In November 2024, Elon Musk presented an extraordinary proposition: the United States government could eliminate as much as $2 trillion in spending by confronting waste, dismantling unnecessary bureaucracy, cancelling expensive contracts and making federal agencies operate more efficiently.
The idea was appealing because the underlying problems were undeniable. The Pentagon repeatedly failed financial audits. Federal agencies made billions of dollars in improper payments. Government technology projects consumed enormous budgets without delivering promised results. Contractors benefited from procurement arrangements that often provided weak incentives to control costs.
The Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, promised to challenge a system that appeared incapable of holding itself accountable. Its supporters saw an opportunity to apply private-sector discipline to a sprawling federal bureaucracy, while critics questioned whether the promised savings were financially or politically achievable.
By July 2026, DOGE’s public dashboard claimed approximately $215 billion in estimated savings. Contracts had been cancelled, grants terminated, federal leases reviewed and employees removed. Some agencies had been pushed to confront inefficient practices that had survived years of conventional oversight.
But the $215 billion figure was not an independently verified reduction in government spending. An August 2026 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found serious problems with DOGE’s calculations, including reported savings from contracts that had not actually been terminated. Meanwhile, the federal budget deficit reached approximately $2 trillion in fiscal year 2026.
The result was neither the sweeping transformation supporters had imagined nor proof that every DOGE intervention was worthless. The initiative exposed real problems and generated some potentially valuable reforms, but its achievements were substantially harder to measure than its public statements suggested.
Understanding whether DOGE worked requires separating three questions that were frequently treated as one: whether the government was wasting money, whether DOGE successfully eliminated any of that waste, and whether administrative efficiency could meaningfully resolve America’s structural fiscal problems.
The Government Waste That Made DOGE Possible
DOGE emerged from a legitimate frustration with the way the federal government managed public money. The United States spends trillions of dollars annually through a vast network of agencies, benefit programs, contractors and state-level partnerships. Much of this expenditure supports essential services, but the systems responsible for distributing and monitoring it have repeatedly demonstrated serious weaknesses.
The Department of Defense provides one of the clearest examples. The Pentagon oversees an enormous inventory of military equipment, buildings, weapons systems, contracts and financial obligations. Yet it has repeatedly failed to obtain a clean opinion in its department-wide financial audits, a process that began in 2018.
An unsuccessful audit does not mean the entire defence budget has disappeared or that auditors have uncovered an equivalent amount of stolen money. Financial audits also examine whether an organisation possesses accurate records, can value its assets, reconcile transactions and demonstrate that its financial statements are reliable. The Pentagon’s difficulties have involved incompatible accounting systems, incomplete documentation, problems tracking equipment and weaknesses in internal controls.
Those distinctions matter, but they do not make the failures acceptable. An institution responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in annual expenditure should be able to establish what it owns, what it owes and whether its resources are being used appropriately. Although successive audits have helped the department identify assets, correct some weaknesses and improve individual systems, repeated failures reveal how difficult it remains to establish reliable financial accountability across the organisation.
Defence procurement presents another longstanding concern. Government contracts can involve highly specialised equipment, limited competition and years of technical development. When agencies cannot independently evaluate costs or become dependent on a small group of suppliers, contractors may possess considerable bargaining power. Poorly designed agreements can leave taxpayers responsible for cost overruns without giving suppliers sufficient reason to prevent them.
The problem extends well beyond the military. Federal technology projects have repeatedly suffered delays, unreliable cost estimates and disappointing results. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ electronic health record modernisation programme, for example, encountered major implementation difficulties, cost concerns and disruptions affecting the intended users. Such failures are particularly expensive because government agencies must often continue operating older systems while attempting to replace them.
Improper payments provide another measure of the problem. According to the Government Accountability Office’s assessment of fiscal year 2025 improper payments, 15 federal agencies estimated approximately $186 billion in improper payments across 64 programs. Roughly $153 billion consisted of overpayments, and the total represented an increase of about $24 billion from the previous fiscal year.
These payments can include money sent to ineligible recipients, duplicate transactions, inaccurate benefit calculations and payments that lack sufficient supporting documentation. Weak identity verification, outdated records and fragmented databases can allow errors to persist. In some cases, agencies may struggle to determine whether a recipient remains eligible for benefits or whether the same expense has already been reimbursed.
However, improper payments are not synonymous with fraud. Fraud involves intentional deception, whereas an improper payment may arise from an administrative mistake, inaccurate information or failure to satisfy a documentation requirement. Some errors involve money that can be recovered; others involve payments that cannot realistically be retrieved.
Nor does identifying $186 billion in improper payments establish that the government could save $186 billion annually. The reported amount includes different categories of error, and correcting them may require additional administrative spending. Some recovered money may be returned to the Treasury, while other corrections improve compliance without reducing the legal obligation to fund a programme.
