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There are a lot of different numbers being floated about the actions of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But how much money is actually being saved by DOGE?
“The actual amount from the cuts they’re proposing are actually pretty small relative to the size of the overall government budget,” said Mary Hansen, professor of economics and a co-director of the Institute for Macroeconomic and Policy Analysis at American University.
She said there’s quite a difference between what DOGE is saying will be saved — hundreds of billions, or even up to a trillion dollars — and the direct savings being reported right now.
“Verifiable cuts were actually only about $6 billion, with two-thirds of that coming from the cap on those overhead payments for research grants,” she said.
She said it also comes down to looking at the short-term versus long-term impacts of the cuts DOGE is making.
“The idea here is that when we cut public investment in knowledge, we shrink the economy, we don’t grow it,” Hansen said. “When these cuts hit institutions — whether we’re talking about farms or colleges or private institutes, research hospitals — what people should be thinking about is how those reductions today in investment are going to make us all worse off in the future.”
DOGE said its goal is to cut down on fraudulent and wasteful spending. But are the jobs and grants being cut incidents of fraud?
“We know there’s a lot of fraud in government and the problem is that, I think, there’s enormous confusion in the DOGE team,” said Veronique de Rugy, the George Gibbs Chair in political economy and a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
She added that it comes down to the definition of fraud, which is a specific intention involving deception or misrepresentation.
“They conflate fraud and wasteful. ‘Wasteful’ is a little bit in the eye of the beholder. They think that DEI grants coming from whatever agency is waste, and obviously, the people who put them there don’t think it’s waste. So there’s a debate,” she said.
And sometimes, she said waste is not necessarily fraudulent. It can be anything from incompetency to procedural errors.
“We’re the United States. The fact that the government in 2025 still has lots of payments that are coming out without being tagged, and we don’t know where some of the money is going, whether it’s fraudulent or not, is not right. And that we fix that is important, even if it doesn’t save us a ton of money,” she said.
DOGE would need to identify where fraud is happening before they can cut it out effectively, according to de Rugy.
“The government doesn’t actually do a ton to prevent fraud and improper payments. In fact, improper payment has been growing quite dramatically over the years,” she said.
To properly figure out how to get rid of fraud, de Rugy said DOGE needs to figure out whether it is fraud or mismanagement.
And de Rugy said she believes that the answer to that may ultimately lie with the courts.
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