departments or transferring their responsibilities to the states.
But abolishing the Department of Education is not the same as making education administration more efficient. Eliminating the Department of Agriculture is not a procurement reform. Those are ideological and constitutional choices about what the federal government should do.
They also do not instantly eliminate every dollar associated with an agency. Programs may be transferred elsewhere. Employees may receive severance or retirement benefits. Contracts may need to be terminated. States may demand replacement funding. Courts may block changes that conflict with statutes.
Even if the entire remaining non-defence discretionary budget had been politically available, cutting $2 trillion would have required reductions on a scale approaching the elimination of major government functions.
That was never likely to pass Congress.
DOGE’s target therefore depended on one of three impossible assumptions: that entitlement programs were available for immediate cuts, that defence could be reduced without strategic or political consequences, or that cancelling contracts with large ceiling values was equivalent to removing cash from the federal budget.
None was true.
What DOGE Actually Changed
An unrealistic target does not mean DOGE achieved nothing.
The organization’s most credible legacy came from interventions that were less dramatic than eliminating departments and more practical than solving the national debt: reviewing contracts, closing underused offices, reducing administrative duplication and forcing agencies to examine systems that had survived because no senior official had an incentive to challenge them.
Those actions deserve to be evaluated separately from the $2 trillion promise.
Contracts, Grants, Leases, Regulations, and the Workforce
DOGE’s public accounting divided its claimed savings across contract and lease cancellations, grant terminations, workforce reductions, regulatory changes, asset sales, programmatic reforms and other administrative actions.
Its final public savings estimate reached approximately $215 billion.
There were several ways such interventions could produce real value.
Cancelling an unnecessary contract could prevent future payments. Closing an unused office could reduce rent, maintenance and security costs. Eliminating redundant software licences could generate immediate annual savings. Improving eligibility checks could reduce future payment errors.
Workforce reductions could lower payroll expenses, particularly if positions remained permanently vacant and the associated work disappeared or became automated.
Regulatory changes were different. DOGE sometimes translated reductions in compliance time or administrative obligations into estimated economic savings. Those benefits could be valuable to companies and citizens without reducing federal expenditure by the same amount.
The categories should never have been added together without explanation.
A dollar of avoided rent, a dollar of cancelled contract ceiling, a dollar of estimated regulatory compliance and a dollar of lower payroll are not economically identical. They occur at different times, carry different levels of certainty and affect the deficit differently.
Independent scrutiny quickly exposed the problem. An analysis of DOGE’s published contract savings found missing details, overstated entries and cases in which headline contract values did not reflect the amount that could actually be saved.
That did not prove every cancellation was meaningless. It showed that DOGE’s accounting standards were not strong enough to support the certainty of its public presentation.
The organization wanted to be judged by speed. Budget savings must ultimately be judged by what would otherwise have been spent.
The Operational Wins That Deserved More Attention
DOGE’s strongest case did not depend on trillion-dollar claims.
Federal agencies often continue paying for software, telephone lines, buildings and consulting arrangements because responsibility is dispersed. The people authorised to cancel an expense may not benefit from doing so, while the consequences of disrupting a service fall directly on them.
An aggressive central team can break that inertia.
A review may discover that an agency maintains thousands of unused licences because no one has reconciled employee records with vendor invoices. A property audit may reveal offices that remain leased despite low occupancy. A technology team may replace a manual approval process that consumes thousands of staff hours.
None of these reforms will balance the federal budget. They still matter.
The original DOGE modernization mandate recognised that government efficiency depends on data, software and interoperable systems, not merely spending cuts. Better technology can reduce fraud, shorten processing times and make future audits possible.
These improvements were also more durable than a one-time cancellation. A well-designed payment system can prevent errors year after year. Shared procurement can strengthen the government’s bargaining power. Reliable inventories can stop agencies buying assets they already own.
DOGE weakened its own strongest argument by attaching these practical gains to an implausible fiscal revolution.
Saving several billion dollars through repeatable administrative reform is a genuine public achievement. Presenting it as evidence that $2 trillion was available invited critics to dismiss the entire project when the larger number failed.
How Much Did DOGE Really Save?
No single number captures DOGE’s final record.
Accepting the official $215 billion figure without qualification ignores incomplete documentation and inconsistent accounting. Declaring that DOGE saved nothing ignores contracts, leases, staffing costs and administrative changes that almost certainly reduced some expenditure.
The defensible answer lies between those extremes.
The $215 Billion Claim
DOGE’s dashboard estimated that its actions generated approximately $215 billion in savings.
The total combined many categories: contract cancellations, grant reductions, lease terminations, workforce changes, regulatory savings, asset sales and programmatic changes.
