Federal spending went up under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which was created to cut costs.
A new report in The New York Times found that federal spending actually rose under DOGE. In fiscal year 2025, the federal government spent $7.01 trillion, while in fiscal year 2024, it spent $6.95 trillion, according to Treasury data.
FY25 began Oct. 1, 2024, and ended on Sept. 30 of this year, meaning Trump was president for the majority of the period during which spending increased. Musk began his DOGE project in January under an executive order Trump signed on his Inauguration Day.
While DOGE 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,” the Times found that most of what DOGE said it cut was incorrect.
DOGE had published a list of canceled contracts and grants, but the largest 13 were incorrect.
The top two contracts were with the Department of Defense, which Musk claimed had been “terminated” and had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. In reality, the Defense Department still has those contracts, according to the outlet.
The Times also found that only 12 of DOGE’s top 40 largest claims were accurate. DOGE also made several inaccurate claims about what it cut, and double-counted some cuts, including contracts cut during the Biden administration, and exaggerated its cuts.
Additionally, four of the contracts that DOGE said it had cut had been reinstated by courts, the outlet reported.
Musk had originally claimed his DOGE project would save the U.S. $2 trillion, but later cut that figure to $1 trillion. Towards the end of DOGE’s time in the Trump White House, Musk claimed DOGE cut $150 billion in federal spending, but did not provide details.
The Daily Beast reached out to the White House for comment.
DOGE and Musk came out swinging in the early days of Trump’s second presidency, literally and figuratively.
The project, however, faced legal setbacks, and Musk was widely unpopular with Americans. Musk and President Trump had a very public falling out in June, just after Musk left the White House.
In addition to Musk’s reportedly bogus claims about government contracts, DOGE was responsible for cutting thousands of federal workers and targeting congressionally appropriated funds.
Courts later ruled, however, that federal employees at multiple agencies had to be rehired because they had been improperly fired. It was the federal government that wound up paying the bill to rehire them, since it had put them on paid leave when they were let go. Federal employees also collected back pay for periods when they were not working.
The federal workforce, firings, rehirings, paid leave, and productivity losses were estimated to have cost more than $135 billion in the last fiscal year, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on the federal workforce.