The distinction between detecting an error and achieving a budget saving became crucial to DOGE’s credibility. A government can prevent duplicate payments, recover overpayments and improve eligibility checks without eliminating the underlying healthcare or retirement benefits that the payments support.
Nevertheless, the case for reform remains powerful. Federal agencies may continue renting underused offices, renewing software licences nobody needs or maintaining overlapping administrative functions because responsibility is dispersed across departments. Managers may lack reliable information about the services they purchase or the financial incentives to discontinue them.
These inefficiencies rarely produce the same public attention as an extravagant defence contract, but their effects can accumulate over years. Better purchasing practices, reliable inventories, modern payment systems and stronger oversight can improve public administration even when they do not produce dramatic headline savings.
DOGE was therefore responding to a genuine problem. Its central mistake was assuming that the existence of considerable waste meant an equally large amount of federal expenditure could quickly and permanently be eliminated.
DOGE’s $2 Trillion Promise—and the Powers It Actually Had
When DOGE was announced in November 2024, Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy were expected to lead an effort to identify unnecessary federal spending, reduce regulation and recommend changes to government operations. The proposed initiative resembled an external efficiency commission whose recommendations would ultimately depend on elected officials and agency leaders.
The $2 trillion ambition generated considerable attention, partly because its precise meaning was unclear. Was the target an annual reduction in expenditure, a cumulative saving over several years, or a broader estimate incorporating regulatory and economic benefits? Those are fundamentally different measures, and the distinction was never consistently reflected in the initiative’s early public presentation.
The federal operation that emerged in January 2025 was also different from the purely advisory body initially described. Through the executive order establishing and implementing DOGE, President Donald Trump renamed the United States Digital Service as the United States DOGE Service and established a temporary organisation within the Executive Office of the President.
The order instructed executive agencies to establish DOGE teams, generally involving a team leader, engineer, human-resources specialist and attorney. These teams were expected to coordinate with the central service and support the administration’s efficiency agenda. The initiative also had a technology-modernisation mandate involving software quality, interoperability, data integrity and government systems.
Ramaswamy departed around the beginning of Trump’s administration rather than becoming a central participant in the federal operation. Musk became DOGE’s most prominent public advocate, while political appointees, agency officials and embedded teams carried out its activities.
This structure gave DOGE more operational influence than a traditional commission. Its personnel could examine systems, review agreements, work with agency leaders and press for changes in procurement, staffing, property management and administrative procedures. They could also encourage agencies to terminate contracts or discontinue activities that the administration considered unnecessary.
But operational influence was not the same as unlimited legal authority. DOGE was not an independent federal department created by Congress, and its personnel did not acquire the power to rewrite spending laws or cancel statutory obligations simply because they believed particular activities were wasteful.
The executive branch can make many administrative decisions within the authority provided by legislation. It can negotiate contracts, decline certain renewals, manage personnel, improve technology and reorganise functions where existing law permits. Congress, however, controls appropriations and establishes many of the programmes that agencies are legally required to administer.
A president cannot simply eliminate Social Security benefits, rewrite Medicare eligibility requirements or abolish a statutory programme through an efficiency initiative. Major changes may require legislation, while some attempted administrative actions can be challenged in court over employee protections, privacy, appropriations or other legal requirements.
The administration’s $9.4 billion rescissions request illustrated this limitation. Seeking to withdraw money that Congress had already approved required a legislative process rather than a unilateral decision by DOGE. Even successful rescissions of that scale would be small compared with a federal budget measured in trillions.
Courts and statutory safeguards created further constraints. Some resistance reflected institutions defending inefficient practices, but other objections concerned whether the executive branch had legal authority to take a particular action. A programme can be poorly designed while still being established by a law that officials are required to follow.
DOGE thus possessed enough influence to accelerate administrative decisions and disrupt established routines. It did not possess the legislative authority needed to transform the federal budget’s largest commitments.
That difference also explains why its achievements should be evaluated in two categories. Administrative reforms can be judged by whether they reduce costs and improve operations within existing law. A proposal to eliminate entire programmes or substantially alter government benefits is a political decision about the proper role of the state.
DOGE frequently blurred that boundary, presenting efforts to make government more efficient alongside proposals that would fundamentally change what government provides.
Why the Federal Budget Could Never Be Fixed by Cutting Contracts
The largest obstacle to DOGE’s original promise was the structure of federal spending. America’s budget is not a collection of interchangeable expenses that an executive team can reduce by searching for unnecessary contracts. Much of it consists of commitments created by law, benefit formulas, national-security decisions and accumulated public debt.
When DOGE was proposed, annual federal expenditure was approaching $7 trillion. Against that figure, a $2 trillion annual reduction would have represented almost three-tenths of the government’s total spending. Achieving it without changing major public programmes would have required an extraordinary concentration of removable waste in the comparatively small portions of the budget available for administrative adjustment.