Some components were easier to verify than others. A terminated lease with a known remaining payment schedule can be assessed relatively directly. A cancelled contract is more difficult because its maximum value may exceed the amount the government was likely to spend.
Workforce savings depend on whether positions remain empty, whether work is abandoned and whether agencies later hire contractors or replacement employees. Regulatory savings depend on assumptions about compliance costs and behaviour.
The $215 billion figure was therefore an estimate, not an audited cash total.
It should also be interpreted against the original promise. Even if every claimed dollar represented a fully realized reduction in one year, $215 billion would equal less than eleven per cent of $2 trillion.
That gap does not make the smaller amount trivial. It reveals how detached the original target was from what administrative action could realistically produce.
The Receipts Problem
DOGE attempted to support its claims by publishing receipts for contracts, grants and leases. But the organization acknowledged that itemized receipts represented only about 30 per cent of the total savings displayed on its website.
The missing documentation mattered because different values could be attached to the same government agreement.
A contract might carry a ceiling of $500 million while only $50 million had been obligated. Of that amount, $30 million might already have been spent. Cancelling it would not produce $500 million in savings. The avoidable amount could be closer to the remaining obligation, and even that figure would need to account for termination charges and replacement work.
Some early DOGE entries contained obvious errors or were revised after outside scrutiny. In other cases, agencies disputed whether contracts had truly been cancelled or whether the listed value represented realistic future expenditure.
These problems did not merely give critics an opportunity to attack Musk. They prevented the public from distinguishing strong reforms from weak ones.
A credible government-efficiency program should be unusually strict about accounting. It cannot demand that agencies justify every dollar while using ambiguous figures for its own achievements.
The absence of a comprehensive final reconciliation left several unanswered questions:
How much of the $215 billion represented cash that was never spent? How much represented multiyear avoided costs? How much reflected contract ceilings? How much came from regulatory models? How much was offset by severance, litigation, rehiring, contractor substitution or service disruption?
Without those answers, the official number remains useful as a record of DOGE’s claim, not a definitive measurement of its fiscal effect.
Why the Deficit Barely Changed
The broadest reality check came from the government’s financial results.
According to the Treasury’s FY2025 financial report, federal outlays increased and the budget deficit remained approximately $1.775 trillion.
That does not prove DOGE saved zero dollars. The deficit reflects the entire federal government, including revenue, entitlement growth, interest, defence, disaster spending and policies DOGE did not control.
A household can cancel subscriptions and still spend more overall because its mortgage, medical bills and interest costs rise. The cancelled subscriptions remain real savings. They simply do not determine the household’s financial trajectory.
DOGE occupied the same position.
Its interventions may have lowered spending below what it would otherwise have been. But they were too small, too uncertain or offset by growth elsewhere to transform the government’s fiscal position.
This was the central mismatch between DOGE’s operational achievements and its political promise.
It could influence the margin.
America’s deficit was being driven by the structure.
Why DOGE Fell Short
DOGE’s failure to approach $2 trillion cannot be explained by one villain.
It encountered congressional authority, legal constraints, unreliable accounting, political opposition and the practical difficulty of altering institutions that provide important services alongside wasteful ones.
Some limits were unavoidable features of constitutional government.
Others were consequences of DOGE’s own methods.
Congress and the Limits of Executive Power
The president manages the executive branch, but Congress controls appropriations and writes the laws that establish federal programs.
This arrangement is intentionally frustrating. It prevents a president from treating all public expenditure as personal managerial discretion.
When Congress has appropriated money, the executive branch cannot always refuse to spend it indefinitely simply because the president considers the program wasteful. The administration may request rescission, use legally available flexibility or challenge the program through new legislation.
It cannot assume that a campaign mandate replaces statutory authority.
The $9.4 billion rescissions package illustrated the problem. DOGE and the administration could identify spending they opposed, but lawmakers had to decide whether previously approved money should be withdrawn.
Even a Congress controlled by the president’s party contained legislators whose districts benefited from targeted programs. Each cancellation created a specific constituency prepared to defend it.
The Grace Commission had encountered a similar pattern decades earlier. Identifying a theoretical saving is politically easy. Voting to impose the associated loss is much harder.
DOGE’s public rhetoric often treated delay as proof that bureaucrats were protecting themselves. Sometimes they were. In other cases, resistance came from lawmakers exercising powers granted to them by the Constitution or agencies attempting to comply with existing law.
A serious reform program had to navigate that structure.
DOGE often behaved as though force of personality could replace it.
Speed, Measurement, and Institutional Damage
Speed was DOGE’s greatest advantage.
