Elon Musk’s “DOGE” produced no efficiency at all

The "efficiency" commission cut thousands of federal jobs--and spending went up anyway.

Maybe a chainsaw was the wrong tool for the job.

President Trump’s frenemy Elon Musk famously vowed to take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy after Trump made him head of a government efficiency operation in January. Musk said the Dept. of Government Efficiency, or DOGE 😏😏, would cut as much as $2 trillion per year in federal spending. That would have been a massive 30% decline in all federal outlays.

Ten months later, DOGE has quietly dissolved, months ahead of schedule. It managed to dismantle a handful of government agencies—yet federal spending is higher than ever. Musk’s chainsaw certainly left some wreckage, but it had no measurable impact on spending, which was the stated goal.

For what it’s worth, that’s exactly what real budget experts predicted would happen.

Here are the topline numbers. Federal employment has declined, thanks to DOGE and to Trump’s overall hostility toward the federal workforce. The number of federal workers dropped from 3 million one year ago to 2.9 million in September, the latest data available. That’s a modest decline, but it did reverse a sizeable bump in federal payrolls from 2022 to the beginning of 2025.

Musk’s mistaken presumption was that if you cut workers, you cut spending. Maybe, at a private-sector company. But most federal spending doesn’t go toward payroll. It goes toward public benefits, defense, interest payments and a lot of stuff only Congress can change. And Congress doesn’t want to.

Federal spending in 2025 has totaled more than $7 trillion, according to daily tracking by the Hamilton Project. At the same point in 2024, federal spending was just $6.6 trillion. So spending is about 6% higher this year, even though there are fewer federal workers.

In business, one way to think of efficiency is getting better financial results with fewer workers. That’s how Musk framed his ambitions at DOGE. But the Trump record so far is a smaller federal workforce paired with worse financial results, in the form of more spending. That’s the opposite of DOGE’s stated goal, and anti-efficient, to boot.

DOGE claims it has “saved” $214 billion in taxpayer money, through a combination of downsizing, program cancellations, federal asset sales and other types of cuts. But the concept of “savings” in the federal budget is arbitrary and kind of nonsensical. The government spends money on stuff that’s supposed to be in the public interest. Cutting some of that spending only “saves” money if it makes taxpayers better off, on the whole.

The DOGE cuts could turn out to be pennywise and disastrous. Here’s one example. One DOGE target was CISA, the agency that guards against cyberattacks on national infrastructure such as airports, bridges, pipelines and the electrical grid. CISA had an annual budget of around $3 billion last year. The DOGE cuts could shave up to $500 million off that. But a cyberattack could easily cost the economy billions of dollars. If the DOGE cuts allow something like that to happen, taxpayer “savings” would become an added cost borne of terrible policymaking. It’s like declining to buy insurance, which might look like saving money—until something bad happens.

Federal spending continues to rise, meanwhile, for totally predictable reasons Musk and his DOGE minions seemed oblivious to. Social Security, Medicare and other benefit programs that are basically on autopilot pay out ever larger sums because of an aging population and the constantly rising cost of healthcare. Interest on Treasury debt has to be paid. Defense is another huge spending category, and nobody wants to cut it.

Those categories account for at least 60% of all federal spending, and they’re the main reason the national debt will continue ballooning for the foreseeable future. So why not slash the other 40%? Because almost all of that is spending that benefits members of Congress and their constituents, who want to keep it that way.

Everybody knows a real reckoning is coming for a government that spends nearly $2 trillion more than it takes in every year. DOGE, if anything, showed how not to solve the problem. At least we know now that chainsaws are overrated.