Social Security, Healthcare, and Debt Interest
Social Security is one of the federal government’s largest commitments. It provides retirement, disability and survivor benefits to tens of millions of Americans, including people whose household finances depend heavily on those payments.
Medicare provides health coverage primarily to older adults and certain people with disabilities, while Medicaid finances healthcare for eligible lower-income populations and other qualifying groups through a federal-state partnership. Together, these programmes account for an enormous share of federal spending and serve constituencies with substantial political influence.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are generally classified as mandatory spending. This means their expenditures follow statutory rules rather than being determined entirely through the annual discretionary appropriations process. Congress can amend those laws, but DOGE could not independently cancel the benefits they establish.
The programmes also face genuine financial pressure. Social Security’s retirement financing depends substantially on payroll taxes collected from current workers, while demographic changes affect the relationship between contributors and beneficiaries. As the population ages and birth rates decline, the number of people receiving benefits grows relative to the workforce supporting them.
The 2026 Social Security trustees’ projections estimated that reserves in the legally separate Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund would be depleted in 2032. If Social Security’s two principal trust funds were hypothetically combined, their reserves were projected to last until 2034.
These dates do not mean benefits would disappear. Continuing programme income was projected to finance approximately 78% of scheduled Old-Age and Survivors Insurance benefits when that fund’s reserves were depleted, or approximately 83% of scheduled benefits under the hypothetical combined-fund calculation. The problem is a substantial financing shortfall, not an immediate end to Social Security.
Possible responses include higher payroll taxes, increasing the amount of earnings subject to taxation, adjustments to benefits and changes in retirement ages. Raising the full retirement age would generally reduce lifetime benefits for affected workers, even if their monthly payments were not described as a direct cut.
The choice involves more than arithmetic. Increasing the retirement age may appear reasonable when average life expectancy rises, but life expectancy and physical working conditions differ considerably across income groups and occupations. A professional who can comfortably work into their seventies may experience the change differently from someone whose career has involved decades of demanding physical labour.
France demonstrated the political dangers of retirement reform in 2023, when President Emmanuel Macron’s government sought to raise the legal retirement age from 62 to 64. The policy triggered extensive strikes, demonstrations and political confrontation. A change presented by the government as necessary for long-term financing became a dispute about fairness, working life and the obligations of the state.
American politicians face comparable pressures when considering major changes to Social Security. Older voters participate heavily in elections, and both political parties have frequently promised to protect retirement benefits. Even when policymakers recognise the financing problem, they face strong incentives to postpone decisions that would impose visible costs on voters.
Medicare and Medicaid create related challenges. Rising healthcare expenditure reflects factors that include ageing, treatment costs, medical prices, utilisation and the design of insurance and reimbursement arrangements.
The administrative complexity of the American healthcare system creates genuine opportunities for reform. Fragmented billing, inconsistent information systems, payment errors and burdensome procedures can waste resources across both public and private insurance arrangements.
DOGE could potentially reduce inappropriate claims, strengthen identity and eligibility verification or improve government purchasing. Such changes might lower future programme costs without changing benefits. But the savings from correcting payments are not equivalent to eliminating the underlying obligation to provide healthcare.
Substantial changes to Medicare benefits or Medicaid eligibility would also involve legal and political decisions affecting patients, hospitals, states and healthcare providers. They could reduce federal spending while shifting costs to individuals or other institutions, rather than eliminating the economic cost of care.
Interest on federal debt creates another major constraint. The Treasury must service outstanding obligations, and deliberately failing to do so would risk default, financial disruption and damage to the government’s creditworthiness.
Interest costs can be reduced over time through lower borrowing, changes in interest rates and a different debt trajectory. They cannot be removed through an administrative review of contracts or a programme of federal workforce reductions.
Consequently, the most important forces driving the federal budget cannot be changed merely by improving the efficiency of agencies. Meaningful structural deficit reduction requires decisions about benefit promises, taxes, borrowing and the size of government itself.
Defence Contracts and Everything Else
Defence spending was the largest plausible area in which DOGE could pursue substantial procurement savings without immediately confronting the statutory structure of retirement and healthcare benefits. It was also one of the most politically protected categories of federal expenditure.
The Pentagon relies heavily on private contractors to develop aircraft, weapons, software, communications systems, infrastructure and specialised services. Contractors possess technical expertise, manufacturing capacity and intellectual property that the government cannot easily reproduce.
This creates opportunities for cost overruns and dependence on suppliers. When a complex military system requires years of development and has few viable competitors, cancelling the existing contractor may delay the programme without providing a practical alternative.
Contract structure can also influence incentives. In a poorly managed cost-reimbursement arrangement, the government bears much of the risk when a project’s allowable costs exceed expectations. If oversight is weak, contractors may have insufficient financial motivation to control expenses.
