WASHINGTON — Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said 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 the group did not do what Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

How is that possible?

One big reason, according to a New York Times analysis: Many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong. And while the group did make thousands of smaller cuts, jolting foreign aid recipients, American small businesses and local service providers, those amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.

In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect.

At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations,” and said their demise had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.

Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.

Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, the Times found only 12 that appeared accurate — reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend.

The Times’ analysis helps answer a basic question about DOGE, which was hard to judge in the group’s chaotic heyday, when it had enormous power to cut federal spending and force out government employees who stood in the way. At the time, in the early months of 2025, DOGE listed real cuts alongside fake ones, and made it hard to tell the difference.

That raised the question of whether DOGE, at its heart, was an exercise in budget cutting or in deception.

It had elements of both, the Times found. But among DOGE’s largest claims, the bogus savings were both larger and much more common than the real ones. Similar errors and exaggerations recurred across the group’s work.

The Times analysis shows that, in trying to demonstrate progress toward its budget-cutting goal, Musk’s group turned other promises inside out.

Musk had said that DOGE would be “the most transparent organization in government ever,” and that it would bring the precision of the tech world to government. Instead, the group became opaque, with its lack of progress obscured by errors, redactions and indecipherable accounting that few private businesses would accept.

Some of DOGE’s employees are still working in the Trump administration, mainly on technology projects. But the group’s budget cutting now seems to be spent, even as the fallout from fired federal workers and former grant recipients persists. The website where DOGE tallied its successes, called the “Wall of Receipts,” has not been updated since Oct. 4.

At the White House, a spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about DOGE’s work, instead sending a broad statement about the president’s goals: “President Trump pledged to cut the waste, fraud and abuse in our bloated government.”

Neither DOGE nor Musk, who left the group in May, responded to questions from the Times. In a podcast interview this month with Katie Miller, a former spokesperson for DOGE, Musk said his group had been “somewhat successful” at cutting spending. But he also said that, if he could go back in time, he would not do it again.

“Instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically built — you know, worked on my companies,” he said.

Big-Dollar Boasts

To sort DOGE’s bogus cuts from its successes, the Times looked at federal records for the 40 largest items on the “Wall of Receipts.” In at least 28 cases, DOGE got it wrong.

Its errors included:

— Double-counting: DOGE took credit for canceling the same Energy Department grant twice, adding $500 million in duplicate savings.

— Timeline errors: One contract that DOGE claimed credit for ending had actually been terminated by the Biden administration, weeks before DOGE began its work. Three more items on DOGE’s list had simply expired. These were pandemic-era contracts with pharmacies that provided free COVID-19 testing for the uninsured. They were originally allowed to spend up to a combined $12.2 billion, but they never came close to that level. Then, in May, the three contracts ended on schedule.

DOGE still claimed credit for killing them, highlighting $6 billion in savings.

— Misclassifications: Seven programs that DOGE claimed to have terminated are not dead, including four that were resurrected by court rulings.

— Exaggerations: In 16 cases, DOGE greatly exaggerated its cuts. Many, including those two large Defense Department contracts, relied on an accounting trick that produced “savings” with little real-world effect. DOGE lowered the official “ceiling value” of contracts — reducing the theoretical limit on what the government could eventually pay — without changing its actual spending.

Real Cuts, Real Pain

Despite all that, the DOGE effort led to some actual cuts that closed offices, canceled programs and deprived people of food, medicine and other aid.

For people depending on those funds, the effects were sudden and devastating.

DOGE initially terminated nearly every contract and grant at the U.S. Agency for International Development and sought to lay off most staff members, as Musk put the agency “through the wood chipper.” Some aid programs were later revived. But thousands were canceled.

For Plan International USA, the cancellation ended work on 13 grants, including one that provided food aid in Ethiopia and an education program in Nepal to keep girls in middle school to avoid early, forced marriages. Its abrupt termination was listed on the wall as saving $11.7 million.

“When we left, a lot of parents could no longer afford to send their children to school,” said Shanna Marzilli, the group’s CEO.

Scott Roehm, senior director for justice and accountability at the Center for Victims of Torture, said his group received its first stop-work orders for its USAID and State Department grants on Friday, Jan. 24. By the end of the next Monday, the organization had to stop paying 75% of its staff, which forced it to close centers that provided counseling and rehabilitation services to thousands.

Roehm said he was particularly concerned about possible suicides — around a quarter of the torture victims the group served had recently experienced suicidal ideation.

“We know for sure that our survivors we are no longer able to serve are suffering,” he said.

Those dollar amounts were small, compared with DOGE’s largest claims. That is, in effect, how DOGE ultimately saved so little but still caused so much disruption. For small business and local communities, relatively modest sums had major effects.

“It’s the small numbers that hurt people,” said Lisa Shea Mundt, whose company, the Pulse of GovCon, tracks government contracts.

The sheer volume of all these cuts contributed to the sense that DOGE was taking a fine-toothed comb to the government, no waste too small. But in reality, DOGE needed the appearance of the big billion-dollar items because a vast majority of these claims added up to so little, at least in dollars.

In total, the Trump administration terminated more contracts this year than the government did last year. But the actual dollars “de-obligated” — money the government had committed to spend but then pulled back — were at most a couple of billion dollars higher in 2025 than in recent years, according to contracting experts.

DOGE Cancels Contracts

For decades, the government has funded outside analysts to study whether taxpayer-funded programs actually work, and how to improve them. It is the kind of work that would seem to serve DOGE’s mission of making government more efficient.

But DOGE canceled some of these contracts as well.

“It doesn’t feel like any of it has to do with efficiency,” said LaDonna Pavetti, a senior fellow with MEF Associates. Her firm lost several contracts intended to help federal antipoverty programs run more effectively.

Many of DOGE’s initial broad cuts and layoffs were later put on hold or reversed by litigation — a fact DOGE never went back to the wall to update. That litigation also cost the government money.

The Port Discovery Children’s Museum in Baltimore had won a $200,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to fund a program in which museum staff members went into child care centers connected to public schools in Baltimore. There they would teach parents how playing with their children could foster child development and family relationships.

On April 28, the government sent the museum a form letter terminating the grant and half its funds. The program no longer met agency priorities, the letter said, “and no longer serves the interest of the United States.”

“We were serving low-income families in Title I schools,” said Sonja Cendak, vice president for development and marketing for the museum.

The DOGE wall shows that it canceled more than 1,000 IMLS grants to local museums, libraries and history centers. States and the American Library Association sued, and courts required the grants to be reinstated. The Baltimore museum later received most of its funds. And on Dec. 3, IMLS announced it was reinstating all grants. But those grants still appear as cuts on the DOGE website, collectively “saving” the government about $134 million.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Emily Badger, David A. Fahrenthold, Alicia Parlapiano and Margot Sanger-Katz/Eric Lee
c. 2025 The New York Times Company