As the head of President Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Tesla CEO Elon Musk has vowed to cut between $1 trillion and $2 trillion from the annual federal budget by 2026.
"I think we can do at least $2 trillion," Musk said at a Trump rally last October. "Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that."
Musk later revised that number down — but not by much.
"We'll aim for $2 trillion, which I believe is the best-case scenario," Musk said in a January interview on X, the social media site he owns. "But you need to allow for some margin. If we target $2 trillion, I think there's a strong chance we can achieve $1 trillion in spending cuts."
In pursuit of that ambitious goal, Musk and his team have spent their first month on the job waging war on the federal bureaucracy: canceling contracts, terminating leases, firing civil servants, blocking payments and dismantling America's top foreign aid agency.
At the same time, both Trump and Musk have expressed their support for sending $5,000 refund checks to taxpayers as a "DOGE dividend."
“There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the [$2 trillion] DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% goes to paying down debt,” Trump said in Miami on Wednesday.
“I love it,” the president said that night, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One.
So how much money have Musk and DOGE actually “saved” so far — and are they on track to hit their targets? Here are the numbers.
DOGE claims $55 billion in savings over the first month — but its own ‘wall of receipts’ shows just $7.2 billion
On Feb. 17, DOGE posted its first self-audit online in the form of a ‘wall of receipts.’ At the top of the page, the organization claimed $55 billion in savings.
“DOGE's total estimated savings are $55 billion,” the site declared, “which is a combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.”
But the actual data didn’t add up.
For one thing, only $16.6 billion in savings were initially listed on the page — not $55 billion.
Then the New York Times discovered that DOGE's single-biggest line-item — a contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — was erroneously listed at $8 billion.
Its real value? $8 million, with an m.
"Nobody's going to bat a thousand," Musk previously said during a Feb. 11 appearance with Trump in the Oval Office. "We will make mistakes. But we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes."
By Feb. 19, DOGE had updated its wall of receipts to accurately show $8 million in savings from the ICE contract — “though it did not acknowledge the error or explain how it might affect its calculation of total money saved,” according to the Times.
In fact, DOGE was still displaying a topline number of $55 billion in savings, even though just $8.6 billion in itemized cuts were now listed on its wall of receipts.
And on Feb. 20, that number shrunk again. Initially, DOGE claimed to save about $2 billion by canceling a trio of USAID deals worth $655 million each. Now that contract appears only once.
By the end of the week, just $7.2 billion in savings were showing up on DOGE’s wall of receipts.
The top of the page, however, still claimed $55 billion in total savings.
And the real number could be as low as $2 billion
According to National Public Radio, even the figure of $7.2 billion — which amounts to just 13% of DOGE's initial $55 billion claim, and a mere 0.36% of its $2 trillion goal — might be an overestimate.
Since the aforementioned $8 million ICE contract began in 2022, the agency has already used it three times for work totaling $3.5 million. So canceling the contract now could only save the remaining money (i.e., the $4.5 million that hasn’t been spent yet).
In addition, “just over half of the contracts touted by DOGE, accounting for $6.5 billion in alleged savings, haven't actually been terminated or closed out” as of Feb. 19, according to NPR’s analysis of a federal government procurement database. And more than a third of the contracts DOGE posted online wouldn’t even save any money if canceled; DOGE itself lists the savings as $0.
All in all, NRP found the “estimated savings from the initial DOGE list of just over 500 contracts” that have actually been canceled “runs closer to $2 billion” — with “ending research studies into early childhood education improvements, canceling access to financial market resources and the proposed halting of billions in international foreign aid work” among those cuts.
From $2 billion to … $2 trillion?
It’s early yet — but it’s clear from DOGE’s first round of accounting that Musk & Co. still have a long way to go.
If DOGE’s cuts continued at the current rate of $7.2 billion per month, for example, they would total just $86.4 billion by February 2026.
It’s possible that DOGE might get some help from congressional Republicans in the months ahead. Seeking to cram Trump’s entire agenda into a single budget bill that can pass the Senate with 51 votes through a process known as reconciliation, the House GOP has put forward a package with $2 trillion in cuts — mostly to Medicaid and antipoverty programs.
It's an approach that Trump has endorsed (even though he has also promised not to touch Medicaid).
The problem is that Musk’s deadline is 2026 — and those savings would be spread out over 10 years, not one. The House bill also includes extensions to Trump 2017 tax cuts that would reduce government revenue by $4.5 trillion over the next decade, more than offsetting any savings. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans favor a smaller stopgap measure without any tax or spending cuts.
Experts say that if the Trump Administration actually wants to slash trillions from the annual federal budget, they will either have to eviscerate sacrosanct defense spending and social-safety net programs that remain popular with the public — things the president has already declared off-limits — or eliminate everything else.
"It is completely impossible for DOGE to save $2 trillion," Jessica Riedl, an economist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, recently told CBS. "Two-thirds of the $7 trillion federal budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans and interest on the debt — all of which has been taken off the table by President Trump. Saving $2 trillion would require eliminating nearly every remaining federal program."
Unfortunately, Riedl continued, “DOGE has no legal or constitutional authority to cut this spending; Congress must pass a law.”
Graphics by Mike Bebernes