However, it would be misleading to suggest that every cost-plus arrangement automatically rewards rising expenditure. The Federal Acquisition Regulation’s rules governing contract types distinguish fixed-price contracts, cost-plus-fixed-fee agreements, incentive-fee arrangements and other structures. The federal government also prohibits contracts based on a simple cost-plus-percentage-of-cost formula.
Different agreements allocate risk differently. Fixed-price contracts can encourage efficient performance when requirements and costs are sufficiently predictable. But forcing a contractor to accept a fixed price for highly uncertain research or experimental weapons development may result in substantial risk premiums, disputes or suppliers refusing the work.
Effective reform therefore requires choosing appropriate contract types, improving competition and strengthening the government’s ability to assess costs. It also requires retaining enough technical expertise within federal agencies to challenge contractors rather than becoming dependent on their own estimates.
Politics makes the problem harder. Defence expenditure supports military installations, manufacturing plants, research programmes and employment across many congressional districts. A weapons system may survive criticism of its cost because cancelling it would threaten jobs and established industrial relationships.
Military commitments also shape the budget. The United States maintains overseas deployments, international alliances and expensive technological capabilities that reflect strategic choices. Congressional support for military assistance and major defence authorisations has frequently crossed party lines, even when particular operations or aid packages generate fierce disagreement.
Reducing such expenditure on a large scale requires decisions about national security, military commitments and industrial capacity. Identifying an overpriced component is an efficiency issue; deciding that the country should operate fewer bases or purchase fewer weapons is a strategic and political choice.
After mandatory programmes, debt interest and defence are accounted for, the remaining discretionary budget must finance a remarkable range of activities. These include education, transportation, housing, scientific research, environmental protection, federal law enforcement, diplomacy, agriculture, public lands and the administration of existing laws.
Some advocates of a smaller state argue that entire departments should be abolished or responsibilities transferred to state governments. Such proposals deserve to be understood as political positions about what the federal government should do, not simply as measures to eliminate administrative waste.
Closing the Department of Education, for example, would not automatically eliminate every federal education programme or its financial obligations. Functions could be transferred elsewhere, grants might continue under existing law, and restructuring could generate transition costs. Similar complications would arise when eliminating or consolidating other departments.
The financial arithmetic explains DOGE’s fundamental problem. Even dramatic reductions in non-defence discretionary expenditure would have fallen well short of a recurring $2 trillion target while eliminating services that many voters regard as valuable or essential.
The original ambition could not plausibly be achieved through procurement reform alone. It required a much broader national agreement about entitlement spending, taxation, defence and the responsibilities of the federal government—an agreement DOGE had neither the authority nor the political consensus to create.
What DOGE Actually Changed—and How Much It Really Saved
DOGE’s inability to meet its original ambition does not mean its interventions produced no value. An organisation can fail to achieve a headline target while still identifying waste, improving processes and reducing particular expenses.
DOGE and participating agencies reviewed contracts, grants, leases, staffing arrangements and government technology. Some agreements were terminated, facilities were examined for possible closure and agencies were pressured to justify activities that had continued with limited scrutiny.
The strongest case for DOGE rests on operational improvements rather than claims of a fiscal revolution. Government institutions can accumulate expenses that survive because nobody has both the necessary information and an incentive to eliminate them.
An agency might continue paying for software licences belonging to former employees because personnel records are not reconciled with vendor invoices. Another might maintain office space that no longer serves its workforce. A department may rely on separate systems performing nearly identical administrative tasks because nobody has authority to consolidate them.
Correcting those problems can produce recurring savings. Unnecessary software subscriptions can be cancelled, property costs reduced and manual processes automated. Better procurement can help agencies purchase common services more competitively, while reliable inventories can prevent unnecessary acquisitions.
DOGE’s technology-modernisation mandate offered a potentially more durable path to efficiency than one-time cuts. A payment system that prevents errors every year can improve financial integrity long after an initial review has ended. Better data sharing, when legally authorised and securely managed, can also make duplication easier to detect.
An aggressive central team can be useful in confronting institutional inertia. Managers may avoid cancelling longstanding arrangements because the benefits are dispersed while any disruption becomes their immediate responsibility. Strong political backing can overcome that reluctance and force agencies to examine previously unquestioned practices.
The difficulty is determining how much of this activity generated genuine savings, whether those savings would endure and what costs were incurred in achieving them.
What the $215 Billion Claim Measures
DOGE’s public dashboard eventually reported approximately $215 billion in estimated savings. The headline combined several categories, including contracts, grants, leases, workforce changes, regulatory actions and other programme adjustments.
Those categories do not measure the same economic outcome. Terminating an unnecessary lease can prevent future rent payments. Eliminating a permanently vacant position can lower payroll costs. Reducing compliance obligations may save time or money for private organisations without reducing federal expenditure by a corresponding amount.
Contract cancellations are especially difficult to value because federal agreements often contain different measures of financial commitment. A contract’s maximum potential value, including unexercised options, is not necessarily the amount an agency has already committed to spend.
