Today, with Musk out of the White House, Doge having cut only a tiny fraction of the waste it promised, and dozens of lawsuits alleging violations of privacy and transparency laws, much of what the agency has done remains a mystery.
The effects of Doge’s initial blitz through the federal government – which included dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID), embedding staffers in almost every agency and illegally firing people en masse – are still playing out. Contrary to Musk’s promises, Doge’s success is vague and tough to quantify. Measuring the full impact and determining whether the agency even exists as a centralized entity anymore is difficult, complicated by an ongoing effort from the government to block disclosure of documents, which is itself a symptom of the chaos that the department created.
Doge vowed to keep track of its contract cuts throughout its existence via an online tracking site, but even by Doge’s own count it is falling far short. The cost-cutting tracker, which has also been shown to contain egregious errors that make the figures overblown and unreliable, projects that the effort has cut $214bn in spending. The site’s “wall of receipts” of canceled contracts states that it has cut $61bn. Although Doge promised to eventually update the site in real time, the page states it has not been updated since 4 October.
The true dollar amount of how much Doge has cut and how much the agency has cost taxpayers is far harder to pin down due to the convoluted nature of government contracts, Doge’s poor accounting methods and court challenges to layoffs, some of which have resulted in reinstatements. Organizations across the political spectrum that have attempted to track Doge’s cuts agree, however, that Doge’s numbers do not give an accurate representation of how the agency operated.
Doge’s calculations also ignore the more difficult-to-measure long-term equations of cuts, such as demolishing a department that coordinates policy on homelessness or effectively shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which may result in greater costs down the road once those services are no longer available. A report in August from Democrats on the permanent subcommittee on investigations in August found that Doge may have caused around $21.7bn [pathetic —lambert] in waste through actions such as paying federal employees not to work due to deferred resignation. The Trump administration’s top human resource official announced in August that there would be around 300,000 fewer government employees at the year’s end, largely due to Doge efforts, cut from a workforce of roughly 2.25 million civilians.
“DOGE did not reduce spending, but it did reduce federal employment by nine percent in less than 10 months,” a recent analysis from the libertarian Cato Institute thinktank concluded. “A decline that large has not happened since the military demobilizations at the end of World War II and the Korean War.”
“There are still very basic questions about Doge’s operational structure and activities that have not been answered because the entity has evaded transparency laws and evaded discovery requests,” Crew’s [Nikhel Sus] said.
Crew’s case is just one of many lawsuits involving Doge that are still pending a final decision and have no definitive end date in sight. Yet ethics watchdogs emphasize that these cases are important for getting a legal definition of what Doge is and what it is allowed to do. Otherwise, they say the risk is that the White House could re-empower Doge to carry out another rapid, opaque gutting of the government in the future.
“Let’s say Doge’s influence wanes for some temporary period. They could immediately come back in a very strong and decisive way in which they’re operating similar to how they did at the outset of the administration,” Sus said. “They would have the apparatus to do that.”
Inside many agencies, the ethos of canceling contracts and trying to run operations like a tech startup remains. Tools that Doge helped develop for processing information, often using AI and replacing human oversight, have also been put into use at agencies such as the General Services Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs – where ProPublica reported a Doge staffer put together an error-prone AI tool for “munching” government contracts.
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