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Thank you so much. The Department of Government
efficiency is gone. DOGE quietly disbanded in
November, eight months ahead of schedule, and the final numbers
are now in Elon Musk promised to cut at least $2 trillion in
waste, fraud and abuse. That target dropped to about a
trillion dollars, then 150 billion.
The actual result, government spending went up, not down, up
by about $250 billion compared to the same period last year.
But there's another number that tells a different story.
Doge cut 271,000 federal jobs in less than 10 months.
That's the largest peacetime reduction in federal employment
since World War 2. So what actually happened here?
We're going to walk through the data of what Musk himself now
says about the experiment and what are reveals about the
limits of disrupting the government the way you might
disrupt the company now. The Keto Institute, a
libertarian think tank, published A detailed analysis
this month. They looked at Treasury
Department spending data and Bureau of Labor Statistics
employment figures. The conclusion is very blunt to
the point. DOGE reduced federal employment
enormously, but it did not cut spending in.
It could not possibly cut spending just by firing people.
This cuts to a fundamental math problem that Musk either did not
anticipate or chose to completely ignore.
Federal salaries account for about 10% of total government
outlays. The overwhelming majority of
federal spending goes to transfer payments, things like
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the
national debt. None of that changed because
DOGE laid off workers at the Department of Education or the
USAID. Let's get into that right after
this break. And the employment numbers are
crazy. Federal civilian employment fell
from about 3.015 million in January to 2.744 million in
November. 9% decline. The pace of reduction has not
been seen since the military demobilizations at the end of
World War 2 and the Korean War. So Alex Nowrista, senior vice
president for policy at the Keto Institute, put it very bluntly,
said this is a faster and steeper decline in federal
employment at any time since the demobilization of the US
military and economy at the end of World War 2, at the and at
the end of the Korean War. It's the biggest peacetime ever
decline in federal workers over a 10 month period.
DOGE brought federal employment back to levels last seen in
2014, and it did so in less than a year.
Nearly 60% of that decline happened in one month, October,
driven by a civil service buyout offer the Musk had initiated
earlier in the year. The deferred resignation program
gave workers the option to leave with pay through September if
they agreed to just quit and depart voluntarily, and
thousands took that deal. But here's the spending side.
The federal government spent $7.6 trillion in the 1st 11
months of 2025. That's approximately $248
billion more than the same period in 2024.
It also exceeds spending in 20/23/2022 and 2021 under
President Biden. And according to the Cato
analysis, there is no visible structural break in spending
that coincides with Doge's start date.
An observer who did not know when DOGE began could not
identify it in the data. The trajectory of federal
outlays continued almost exactly as the Congressional Budget
Office had projected before DOGE existed.
Doja's own website claims $206 billion in savings, but multiple
outside sources and analysis have found those claims
overstated, full of errors and difficult to verify.
Actually, NPR reported that some listed contract cancellations
were not actually cancelled, were worth far less than
claimed, and had already been spent.
One example, DOGE claimed $4.3 million in savings from
canceling a $4.4 million FAA consulting contract.
The contract was not terminated, was worth about $150,000, and
almost all the money had already been spent.
So Musk addressed this at a recent podcast interview with
Katie Miller, a former DOGE spokeswoman.
When asked if DOGE was the success, Musk said We were a
little bit successful. We were somewhat successful.
And when pressed on whether he would do it again, he said, I
don't think so. Instead of doing Doge, I would
have basically worked on my companies, he added, almost
wistfully. They wouldn't have been burning
the cars. Now that's a reference to test
the vehicles being vandalized dealerships during the height of
public backlash against Doge's cuts.
Now, the timeline of Musk's involvement tells its own story
here. He was sworn in as a special
government employee, or SGE, in January, which legally limited
his 10 year to 130 days. He left at the end of May, right
on schedule, but his departure was not quiet.
In an interview the day before he left, Musk called Trump's
signature legislation the One Big Beautiful Bill, a massive
spending bill that increases the budget deficit and undermines
the work that the Doge team is doing.
Within days, Musk was on X calling the bill.