Consider a contract with a maximum value of $500 million. The government might have obligated only $50 million, already spent $30 million and retained the option to order further work. Cancelling the agreement does not automatically save $500 million, because much of that amount may never have been spent.
The government might also have to pay termination expenses or obtain replacement services. If an agency still requires the underlying work, moving it to a different contract could reduce, eliminate or even reverse the expected savings.
The important measure is the difference between what the government would reasonably have spent without the intervention and what it spends after accounting for implementation and replacement costs. Even this counterfactual can be difficult to establish with certainty.
Workforce reductions create comparable problems. Removing positions can lower salary expenditure, but the net result depends on whether those positions remain vacant, whether the work disappears and whether agencies must recruit replacements or hire contractors.
Regulatory savings require another distinction. Reducing the time businesses spend complying with a rule can generate real economic value, but those benefits are not necessarily equivalent to cash that the Treasury avoids spending. Adding estimated regulatory benefits to cancelled contract ceilings and payroll reductions can produce an impressive total without representing a consistent measure of federal savings.
Timing matters as well. Saving $100 million across a decade is not equivalent to saving $100 million annually. Nor can a one-time asset sale permanently reduce the deficit by the same amount every year.
These differences do not make DOGE’s reported achievements inherently meaningless. They establish why a credible evaluation must distinguish independently documented reductions in expenditure from potential savings, estimates of future benefits and accounting values that may never have become actual costs.
What the Government Auditors Found
The most important independent assessment of DOGE’s public savings claims arrived in August 2026. In its investigation of DOGE’s Wall of Receipts, the Government Accountability Office examined the methods used to calculate savings associated with contract, grant and lease terminations.
As of July 7, 2026, DOGE’s public figures attributed approximately $110.34 billion in savings to these three categories. This was only part of its broader $215 billion claim; the GAO investigation focused specifically on the contract, grant and lease figures rather than independently auditing every category of DOGE’s estimated savings.
The examined total included approximately $61 billion attributed to contracts, $49.21 billion to grants and a reported $113 million associated with leases. GAO found that the underlying lease entries actually summed to approximately $53.5 million, revealing a discrepancy even before examining whether every termination represented new savings.
The contract findings were particularly significant. DOGE had described a methodology for calculating savings, but GAO determined that most of the reported contract savings did not follow that stated method. Some entries also lacked sufficient identifying information to establish how their values had been calculated.
GAO’s comparison with federal procurement records found that almost 2,000 contracts listed as terminated on DOGE’s dashboard had not actually been recorded as terminated in the underlying procurement data. The discrepancy demonstrated why the public list could not be accepted as a definitive record of completed cancellations.
One example involved a Defense Health Agency contract supporting information technology at more than 700 military treatment facilities worldwide. DOGE reported approximately $1.7 billion in savings after initially identifying the contract for termination.
GAO found that the agreement had not ultimately been terminated, and its scope, value and funding had not been reduced. Consequently, the specific $1.7 billion saving claimed for that contract had not occurred.
The grant figures presented a related problem. GAO reported that the available information was insufficient to verify the method used to calculate approximately 96% of DOGE’s claimed grant savings.
Some grants could not be reliably matched to public federal spending records. Without complete identifying information and consistent calculation methods, auditors could not establish the relationship between the headline figures and actual changes to federal financial commitments.
The lease findings revealed a different weakness: DOGE sometimes claimed credit for decisions that had already been made. Of 264 lease terminations remaining on the dashboard, GAO determined that 108 had already been in the process of termination when DOGE was established.
Those 108 leases accounted for approximately $15.3 million of the listed $53.5 million in underlying lease savings. Ending those agreements might still reduce government expenditure, but it would be misleading to attribute the entire benefit to DOGE if the termination process had begun independently.
The reported lease figures had also changed substantially over time. Hundreds of initially listed terminations were subsequently removed because the leases were no longer being considered for termination. This illustrated the danger of treating early proposed savings as permanently realised results.
GAO did not conclude that every DOGE cancellation was ineffective. Its examination of selected contracts identified funds that could potentially become available for reduced spending or higher-priority uses. The existence of genuine potential savings was consistent with its broader finding that the published accounting remained unreliable.
The distinction is essential. Auditors were not calculating a definitive total of every dollar DOGE saved or lost. They were examining whether particular published claims could be supported by records, appropriate methods and accurate reporting.
DOGE also did not respond to GAO’s requests for interviews and clarification. That limited the auditors’ ability to determine why some estimates diverged from the methods DOGE had publicly described.
The investigation ultimately recommended that the Wall of Receipts prominently disclose known data-quality limitations. This was a relatively basic transparency requirement for an initiative built around making government expenditure more accountable.
A serious efficiency programme should be able to distinguish planned actions from completed ones, gross estimates from net savings and money made available for alternative uses from actual reductions in expenditure. It should also explain when a saving is uncertain or cannot be independently verified.
