Elon Musk’s effort to dramatically cut government spending is expected to fall far short of his grand early pronouncements, and perhaps even his most modest goals.
It didn’t have to be that way.
According to experts across the ideological spectrum, a major problem was a failure to deploy people who understood the inner workings of government to work alongside his team of software engineers and other high-wattage technology talent.
Even that might not have achieved Musk’s original target of $2 trillion, which is roughly the size of the entire federal deficit.
Musk, whose last day spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency is Friday, slashed his goal for savings from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to finally only $150 billion.
The current DOGE results put Musk’s efforts well short of President Bill Clinton’s initiative to streamline the federal bureaucracy, which saved the equivalent of $240 billion by the time his second term ended. Clinton’s effort reduced the federal workforce by more than 400,000 employees. According to government estimates, the total civilian federal workforce — not counting military personnel or postal workers — reaches 2.4 million people.
It also seems clear that Musk was unable to change the overall trajectory of federal spending, despite eliminating thousands of jobs. The Yale Budget Lab, in an analysis of Treasury data, shows money is flowing out of government coffers at an even faster pace than the previous two years.
“It was an impossible goal they were trying to achieve. They kept lowering the standards of success,” said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “A more knowledgeable DOGE team wouldn’t have made insane promises that would be impossible to keep. They set themselves up for failure.”
At a White House event with Trump on Friday, Musk said his team would stay in place and renewed the goal of reaching at least $1 trillion in cost savings.
“This is not the end of DOGE, but really the beginning. The DOGE team will only grow stronger over time. It’s permeating throughout the government,” Musk said in the Oval Office, wearing a black blazer over a T-shirt emblazoned with “The Dogefather.” “We do expect over time to achieve the $1 trillion.” The early evidence suggests that the goal will be exceedingly difficult to reach.
By relying chiefly on information technology experts, Musk ended up stumbling through Washington and sometimes cutting employees vital to President Donald Trump’s own agenda.
Immigration judges were targeted at the same time the administration was trying to accelerate deportations of people in the U.S. illegally. Likewise, technologists with the Bureau of Land Management were purged from the Department of Interior, despite their significance to clearing the way for petroleum exploration, a Trump administration priority.
In many cases, fired employees were rehired, adding administrative costs to an effort aimed at cutting expenditures.
