Trump puts DOGE out of its misery

The once-vaunted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — originally led in part by Elon Musk — is officially no more. As of July 4, 2026, President Donald Trump allowed the agency to sunset, even though it imploded and virtually ceased to exist as a functioning program in November 2025.

It was an ignominious end to a hyped-up, pseudo-government entity that was supposed to rely on private-sector actors to transform the federal government and cut wasteful spending. The results, on the other hand, were as underwhelming as its goals were ambitious, but this was a predictable outcome to just about anyone with an understanding of government budgeting.

Musk suggested in October 2024 that he could identify and eliminate at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, which stunned many spectators. $2 trillion at the time represented about 30% of government spending and was also approximately equal to the federal deficit. Cutting this much would have been an astounding feat and could have put the United States on more stable financial footing.

Musk evidently learned how difficult it would be to achieve this, and by January 2025, he revised his goal to $1 trillion. A few months later, he altered his projection to a much more modest (well, modest for the spendthrift feds) $150 billion in the first year. By late April 2025, Musk left his post to return to the private sector, which was a wise decision. He has since become the world’s first trillionaire.

DOGE limped along after his departure, and now with it officially shuttered, the results are in. The agency asserts $215 billion in savings through a “Combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

Considering DOGE’s lauded goals, it is hard to consider it anything but an abject failure. I can already hear my readers grumbling that saving a couple hundred billion dollars is hardly a failure. I readily admit that saving taxpayer money, regardless of how much, is a noble and important cause, but the alleged savings are only about one-tenth of Musk’s initial objective of $2 trillion.

To put this another way, if Braves manager Walt Weiss promised to win 100 games this season but only won 10, would you call that a success? No, Braves nation would be calling for his ouster. Of course, baseball and government are not the same thing, but the problems for DOGE don’t end there.

Even suggesting that DOGE saved taxpayers $215 billion might be misleading. The agency often faced scrutiny over its accounting and whether its numbers were accurate or grossly overstated. What’s more, DOGE’s cuts might cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, which sounds counter-intuitive at first. However, DOGE’s activities have led to lawsuits, costly buyouts related to workforce reductions and may result in lost revenue thanks to a now understaffed IRS. So tax cheats may get away with tax evasion, while people like you and me pay our share.

The reason Musk fell well short of $2 trillion isn’t necessarily his fault. As a nominal part of the Executive Branch, Musk and DOGE did not have the authority to make the kind of substantive cuts he wanted to facilitate. He could advise Trump to curtail discretionary spending, but the biggest line-items were out of his reach.

Congress holds those purse-strings, and it was not going to make serious cuts, despite running deficits for over two decades. “To eliminate a third of the government, you would have to dramatically eliminate full functions of the federal government. You would have to dramatically scale back programs like Social Security, Medicare, and defense and veterans. It’s not going to happen,” a Manhattan Institute scholar correctly predicted in 2024.

Give credit where it is due. Musk and DOGE tried to tackle a long-standing dilemma: runaway spending and crippling government debt. We are nearly $40 trillion in debt, and there is no end in sight. Attempting to rein this in was a worthy pursuit, but thanks to government realities, it was a fool’s errand.

Back in January 2025, Musk and the Trump administration probably would have predicted that DOGE would have been wildly successful and garnered great fanfare by its sunset date. However, as its charter’s expiration date came and went, little admiration for DOGE existed. Instead, Trump quietly put the failed project out of its misery.

Marc Hyden is the senior director of state government affairs at the R Street Institute. You can follow him on X at @marc_hyden.