DOGE’s reporting frequently failed that standard. The $215 billion claim remains a record of what the initiative estimated, not an audited statement establishing that federal spending fell by that amount.
That finding weakens DOGE’s most ambitious claims without erasing the possibility that individual reforms produced real benefits. The credible assessment is narrower: there were actual interventions and some identifiable savings opportunities, but the public evidence does not establish savings anywhere near the transformation originally promised.
The Risks and Costs of Moving Faster Than Government Normally Moves
Speed was one of DOGE’s greatest advantages. Conventional government reviews can take years, giving agencies time to defend existing arrangements, negotiate away difficult recommendations or wait for political attention to shift elsewhere.
DOGE approached institutional change differently. Its personnel sought rapid access to information, pressed agencies for decisions and challenged procedures that other reform initiatives might have spent months examining.
This urgency could be valuable when directed at clearly unnecessary expenditure. A vacant office does not become more useful because a lengthy committee examines whether to retain it. A duplicate software licence does not require an elaborate policy debate before cancellation.
But government institutions also manage functions whose reliability is more important than the speed of reorganisation. Federal employees administer benefits, process payments, maintain scientific programmes, oversee contracts and operate systems containing sensitive personal and financial information.
Rapid workforce reductions can remove unnecessary layers of administration, but they can also eliminate specialised knowledge that is difficult to replace. Experienced employees may understand procurement law, payment controls, technical infrastructure or statutory responsibilities that are not documented adequately elsewhere.
When such expertise disappears, an agency may need to recruit replacement personnel, hire outside consultants or accept reduced service capacity. The immediate payroll reduction may therefore overstate the lasting financial benefit.
There can also be costs associated with severance, litigation, retraining, delayed decisions and failed implementation. These costs must be measured rather than assumed, because neither the existence of disruption nor the announcement of a staff reduction establishes the final net financial result.
DOGE’s access to sensitive government systems created particularly important concerns. A modernisation initiative needs sufficient information to identify failures, but the government has legal and operational obligations to protect the records it holds.
The GAO review of DOGE access to Treasury payment systems, published in April 2026, found weaknesses in the controls governing access to systems operated by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service.
The review found that a DOGE team employee had access to three payment systems and was temporarily granted unintended permissions to create, modify or delete data in one of them. GAO found no evidence that the employee had actually changed system data, an important qualification when evaluating the incident.
Auditors also identified failures involving security agreements, access controls and the transmission of payment information. In one instance, an employee sent payment information without the required encryption and prior approval.
These findings did not demonstrate an intention to misuse federal information. They showed that important safeguards had not been implemented consistently and that sensitive systems were exposed to risks that effective management should anticipate.
A September 2026 GAO review identified further oversight problems at six federal agencies. DOGE teams were reported to have accessed more than 23 systems across four agencies that provided information, but the auditors could not fully determine the extent of that access from the records supplied.
Several agencies failed to provide all the requested information concerning system access or the controls used to protect data. This prevented GAO from giving Congress and the public adequate assurance that appropriate safeguards had been implemented.
The problem was not that technology specialists should never examine government software. It was that efforts to improve efficiency must operate alongside reliable access records, appropriate authorisation, security training and independent oversight.
Data protection is not separate from operational efficiency. A payment system that processes transactions rapidly but exposes sensitive information or permits unauthorised changes is not functioning effectively. Likewise, an administrative reform that removes necessary expertise may create problems that cost more to correct than the original activity.
DOGE’s operational record also became difficult to assess because the government did not publish a comprehensive closing reconciliation of savings, transition costs, workforce consequences and service effects. Some actions undoubtedly warranted further examination, while the available information did not support a single reliable figure for the initiative’s overall net impact.
The most defensible lesson is therefore not that rapid reform must be rejected. It is that reform should combine urgency with reliable measurement, legal safeguards and sufficient institutional knowledge to preserve the functions government is required to perform.
The Fiscal Verdict After DOGE
The ultimate test of DOGE’s original promise was whether its activities could make a significant difference to federal expenditure. By October 2026, the broader budget results showed that the United States remained far from the fiscal transformation promised in November 2024.
The federal deficit was approximately $1.775 trillion in fiscal year 2025. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s September 2026 budget review, the deficit for fiscal year 2026 was estimated at approximately $2 trillion, representing an increase of about $218 billion over the previous year.
Subsequent Treasury figures placed the fiscal year 2026 deficit at approximately $1.992 trillion. Federal outlays reached roughly $7.4 trillion, while government receipts totalled approximately $5.4 trillion.
The increase in the deficit reflected several forces. Federal expenditure rose on debt interest, major benefit programmes, defence and other activities. Changes in revenue also influenced the outcome, illustrating why government borrowing cannot be explained solely through spending decisions.