Traditional government reviews can take years, allowing agencies to dilute recommendations, defend obsolete processes and wait for political attention to move elsewhere. DOGE imposed deadlines, demanded access and acted before institutions could fully mobilize against it.
The same speed created risks.
Government payment systems contain personal, commercial and financial information. Expanding access without complete security controls can expose data or weaken audit trails. GAO’s review of DOGE access to Treasury payment systems found that Treasury had not fully implemented required data-protection controls.
That did not mean DOGE personnel intended to misuse information. It meant a project built around efficiency sometimes treated safeguards as obstacles rather than part of effective administration.
Workforce reductions created similar trade-offs.
Some agencies undoubtedly carried unnecessary layers of management or positions that had outlived their purpose. Others depended on specialised employees who understood procurement law, scientific programs, payment systems and operational risks.
Removing staff quickly can produce an immediate payroll estimate. If the government later rehired employees, paid contractors more to perform the same work or suffered processing failures, the net saving could be much smaller.
The decision not to publish a comprehensive after-action review made this difficult to assess. Reporting on the administration’s decision not to publish a closing DOGE report confirmed that no definitive official account would reconcile savings, costs, service effects and unfinished reforms at the end of the mandate.
That omission undermined DOGE’s central claim to accountability.
A project created to make the government explain itself ended without fully explaining itself.
The Political Limits of Cutting Popular Programs
The largest fiscal choices were never hidden in obscure contracts.
They were embedded in programs voters know, use and defend.
Social Security recipients do not view their benefits as government waste. Medicare patients do not experience healthcare payments as an accounting category. Communities surrounding military bases do not consider defence employment an abstract inefficiency.
Politicians respond to those preferences.
Republicans may campaign against federal spending while promising to protect Social Security, Medicare and defence. Democrats may warn about deficits while defending healthcare, social programs and public-sector employment.
Both positions can be internally understandable. Together, they make major deficit reduction extraordinarily difficult.
Voters also contribute to the contradiction. Many support cutting government in principle but oppose reductions to particular benefits, facilities, subsidies or jobs that affect them directly.
France’s pension protests showed the intensity of that conflict. The political system protecting defence spending reveals another version of it. The underlying mechanism is the same: savings are celebrated in general and resisted in detail.
DOGE could embarrass agencies and expose individual expenses. It could not make voters welcome losses.
That was why the project’s biggest promise was political rather than administrative. Achieving $2 trillion would have required elected officials to tell millions of people that benefits, jobs, services or strategic commitments would be reduced.
No efficiency dashboard could make that painless.
What Earlier Reform Drives Teach
DOGE was not the first attempt to import private-sector methods into government.
Earlier reform drives repeatedly found that the decisive variable was not the number of recommendations produced. It was whether political leaders, legislatures and institutions possessed the authority and endurance to implement them.
The comparisons also show why headline savings should always be treated cautiously.
The Grace Commission
President Ronald Reagan established the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in 1982. Led by businessman J. Peter Grace, the commission recruited private-sector executives to examine federal agencies and recommend ways to reduce costs.
Its work resembled DOGE’s original public concept: outsiders would enter government, identify duplication and apply business discipline to institutions that lacked competitive pressure.
The commission generated thousands of recommendations and claimed enormous potential savings. Proposals included consolidating functions, improving procurement, collecting debts, changing benefits and eliminating subsidies.
But potential savings were not self-executing.
Many recommendations required legislation. Others depended on agencies changing entrenched processes. Some shifted costs to states, employees or beneficiaries rather than eliminating them. Long-term estimates were sometimes presented as though they were immediately available budget reductions.
GAO’s analysis of the Grace Commission’s major proposals demonstrated why independent review was necessary. Headline totals could change substantially when analysts examined timing, feasibility, legal requirements and the difference between gross and net savings.
The Grace Commission’s central lesson was not that government reform was impossible.
It was that recommendations without implementation authority are only the beginning.
DOGE improved on that model by embedding teams inside agencies. It still confronted the same political system when reforms required Congress or imposed visible losses.
The Rayner Scrutinies
Britain’s Rayner efficiency programme operated differently.
Sir Derek Rayner, a businessman brought into Margaret Thatcher’s government, oversaw focused examinations of specific administrative activities. The scrutinies asked basic questions: why was a function being performed, what did it cost, what would happen if it stopped and whether the same result could be achieved more simply.
The programme benefited from direct prime-ministerial support and close integration with departments. It was not merely an outside commission sending recommendations into the bureaucracy.
Official accounts of Britain’s Rayner efficiency scrutinies credited the programme with identifying substantial savings and improving managerial attention to costs.
