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President Donald Trump has said that he believes billionaire Elon Musk will save the government “hundreds of billions” of dollars with his Department of Government Efficiency.
DOGE has claimed to have saved taxpayers about $55 billion.
But only about $6 billion in cuts have been verified so far — an almost infinitesimal fraction of the federal budget, which was $2.44 trillion in fiscal year 2025.
It has been targeting what it calls “wasteful” spending. Some of these cuts have totaled nearly $1 billion, but most are under $20 million.
Many of the programs in its crosshairs are related to foreign aid or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.
Elaine Kamarck, who led a Clinton-era initiative that trimmed $136 billion, is not opposed to eliminating fraud and waste. But she is skeptical of DOGE’s strategy.
Her research at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management showed that the biggest culprit behind missing federal money isn’t the government itself — it’s the American people.
“Lots and lots of people don’t pay the amount of taxes that they owe,” Kamarck said.
The IRS reported that Americans failed to pay an estimated $688 billion in taxes in 2023 alone.
That amount of money could fund the federal government’s biggest expenditure — the Department of Defense — with $100 billion still left over.
“That’s a lot of money. But you have to increase the size of the Internal Revenue Service,” Kamarck said.
“Ironically, the Republicans in the last several congresses have refused to increase the number of investigators at the IRS.”
Trump paused the hiring of new IRS agents on his first day in office. The Associated Press has reported that the IRS has plans to lay off 7,000 probationary workers this week.
“Similarly, we know that there’s a lot of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid,” Kamarck said.
The Department of Health and Human Services estimates around $100 billion is lost every year to Medicare and Medicaid fraud.
‘Cut government with a scalpel, not an ax’
As for rooting out wasteful spending within the agencies themselves, Kamarck said, “You have to cut government with a scalpel, not an ax.”
Kamarck said that when she cut federal spending under the Clinton administration, she worked with experts at these agencies to determine where cuts could be made.
“It would be a good step if they were paired with someone who understood the missions of the agencies,” Kamarck said.
In a statement on Feb. 3, the White House Office of Communications shared a laundry list of what it called “ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects.”
One of these was described as funding for “‘personalized’ contraceptives birth control devices in developing countries.”
The PharmaE3D team that received the grant said their project aimed to find a solution for the severe pain that often is a barrier to intrauterine devices, which are one of the safest and most effective forms of birth control for women around the world, including in the U.S.
Kamarck said shutting down USAID for even one day created a significant amount of waste — the exact thing DOGE is trying to eliminate.
“There [were] half a million metric tons of food sitting on docks,” Kamarck said. “They told everybody at USAID, ‘Don’t go to work.’ So, if there’s nobody to move it, that disintegrates. The food gets bad.”
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