These numbers make clear that DOGE did not reverse the federal government’s overall fiscal trajectory. Despite administrative cuts and the announced savings, total spending continued to rise and the deficit remained extraordinarily large.
However, the budget figures do not establish that DOGE saved nothing. The deficit measures the difference between actual revenue and actual expenditure across the entire government, not the isolated effect of one administrative initiative.
If an agency cancels an unnecessary contract and saves $100 million while other federal spending increases by $100 billion, the government still spends more overall. The smaller saving remains real, even though it is overwhelmed by larger developments elsewhere.
A proper assessment therefore asks what expenditure would have been without DOGE. That counterfactual is difficult to reconstruct because spending depends on legislation, economic conditions, demographic changes, agency decisions and policies unrelated to the initiative.
The problem is that DOGE’s own published figures were not sufficiently reliable to establish the answer. Its dashboard combined uncertain and differently calculated categories, while independent auditors found substantial documentation and methodology problems.
The institutional ending further complicated the picture. By November 2025, reporting indicated that DOGE’s central operation had effectively been dismantled, although some personnel, agency-level practices and administration priorities continued.
The temporary organisation’s formal mandate ended on July 4, 2026. That deadline did not mean every related agency activity or the broader United States DOGE Service automatically ceased to exist, but it marked the end of the temporary effort around which the original public campaign had been organised.
A lasting government reform programme requires more than a period of intensive review. Its changes must become part of ordinary administrative practice through appropriate rules, reliable systems, managerial responsibilities and continued oversight.
Without that institutional continuity, a cancelled agreement may be replaced, a vacant position refilled or an inefficient process recreated after political attention moves elsewhere. Long-term savings therefore depend on whether agencies permanently change how they operate.
DOGE did not demonstrate that it had produced recurring annual savings approaching $2 trillion. Nor did its published evidence establish a complete net total after accounting for implementation costs and subsequent decisions.
Its achievements were more limited and more difficult to measure. Some waste was challenged, some administrative decisions were accelerated and some spending commitments were reduced or reconsidered. But the government continued to operate within the same broad fiscal structure that had made the original target implausible.
Why Reforming Government Is Harder Than Finding Waste
DOGE was not the first attempt to bring private-sector management techniques into government. Earlier reform efforts repeatedly demonstrated that identifying unnecessary costs is only the first stage of a much harder process involving legislation, institutional change and political resistance.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan established the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, commonly known as the Grace Commission after its chairman, businessman J. Peter Grace.
The commission brought private-sector executives into the process of reviewing federal operations. Its recommendations addressed overlapping functions, procurement, debt collection, subsidies, administrative practices and changes to public programmes.
The initiative generated thousands of recommendations and extremely large estimates of potential savings. But many proposals required legislation, while others depended on agencies changing established practices or transferring costs to different institutions.
The Government Accountability Office’s examination of major Grace Commission proposals found that projected savings required careful scrutiny. Estimates could change considerably once analysts examined implementation schedules, legal requirements, practical feasibility and the distinction between gross and net financial benefits.
The difficulty was not simply that nobody could identify waste. Reformers could produce substantial lists of possible improvements, but recommendations did not automatically translate into enacted legislation or cash removed from federal budgets.
DOGE improved on the original commission model in one important respect: it placed teams inside executive agencies with direct political backing and access to administrative operations. Yet whenever reforms required congressional action or imposed costs on influential constituencies, DOGE encountered familiar barriers.
Britain’s experience under Margaret Thatcher offered another model. Businessman Sir Derek Rayner led a programme of targeted efficiency reviews that examined specific government functions and asked whether they could be performed more effectively or discontinued.
These examinations, known as the Rayner Scrutinies, benefited from strong support within the government. Rather than simply producing broad recommendations, they focused attention on departmental activities, responsibilities and the implementation of administrative changes.
The programme was associated with reported savings and improvements in management. Nevertheless, the distinction between identifying potential savings, agreeing to changes and permanently releasing funds from departmental budgets remained important.
Rayner’s reviews should also be distinguished from Thatcher’s wider political programme. Privatisation, industrial restructuring, changes in employment and the sale of state-owned enterprises formed part of a much broader effort to transform Britain’s economy and the role of government.
Targeted administrative scrutiny can improve efficiency without fundamentally altering the country’s fiscal model. That narrower achievement resembles the strongest part of DOGE’s record: reducing unnecessary costs through focused examination and active management.
New Zealand’s reforms during the 1980s provide a more ambitious comparison. Facing serious economic and fiscal difficulties, the government of Prime Minister David Lange and Finance Minister Roger Douglas pursued extensive changes to state institutions and economic policy.
The reforms included restructuring government departments, changing the management of state-owned enterprises, reducing subsidies and introducing systems designed to clarify financial responsibility. Departmental managers received greater flexibility in some areas while becoming more accountable for the results they delivered.
