Elon Musk doubled back on his promise to decrease government expenditure by $1 trillion – a sum that would half the federal budget deficit and, if carried out, bring the U.S. far closer to stabilizing the rise of its debt load in relative proportion to the size of the economy.
“Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars,” Musk told Fox News Thursday night – adding that he hoped to cut total federal expenditure by 15% just by “eliminating waste and fraud,” a target he said “seems really quite achievable.”
He cited several instances of excessive expenditure, including a poll Musk claimed was conducted for the Interior Department at a cost of $830 million to gather Americans opinions about national parks. Musk said another vendor could have completed the poll for about $10,000.
Under the direction of the Tesla (TSLA) CEO, the “Department of Government Efficiency” claims on its website that it has thus far saved $130 billion, or roughly $2 billion daily since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
That’s approximately half of the $4 billion daily Musk promised to reduce in his interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, but it’s challenging for reporters and analysts to verify these assertions.
After deleting government identification numbers from the source code of its website that would enable outsiders explicitly to identify what grants and contracts the agency is referencing, DOGE has made fact checking its claims extremely difficult.
This makes it challenging and occasionally impossible to find the vendors the government has hired as well as whether the government is really saving the DOGE claimed savings.
Claims on the website that are false abound meantime. DOGE claims the biggest savings—a terminated $1.9 trillion deal for IT modernizing. But the contractor told the New York Times this month that under President Biden the award was truly revoked in November 2024.
Though it authorizes the IRS to spend $1.9 billion over 7 years, the government Procurement Data System, a database of government procurement initiatives, shows that no money was ever spent on this program.
A request for comment went unmet by the White House.
Examining government expenditure figures more broadly also seems to refute assertions that DOGE’s initiatives are saving money for American taxpayers.
Using daily official treasury releases, the economic policy think tank The Hamilton Project tracks federal expenditure.
As of March 26, the federal government had spent $1.893 trillion in 2025 compared to $1.750 trillion at the same day previous year according these figures. Stated differently, federal expenditure is line to come in 7.4% higher this year than last.
Federal outlays often follow the economy year by year and expand accordingly. But the government is running under a continuous budget resolution that mostly locks in expenditure levels agreed upon by President Biden last year.
Though overall expenditure ended up 3.0% more for full-year 2024 compared to 2023, government expenditure at the conclusion of the first quarter in 2024 was on course to be 1.6% less than the previous year.
“You would expect, given the rhetoric, to see major declines relative to last year,” Wendy Edelberg, former top economist at the Congressional Budget Office and head of the Hamilton Project, told MarketWatch.
“It’s less surprising when you consider that most of the cuts they have discussed are rather small bore; I think that’s the main takeaway,” she said.
Edelberg further pointed out that even with the government putting many federal employees on administrative leave, those individuals are still paid, implying that even federal salary spending is surpassing past year.
These numbers cannot by themselves disprove assertions made by Musk and DOGE since they ignore future savings that some contract and grant cancellals potentially produce for the Treasury.
It also ignores seasonal fluctuations in expenditure since contract and grant money are distributed in erratic lump sums rather than daily.
It does offer proof, though, that any savings DOGE has identified are not yet sufficient to cause any real-time deficit lowering.
