Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency originally promised to save the government $2 trillion in waste.
That target quickly dropped to $1 trillion. Then in April, Musk started intimating that the savings would only be in the region of $150 billion, making it clear to all but his most diehard supporters that DOGE was failing on its own terms — even going by its own dubious estimates of its progress.
Now, it’s looking like those purported “savings” are somehow even more pitiful than once believed.
A new investigation by Politico found that of the $52.8 billion that DOGE claims it’s saved by cancelling federal contracts through July, its actual savings were closer to a paltry $1.4 billion — which is barely two percent of what it’s boasting to the public.
The books, it seems, have been well and truly cooked — but how? According to Politico, DOGE is using the maximum spending possible allocated for some of the 10,000 contracts it axed as of last month, a “ceiling value” that’s often way higher than what the government ends up spending.
“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, cancelling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,'” Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School, told Politico. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.”
DOGE took a “move fast and break things,” take-no-prisoners approach to gutting the federal government. It gleefully pushed for firing tens if not hundreds of thousands of federal employees, demanded access to sensitive and private data, hollowed out the Social Security Administration, and targeted funds for science, education, and healthcare.
This plunged Washington, DC, into chaos, sparked waves of protests nationwide, and helped Musk become one of the most hated men in America.
For all the drama it caused, you’d at least expect dramatic results. What we’ve actually gotten is some clumsy accounting sleight of hand.
When DOGE isn’t outright cancelling federal contracts, it’s lowering their ceiling value and basically calling it a day, Politico found. This only changes the potential price tag and doesn’t reflect how much will actually be spent in the future.
It also completely ignores the complex legal, financial, and bureaucratic entanglements of these agreements. Cancelling a contract prematurely, for example, will often incur additional expenses, Politico notes, like payments for leases or subcontractors. This can take literal years to take into account, according to Tillipman.
“There’s no certainty because we haven’t finished understanding termination costs of anything,” she told the publication.
The potential for blowback doesn’t end there. Hundreds of cancelled contracts have already had to be restored because they were required by law. Some of the employees DOGE axed were quickly rehired because they performed indispensable roles, like safeguarding the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Also, federal agencies are required by law to spend the funds that Congress allocates. Any of the money set aside in the contracts that get cancelled simply go back to the agency, according to Politico. That means that cancelling the contracts does absolutely nothing to lower the federal deficit — which is Musk’s entire reason for forming DOGE in the first place.
One form of savings DOGE gloated about was shutting down a shelter for migrant children. It took the ceiling value on the shelter’s contract and subtracted the money that had already been awarded, and said it saved $2.9 billion. But the ceiling value it used to jack up its claim was calculated on how much it would cost to run the shelter at absolute maximum capacity every day for five years.
The shelter, in reality, had been empty since 2024, but received a reduced amount of money to be ready to house children on short notice, which it has done at least twice. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which runs the shelter, had committed to spending no more than $428 million on operating it through November, at which point it would be renewed or cancelled.
By cancelling it prematurely, DOGE saved no more than $126 million, Politico found — which is just four percent of the nearly $3 billion it claimed.
DOGE has responded by claiming its calculations are — despite evidence to the contrary — spotless.
“All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials and updated in real time based on current information,” Harrison Fields, White House principal deputy press secretary, told Politico in a statement, claiming that it’s created “historic savings for the American people.”
As Politico emphasizes, it’s impossible to take stock of exactly how much money is being “saved” in the moment. But these findings make it more than clear that any claims that DOGE makes should be taken with an enormous grain of salt.
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