Later assessments were more cautious about how much of the claimed amount had been fully realized. That distinction matters. Identified savings, agreed savings and cash released from departmental budgets are different measures.
Rayner also should not be credited with the entire Thatcher revolution. Privatisation, industrial restructuring, labour reform and reductions in public employment emerged from a much broader political programme.
The scrutinies offer a narrower lesson.
Targeted reviews can improve operations when ministers remain engaged, managers are responsible for implementation and claimed savings are followed through. They can produce worthwhile results without transforming the national fiscal position.
That is the model DOGE came closest to achieving when it concentrated on leases, contracts and technology.
New Zealand’s State-Sector Reforms
New Zealand provides the strongest example of deep public-sector reform, but it is also the comparison most easily misunderstood.
The country’s reforms began amid a severe economic and fiscal crisis in the 1980s. The government confronted high debt, inflation, weak growth, extensive controls and state institutions that lacked clear accountability.
The response was not a temporary commission searching for foolish expenses.
As the New Zealand Public Service Commission’s history of New Zealand’s decade of state-sector reform explains, the transformation involved legislation, new financial-management rules, clearer responsibilities for department heads, changes to state-owned enterprises and a wider programme of economic liberalisation.
Managers received greater authority over inputs while facing stronger accountability for results. Government accounts moved toward systems designed to reveal the full cost of activities. Departments were expected to specify what they produced rather than merely defend how much they had spent.
The reforms extended beyond Prime Minister David Lange and cannot be attributed to one leader. Finance Minister Roger Douglas played a central role, and later governments continued or modified important elements.
Nor was the transition painless. Restructuring contributed to job losses, social disruption and intense political conflict. Some reforms improved transparency and fiscal control while their distributional consequences remained contested.
New Zealand succeeded because reform changed laws, institutions, managerial incentives and political expectations over many years.
That makes it a poor precedent for the idea that outsiders can uncover trillions in easy savings.
It is a strong precedent for the opposite conclusion: genuine transformation requires far more than an efficiency hunt.
The Real Lesson of DOGE
So, did DOGE work?
It worked as an intervention into parts of the federal bureaucracy.
It forced agencies to review expenses they had little incentive to question. It exposed weak controls, cancelled some unnecessary agreements, pushed technology modernisation and demonstrated that an aggressive central team could move faster than ordinary government processes.
Those achievements should not be erased simply because the $2 trillion promise failed.
But DOGE did not work as a solution to the fiscal crisis it claimed it could solve.
Its early dissolution as a centralized operation reflected the limits of building reform around a temporary, personality-driven campaign. Some personnel and practices continued inside agencies, but the institution itself did not become the permanent machinery of accountability its ambitions seemed to require.
The deeper failure was conceptual.
America’s deficit is not primarily the product of a few outrageous contracts waiting to be cancelled. It is the cumulative result of laws, benefit promises, military commitments, interest costs, tax choices and electoral incentives.
Waste makes that problem worse. Removing waste does not make the underlying choices disappear.
A lasting reform programme would preserve DOGE’s urgency while rejecting its weakest habits. It would set conservative accounting standards, distinguish cash savings from theoretical values, publish independently verifiable results and evaluate the costs of disruption alongside the benefits of cuts.
It would invest in technology without treating data protection as unnecessary bureaucracy. It would reduce contractor dependence while retaining public expertise. It would give managers authority, hold them responsible for outcomes and build reforms that survive beyond one administration.
Most importantly, it would force elected officials to confront the decisions DOGE could not make.
How much should the country spend on retirement and healthcare? What military commitments is it willing to reduce? Which federal services should disappear? How much revenue is required to finance the government voters continue to demand?
Warren Buffett once captured the incentive problem by suggesting that members of Congress should become ineligible for reelection when the deficit exceeded a fixed share of the economy. The proposal was more provocation than complete fiscal policy, but its intuition was correct: institutions respond to incentives.
Politicians are rewarded for promising benefits, opposing taxes and blaming waste. They are rarely rewarded for explaining that every major fiscal solution imposes costs on someone.
DOGE could identify inefficiency. It could not resolve that contradiction.
Its final claim of $215 billion should therefore be neither celebrated as proof that the national debt was easy to fix nor dismissed as though every reform had been fabricated. The honest judgment is more useful.
DOGE showed that government can spend less on some things.
It did not show that America had decided what it was willing to stop doing.
Until that decision is made, the country’s fiscal future will not be determined by how aggressively it hunts for waste. It will be determined by whether its political system can distinguish the promise of efficient government from the much harder obligation to govern within its means.
Last Updated on July 21, 2026 by Aseem Gupta