Elon Musk famously waved a chainsaw on stage and promised to carve out $1 trillion from Washington’s federal budget.
His Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, aimed to be the fast track to making government spend more efficiently. However, a recent report from The New York Times revealed that despite DOGE firing federal employees, cutting budgets, and canceling grants and programs, federal spending actually increased, according to data from the Treasury Department.
DOGE’s own accounting attempted to present a different picture, but NYT reported that the agency claimed it “made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government, slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants, and pushing out civil servants,” stating it was “on track to reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October.” But when Times reporters Emily Badger, David A. Fahrenthold, Alicia Parlapiano, and Margot Sanger-Katz examined DOGE’s major claims, many of the supposed savings vanished under scrutiny.
The publication found that many of DOGE’s largest claims of savings were simply incorrect. The reporters looked into DOGE’s list of canceled contracts and grants and found that many of the most notable entries contained errors. The top 13 contracts DOGE mentioned were “all incorrect,” the Times reported, including two Defense Department contracts that Musk presented as “terminations” claiming to save $7.9 billion. The Times stated, “That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.”
Among DOGE’s 40 biggest claims, the Times identified only 12 that “appeared accurate” as they reflected real reductions in what the government had committed to spend. The others were a mix of exaggerations, accounting tricks, and claims that didn’t hold up under investigation.
DOGE closed offices, killed programs, eliminated jobs, and deprived people of medicine and aid. What it didn’t cut: federal spending. That went up.
Of the agency’s top 40 savings claims, 28 were wrong. https://t.co/LzyhKfWd8c pic.twitter.com/qZ5DeyBoyk
— nxthompson (@nxthompson) December 24, 2025
The report depicted a confusing set of accounts where real cuts appeared alongside false ones, making it difficult to audit even for experts. NYT noted that DOGE frequently “listed real cuts alongside fake ones and made it hard to tell the difference,” raising a fundamental question about the project: was it serious budget cutting or more like a performance?
NYT also documented that there was double-counting, including a canceled Department of Energy grant counted twice, which duplicated $500 million in alleged savings. There were timeline issues, with DOGE taking credit for cancellations that occurred under the Biden administration or for contracts that expired naturally. There were inflated totals, where DOGE claimed credit for the maximum approved “ceiling value” of a contract even when actual spending was much lower. In some situations, DOGE stated contracts were canceled when they were later revived by court rulings or never canceled at all.
Then there was the most clever trick of all, changing the numbers without altering the actual spending.
In 16 cases, NYT found that DOGE significantly inflated its cuts by lowering the “ceiling value” of contracts, reducing the theoretical maximum the government could pay without decreasing actual spending. Travis Sharp, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, explained it simply: “Does lowering the maximum limit on your credit card save you any money? No, it does not.”
Even when cuts were real, the Times observed they were minor compared to the parts of the federal budget DOGE completely avoided, such as Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the debt, which are the large and growing factors driving federal spending.
The publication described DOGE stopping work done by outside analysts who assess whether taxpayer-funded programs actually work, while pushing agencies to meet dollar targets without considering whether these cancellations might lead to higher costs later. In some instances, the cancellations appeared wasteful, like cutting a multi-year study just before data collection concludes and analysis is ready.