New financial-management arrangements encouraged attention to the full cost of public activities rather than merely the amount allocated to a department. Governments sought to define outputs, clarify responsibilities and improve transparency across the public sector.
These reforms were not the achievement of a temporary efficiency commission operating outside the country’s legal framework. They required legislation, sustained executive commitment, institutional redesign and action by successive governments.
They also produced controversy. Economic restructuring involved job losses, disruption and disputes about the distribution of costs and benefits. Improvements in fiscal management did not guarantee that every social consequence was positive or that voters would welcome the changes.
New Zealand’s experience demonstrates that profound public-sector transformation is possible. It also demonstrates why such change cannot reasonably be reduced to identifying overpriced contracts and ordering agencies to spend less.
The common obstacle across these reform efforts is political incentives. Governments can identify inefficient practices, but the people benefiting from existing arrangements have immediate reasons to defend them.
A federal subsidy may appear unnecessary when viewed from the national budget, yet it can support businesses and employment in a particular community. A military programme may generate substantial costs while sustaining factories and skilled workers across several states. A public benefit may create long-term fiscal pressure while providing essential income to millions of households.
The benefits of reducing deficits are often gradual and widely distributed. The consequences of an individual spending cut can be immediate, concentrated and politically damaging.
Elected officials face this asymmetry whenever they propose meaningful reductions in expenditure. Voters may support fiscal discipline in principle while resisting cuts to healthcare, pensions, schools, infrastructure or employment that affects them personally.
Politicians consequently have incentives to support government efficiency as a general objective while avoiding the largest and most controversial decisions. Promising better administration is easier than explaining which services should be reduced, which benefits should change or which taxes should increase.
This tension affects both major American political parties. Republicans may criticise excessive federal spending while defending Social Security, Medicare and military commitments. Democrats may emphasise fiscal responsibility while protecting healthcare programmes, public services and social spending.
These priorities are not inherently irrational. They reflect genuine public preferences and competing views of government responsibilities. The difficulty arises when political leaders promise to maintain extensive commitments without accepting the revenue or trade-offs needed to finance them.
Warren Buffett once illustrated the incentive problem with a provocative suggestion: members of Congress should become ineligible for reelection if the federal deficit exceeded a specified share of economic output.
The proposal was not a complete or practical fiscal framework. It did not resolve disagreements about recessions, emergency borrowing, public investment or the appropriate size of government. Its value was in highlighting how political incentives influence spending decisions.
Public officials are often rewarded for announcing benefits, opposing unpopular taxes and promising to eliminate unspecified waste. They are less frequently rewarded for explaining that sustaining popular programmes requires difficult choices.
A stronger system of accountability would make those trade-offs more visible. It would also distinguish genuine savings from accounting claims, measure results over time and hold administrators responsible for whether reforms actually improve the services they manage.
Independent oversight already provides part of that foundation. Institutions such as GAO have repeatedly identified improper payments, duplicated activities, weak financial controls and opportunities for improved federal management. Their findings demonstrate that much of the information required for reform is available, even when implementing recommendations remains difficult.
The essential challenge is therefore institutional and political rather than merely technical. Lasting improvements require elected officials to support reforms after the initial publicity has faded, departments to accept measurable responsibilities and voters to confront the cost of the government they expect.
DOGE demonstrated how quickly a politically empowered team could challenge established arrangements. Earlier reform efforts show that enduring success depends on what survives after that team has disappeared.
DOGE ultimately worked in a limited sense. It challenged genuine inefficiencies, accelerated reviews of federal expenditure and created opportunities to improve procurement, technology and administrative controls. Those achievements matter because government should not accept unnecessary costs simply because they have become familiar.
But DOGE did not establish that its claimed $215 billion represented independently verified net savings, and it never demonstrated a credible path to its original $2 trillion ambition. Its accounting weaknesses and oversight problems also revealed that an initiative demanding accountability from government institutions must be willing to meet the same standard itself.
The deeper lesson concerns the difference between making government operations more efficient and deciding what government should do. Better management can reduce waste within existing programmes, but it cannot settle disagreements about retirement benefits, healthcare obligations, military commitments, taxation or the public services citizens expect.
A lasting reform effort would preserve DOGE’s willingness to challenge inefficient practices while applying more rigorous standards of evidence, protecting sensitive systems, retaining essential expertise and embedding improvements within institutions that can sustain them. Its success would be measured through independently verifiable outcomes rather than impressive estimates.
America’s fiscal challenge will not be resolved by treating every government expense as waste, nor by assuming that every existing programme must remain unchanged. It requires the far more difficult task of deciding which commitments the country values, what those commitments actually cost and how they should be financed.
DOGE showed that parts of government can operate more efficiently. It did not show that the United States had resolved the political choices responsible for its continuing deficits. That distinction is the difference between a worthwhile administrative reform and a genuine solution to the country’s long-term fiscal problems.
Last Updated on October 30, 2026 by Aseem Gupta