Data reveals Musk has delivered 0.25% of promised federal spending cuts

Musk Watch: “With Musk now preparing to scale back his work for the White House, he joined a farewell Cabinet meeting last Wednesday, during which he took credit for saving the federal government $160 billion. However, the real number appears to be much lower, particularly when considering how much DOGE could save taxpayers in future federal budgets. For fiscal year 2026, Musk Watch’s DOGE Tracker could verify just $5.02 billion in savings produced by DOGE. Of the $165 billion in savings DOGE now claims — another $5 billion was added to DOGE’s website following Musk’s comments last week — it has only itemized $69.3 billion. But in many line items, DOGE claims savings but provides no information about the contract or grant. This makes these claimed savings impossible to verify. In other cases, DOGE includes theoretical savings, counting unexercised government options to inflate the value of the contract. To correct for this, Musk Watch calculated savings by subtracting the amount already obligated from the total current value of the contract. Tallying DOGE’s savings that way, and excluding unidentified grants and contracts, we found that DOGE identified about $16 billion in verifiable cuts from grants and contracts. But that figure still doesn’t tell the full story. Musk promised to cut $2 trillion from the annual federal budget. But the $16 billion in verifiable cuts from grants and contracts will be realized over several years, since many of the contracts and grants that were cut spanned many years. DOGE made it difficult to calculate the annual savings because, in many cases, once it canceled the contract or grant, DOGE changed the termination date of the contract to the date of the cancellation. To estimate the annual savings in 2026, Musk Watch analyzed about 5,000 grants and contracts terminated by DOGE where the cancellation date had not been changed. The lifespan of those commitments averaged 1233 days, or about 3 years and 3 months. So, to determine how much DOGE’s cuts could save in Trump’s first full fiscal year, Musk Watch calculated one year of prorated savings. We found that DOGE’s verifiable cuts to contracts and grants would produce about $4.73 billion in fiscal year 2026. Adding in DOGE’s full claimed cancellations of $291 million in real estate leases (even though many of those cuts are dubious) brings the total verified cuts to $5.02 billion…”