What has Elon Musk’s Doge actually achieved?

FT.com no paywall: “It was never meant to be $2tn. Elon Musk’s vow last year to cut almost a third of the annual federal budget, made in front of a frenzied Maga crowd during a Trump rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, came as a surprise even to the event’s organisers. “The deal was he was going to [say he would] cut $1tn,” Howard Lutnick, the prominent Trump backer and now commerce secretary — who had invited Musk on stage — later admitted. “What was I supposed to say?” The impromptu pledge has increasingly become an albatross around Musk’s neck. Six months after Donald Trump officially announced the formation of Musk’s cost-cutting vehicle, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), it has yet to find a fraction of that initial sum on a one-off basis, let alone make the sort of cuts that would reduce spending year after year.While Doge’s website claims $170bn in savings, an FT investigation shows that only a sliver of that figure can actually be verified. Instead, there is evidence of inflated valuations being used to boost the numbers, while contracts that were already lapsing have been claimed as new savings. At the same time, US Treasury data has so far shown no drop in government spending. As Doge has struggled to make headway, it has strained to paint a positive picture: to beef up its claims, its website mixes recurring cuts to federal spending through workforce reductions along with temporary or one-off influxes of cash from the sale of federal properties and contract cancellations. “In all likelihood, the amount of claimed savings from Doge is significantly less than what Elon Musk originally wanted,” says Dominik Lett, an analyst at the free-market Cato Institute. “Doge should not be seen as a very successful deficit reduction effort.” Musk and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. Musk is prematurely stepping back from his role atop Doge — which was supposed to last until next summer — amid a backlash from members of the Trump cabinet and persistent protests from Congress. He leaves Washington a poorer man, as his political exploits have wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off Tesla’s share price and have led to cancellations of contracts with his satellite internet provider Starlink…

Doge’s emissaries appeared to have little appreciation of what branches of government they were targeting actually did, alarming some inside the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. The Trump administration had to halt the firing of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which guards the nation’s nuclear stockpile. Musk’s allies in the media were reduced to begging for reversals of rash decisions…”The FT has been able to match the claimed saving to an underlying contract modification in only around 6,700 cases. Almost all of the missing contracts involve the US Agency for International Development where no contract is listed. For these 3,373 cases, which account for $12.8bn of Doge’s claimed savings, the platform simply lists the details as “unavailable for legal reasons”. Even among the fully itemised items, which claim to be worth $18.2bn, the numbers are overstated. Around $840mn came from 253 contracts where Doge itself lists the contract as “expired”. Doge also claimed a further $289mn of savings stemming from 322 contracts whose period of operation had been scheduled to end prior to Doge’s involvement. Even where the claims can be matched to contracts, the maths for savings are contestable. Around $4bn of the claimed savings come from 155 “indefinite delivery vehicles” (IDVs)— flexible framework contracts that allow agencies to order a good or service as they need it. In these cases, where there is no firm contract to cost, Doge’s savings estimates have come from citing the legal limits of what could hypothetically be spent on a particular item. Contracts closed out by Doge that were actually matched to contracts with clear terms saved just $12.4bn. But even here, there are problems with the claims. One of the larger claims — a $1.4bn saving on an IT contract for the Department of Defense — was singled out by the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth. But a decision to foreshorten the contract from its original 2029 end point had already been taken in September 2024, under the Biden administration, when the term was cut to June 2025. With a single month left to run, this contract has so far only cost $73mn. “While Doge has drawn attention to some wasteful spending, it has overpromised and underdelivered on verifiable cuts,” JP Morgan’s Michael Cembalest said this month. “Given Doge’s indiscriminate approach, it may take years to fully assess negative effects from broad cuts to departments focused on public health, aviation, energy, cyber security, taxation and education,” Cembalest added. Calculating Doge’s impact, analysts say, is complicated by its deliberate opacity. Musk repeatedly claimed that Doge is operating with “extreme transparency”. Yet even as it faces dozens of lawsuits, the initiative has refused to provide the most basic information about its inner workings, including the number of staff it has hired, the number of agencies targeted, and the amount of criminal referrals it has made for “tremendous fraud”.