It is gusting abomination. He urged supporters to kill the
bill and threatened to fire every politician who voted for
it. Trump responded by saying that
Musk had lost his mind and that he was not interested in
speaking to him. And the two feuded publicly
through June and July, with Trump at one point telling a
really crowd maybe it's time he went back to where he came from
now. Musk even formed his own
political party, the America Party, in response, but by
September changed his mind. The two in reconciled publicly,
preparing together at a memorial service for conservative
activist Charlie Kirk. And the bill passed anyway.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated it would add roughly
$3.8 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.
Indoge itself no longer exists as a centralized entity.
When asked about his status in November, Office of Personnel
Management Director Scott Cooper told Reuters that doesn't exist
now. OPMOPM has absorbed many of
Doge's functions. Some of Musk's former
lieutenants transitioned to full time government roles at the
agencies they were originally detailed to.
Joe Gabia, an Airbnb Co founder who led Doge's overhaul of the
federal retirement system, now runs something called the
National Design Studio, responsible for government
websites, including the new Trump accounts program.
Now what does this all mean? Though the Cato analysis frames
it quite plainly, Doge failed to cut spending because most
federal spending is for entitlement programs that remain
on policy autopilot. Only Congress has the authority
to change those programs. Firing bureaucrats does not
touch Social Security. Canceling grants does not touch
Medicare. The math never worked out.
A 10% cut in the federal workforce saves roughly $40
billion annually. That's a lot of money in
absolute terms, but but it's a rough rounding error in a $7
trillion budget. DOGE reduce federal employment
enormously. It did not cut spending, and it
couldn't possibly cut spending just by firing people.
The only likelihood to close the deficit is by cutting the
biggest programs and the biggest programs, Medicare, Social
Security, Medicaid, and also the military.
They're not going to cut military spending.
Some agencies did not see spending cuts USAID saw.
The biggest, though, was spent over $30 billion in 2024, was
slashed and folded into the State Department before
November. The Department of Education is
on pace to spend over $40 billion less in 2025, and the
FCC is on track to spend about 1/3 of as much this year as last
year, with those savings were dwarfed by increases elsewhere.
Defense spending is up. Homeland Security is up.
Commerce is up. In the mandatory spending
categories, the one that's actually drive the budget kept
growing on autopilot. Social Security payments alone
are set to be over $100 billion higher in 2025.
Interest payments of the national debt will also be about
$100 billion higher. The national debt grew by more
than $2 trillion during Trump's first year back in office.
Musk came to Washington with the same playbook he uses at his
companies Move really fast, cut aggressively.
Ignore resistance. And that works at a private
enterprise where you own the equity and can fire anyone who
disagrees with you, and does not work in a government constrained
by laws, courts, civil service protections, congressional
appropriations and public opinion.
Musk acknowledged as much in his interview with Miller, said he
had underestimated how hard it would be to remake the federal
government quickly, and he noted that his businesses had suffered
because of the time and controversy that Doge consumed.
Now the irony is that Musk's political involvement may have
cost him more than he saved anyone.
Tesla's brand took a beating. Sales slowed.
Cars were vandalized, caught on fire.
Dealerships were fire bombed. Investors pressured him to
refocus on the company. Meanwhile, government spending
rose. The deficit crew in the national
debt crossed $38 trillion. DOGE cut jobs but not costs and
made headlines. But it didn't make any savings.
And in the end, even the man who ran it said he would not do it
again. There's a broader lesson here
about the difference between running a company and running a
government. In a company, the CEO has
authority that can fire people, cancel projects and redirect
resources at will. In government, power is
distributed. Courts can block actions.
Congress controls appropriations.
Civil service rules protect workers.
Public opinion shapes what is politically possible.
And Musk ran into all of these constraints and seemed genuinely
surprised by them. The same tactics that made him
successful at Tesla and SpaceX, moving fast, breaking things,
ignoring objections, generated lawsuits, political backlash,
and ultimately limited results when applied to the federal
bureaucracy. Now the agencies that Doge cut
are now rehiring workers. Some employees who took the
buyout have been asked to return.
Operations stalled out. Patient basic functions broke
down. The Labor Department, the Social
Security Administration and other offices struggled to serve
the public after losing experienced high value staff.
Whether those service disruptions were worth the
political statement is a question.
Depends on your politics, but from a pure spending
perspective, the answer is very clear.
The cuts did not produce savings, the deficit kept
growing, and the experiment ended 8 months early, quietly
absorbed into the Office of Personnel Management as if it
never. Hey, thank you so much for
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