(DOGE) and the U.S. Budget: Separating Fact from Fiction

In early 2025, President Trump installed tech entrepreneur Elon Musk to co‑lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” (acronym DOGE) tasked with slashing federal waste. (The name is a wink at Dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency.) Within weeks, Musk’s team boasted of enormous savings. Trump echoed those claims before Congress, saying Musk’s unit had uncovered “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” and “reduced our debt to fight inflation” reuters.com.

But independent analyses find no evidence of such windfalls – only a small fraction of the promised cuts have been documented. In context of the U.S. budget (currently roughly $6.8 trillion in annual outlays npr.org) even tens of billions of dollars are minor. We examine the actual numbers and statements behind these headlines.

Musk’s DOGE team quickly took credit for some contract cancellations. For example, DOGE’s social media claimed more than $1 billion saved by axing diversity, equity and inclusion contracts cbsnews.com. But major cuts have faced legal pushback and public scrutiny. An NPR review found the official “wall of receipts” on the DOGE website was riddled with errors: hundreds of alleged savings were later deleted or revised, and some contracts were double-counted or wrongly valued npr.orgreuters.com. Musk acknowledged that “some of the things that I say will be incorrect” and vowed to fix mistakes “very quickly” cbsnews.com. Yet even if DOGE’s figures were accurate, they would be dwarfed by the scale of federal finance: U.S. spending hit $6.8 trillion in fiscal 2024 npr.org and the national debt now exceeds $35 trillion.

To put things in perspective, Table 1 below shows federal debt and annual deficits in recent years. The debt has surged under both administrations, and annual shortfalls run into the trillions. Against that backdrop, DOGE’s savings claims (even if true) are negligible.

Table 1: Federal debt and deficits by fiscal year. Debt figures from the U.S. Treasury; deficits from CBO and Treasury data. Note spike in 2020 due to pandemic usafacts.orgthebalancemoney.com.

The table underscores the mismatch between DOGE claims and actual fiscal trends. During the Trump years (2017–2020), the debt climbed from about $19.6 trillion at the start of 2017 to $26.9 trillion by 2020 investopedia.com (a ~37% increase). Under Biden (2021–2024), it went from $26.9 trillion to $35.5 trillion (about +32%). In each case the increase (several trillions) far exceeds Musk’s cited savings. Similarly, annual deficits were in the hundreds of billions in 2017–2019, then surged to $3.1 trillion in 2020 usafacts.orgthebalancemoney.com. Under Biden the deficit fell back to around $1.4–1.7 trillion in 2022–2023 thebalancemoney.comusafacts.org.

By comparison, the largest single “savings” item DOGE has claimed – on the order of $8–16 billion for certain contract terminations – amounts to only a few percent of one year’s spending npr.orgreuters.com. Even DOGE’s most recent total ($160 billion as reported by DOGE and media cbsnews.com) is a sliver of a $6.8 trillion budget – roughly 2–3% of annual outlays. (For scale, the federal debt grew by over $6 trillion in just two years of the pandemic investopedia.comusafacts.org.) In short, the alleged DOGE savings are minuscule next to overall spending, and uncorroborated by auditors.

Fact-checking statements by Musk and Trump: Both Musk and Trump have publicly touted DOGE’s impact, but their claims lack independent verification. At an Oval Office event on Feb. 11, Musk declared that the new administration would deliver what “the people voted for” and called it “essential” to pare government spending cbsnews.com. He insisted DOGE is “maximally transparent” – “I don’t think there’s been… more transparent” effort npr.org. In practice, watchdogs note that transparency means little if the numbers aren’t accurate. Yale budget expert Martha Gimbel told Reuters that simply posting flashy figures online is not enough: if the underlying data are wrong, “why should I trust it?” reuters.com. Indeed, DOGE’s own website has had to delete its five largest claimed “savings” items after errors were found reuters.com.

President Trump’s characterizations have also been misleading. In his March 2025 address to Congress, he praised DOGE for allegedly uncovering “hundreds of billions” in fraud reuters.com. But his administration’s own preliminary accounting, as reported by Reuters, tallied only about $105 billion in cuts – and that figure has been repeatedly revised downward reuters.com. No nonpartisan agency has confirmed any “reduced debt” from these actions. (In fact, Treasury figures show government spending and borrowing remain higher now than a year ago reuters.com.)

It is important to note that none of this involves the Dogecoin cryptocurrency itself. The DOGE team is named after the meme coin, but uses no crypto in its operations. Dogecoin was a private joke currency started in 2013 cbsnews.com, and nothing in the federal budget is paid for with it. Statements like “Dogecoin saved taxpayers money” confuse two unrelated things. So far, the only “savings” come from Musk’s DOGE website – with figures that budget experts call highly questionable npr.orgreuters.com.

In summary, while rooting out waste is a worthy goal, the claims that Musk’s DOGE has delivered hundreds of billions in savings are unsupported. In real terms, documented savings are small – only a few billion dollars – and in some cases have been reversed or credited incorrectly. By contrast, federal spending and the national debt continue to grow by trillions each year investopedia.comusafacts.org. Until DOGE’s figures pass independent audit, the government’s fiscal situation remains dominated by deficits and debt, not by mythic windfalls from a meme-inspired task force.

Sources: Official U.S. Treasury and CBO data on debt and deficits investopedia.comusafacts.org; recent fact-checks and news reports on the Trump administration’s DOGE claimsreuters.comnpr.orgcbsnews.comnpr.org. These confirm that no credible agency has reported DOGE-driven savings of the magnitude claimed.