Name: How Much Money Did Elon Musk’s DOGE Actually Save?
Uploaded: 2025-05-30T20:55:00Z
Duration: 7 min 44 s
Description: Elon Musk is done with the Department of Government Efficiency. The agency claims to have saved taxpayers more than $170 billion with its aggressive cost-cutting. Did DOGE live up to Musk’s promises?

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Elon Musk is done with the Department of Government Efficiency. The agency claims to have saved taxpayers more than $170 billion with its aggressive cost-cutting. Did DOGE live up to Musk’s promises? Photo Illustration: Paige Money

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Elon Musk is done with the Department of Government Efficiency. The agency claims to have saved taxpayers more than $170 billion with its aggressive cost-cutting. Did DOGE live up to Musk’s promises?

How Much Money Did Elon Musk’s DOGE Actually Save?

Narrator: Elon Musk is officially done with the Department of Government Efficiency.

This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.

Narrator: After leading DOGE for only a few months, the billionaire CEO of Tesla is now no longer a special government employee.

The DOGE influence will only go stronger. I'd liken it to sort of Buddhism. It's like a way of life. So it is permeating throughout the government.

Narrator: His aggressive cost-cutting at DOGE though has left a big impact.

DOGE has created just an enormous amount of backlash.

Narrator: OGE dismantled entire agencies, canceled billions of dollars in contracts, and helped the White House fire thousands of federal workers.

It was like the worst day of my entire federal career.

Narrator: The agency has also faced mounting criticism over its lack of transparency.

DOGE's wall of savings has been highly unreliable, riddled with numerous errors.

Narrator: So, what did Musk and DOGE actually accomplish? And what's next for the agency without Musk?

Announcer: Elon Musk!

Narrator: During the election, Musk said DOGE could save.

We could do at least 2 trillion.

Yeah!

Narrator: By March, Musk reduced that projection. Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars.

The numbers that they initially threw out seemed really far fetched.

Narrator: Romina Boccia studies federal budget and spending at the libertarian Cato Institute.

In order to cut debt kind of spending, DOGE would've had to reform major and popular entitlement programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. And those programs had already been taken off the table by President Trump.

Narrator: By the end of May, DOGE claimed to have saved a much smaller number, $175 billion. Its wall of receipts claimed $32 billion was saved for more than 10,000 contract terminations, and $40 billion for more than 15,000 grant terminations. In February, "The Journal" analyzed $7 billion in canceled contracts posted to the DOGE site and found the actual savings were closer to $2.6 billion.

The problem is that this wall of receipts has had a number of errors in it. It's been difficult to really know how much the federal government is actually saving.

Narrator: DOGE's contract and grant terminations add up to about $72 billion, but that still leaves more than $100 billion from other areas with an untold number saved from quote, "workforce reductions." A DOGE spokesperson didn't respond to emails requesting comment.

Protestors: Elon Musk has got to go! Hey-hey!

Narrator: Many of the widespread layoffs across the federal government that DOGE kicked off are being held up by the courts. And his forceful approach has led to behind-the-scenes friction between Musk and some of Trump's cabinet.

We have seen lawsuits filed on a number of fronts to protect federal workers who were fired, to the attempt by DOGE to access certain databases within the federal government.

Narrator: The first employees fired at many agencies were probationary employees.

The Office of Personnel Management made a decision for all agencies to fire all probationary employees in the federal government because they considered them to be temporary employees.

Narrator: Jeffrey Grant oversaw a department of 600 workers which ran healthcare.gov, the Affordable Care Act website. 86 of Grant's employees were terminated in February, shortly after he announced an early retirement.

We had IT people, we had health policy experts, we had operational experts, we had communications experts. It was a blow on a work level, but it's also a blow on a personal level.

Narrator: Grant says 30 of his employees were brought back because they were either deemed actually necessary, or they were erroneously fired. On March 11th, nearly half of the Department of Education's employees received reduction in force notices as part of President Trump's goal to dismantle the department. Sheria Smith has been an attorney for the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights since 2016. She also heads a union that represents nearly 3000 department employees.

Our workforce, our members received emails, including me, that we were impacted by a reduction in force. And then immediately that day they deactivated our key cards and made plans to take away all of our work equipment so that we could not perform any work.

Narrator: On May 22nd, a federal district judge in Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the fired Department of Education employees. She wrote, "There's no evidence that the reduction in force has actually made the department more efficient."

If we don't do this, America will go bankrupt.

Narrator: With Musk stepping back from DOGE, as the legal fight continues over massive layoffs, budget hawks in the Trump administration want to keep cutting.

DOGE has been a paradigm shift in Washington DC.

Narrator: One of the biggest proponents of DOGE in the Trump administration is the Director of Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought.

We intend to take the the DOGE agenda and the cuts and the momentum and the initiative and turn those into permanent savings.

Now that Musk is moving off to the side, we expect Vought will play an even more central role ensuring that the cuts that DOGE has identified become codified into law.

Russ Vought has long had a goal of significantly downsizing the federal government and has also been the power behind the throne when it comes to DOGE.

Narrator: As head of OMB, Russ Vought sent Congress a budget that proposed $163 billion in non-defense spending cuts, or 22.6% of current-year spending.

The 163 billion, which they identified, is very similar to the roughly 170 billion that DOGE has identified. But at the same time, they want to increase defense spending, and they don't want to touch Medicare or Social Security.

Ultimately, reducing spending is a prerogative of the Congress.

The bill is passed.

Narrator: In May, House Republicans passed a thousand plus page budget known as the Big Beautiful Bill. Musk said the bill undermines DOGE's work by not making enough cuts.

I was like disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it. And undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.

Narrator: The Senate still needs to pass the bill, but Republicans said they hope to get it on the President's desk by July 4th. In an April Tesla earnings call, Elon Musk said he would start spending far more time on running his electric car company.

My rough plan on the White House is to be there for a couple days every few weeks. And to be helpful where I can be helpful.

Narrator: The impact of DOGE's cuts are still playing out across the country.

DOGE is now part of every federal agency. They have brought people into every one of these federal agencies with a budget-cutting mindset. They are people who are really true to the cause of DOGE. If the public sees fewer services, if they see real bottlenecks in their ability to access Social Security, for example, all of that will affect the way the public views DOGE in the months ahead.

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