Elon Musk's DOGE Gutted Federal Agencies, Cancelled Major Programs -- But Federal Spending Still Went UP: Report

Source: MEDIAite

Dec 23rd, 2025, 7:13 pm


Back in February, Elon Musk infamously waved around a chainsaw onstage at CPAC as his Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, kicked off its activities, but a new report by The New York Times has revealed that while the agency did fire lots of federal workers, slash budgets, and cancel grants and programs, the end result not only didn’t save the $1 trillion Musk promised — federal spending actually went up.

According to the report by Times reporters Emily Badger, David A. Fahrenthold, Alicia Parlapiano, and Margot Sanger-Katz, 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,” but nonetheless failed to keep Musk’s promise that it would “reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October.”

To the contrary, “[o]n DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all,” the Times reported, citing data collected by the Treasury Department. “It went up.”

There were multiple causes for this, according to the Times analysis, chiefly that “[m]any of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong.” The Times reporters reviewed DOGE’s list of dozens of contracts and grants it said had been cancelled.

Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/politics/elon-musks-doge-gutted-federal-agencies-cancelled-major-programs-but-federal-spending-still-went-up-report/