The Department of Government Efficiency came to an official end this past weekend as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting effort reached a self-imposed termination date of July 4, 2026.
First dreamed up by Elon Musk in 2024 during President Trump’s election campaign, DOGE was formally created on Trump’s first day back in office amid promises of trillion-dollar savings to be won by hard-nosed tech geniuses slashing their way through endless thickets of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.
It didn’t work out that way.
Musk and a small team of acolytes quickly got to work in early 2025, disrupting the operations of multiple federal agencies as they dug through sensitive databases, canceled contracts for services and pushed for mass layoffs. Although the numbers are a bit hazy, about 200,000 federal employees eventually left their jobs through a mix of firings, buyouts and retirements, and some federal agencies saw their capacities sharply reduced due to the DOGE cuts.
Did DOGE save money? Overall, DOGE fell well short of Musk’s initial promise of $2 trillion in savings, as the project ran headfirst into the reality of a federal budget that is shaped largely by the needs of an aging population, the world’s largest military, soaring healthcare spending and rising interest costs rather than the nefarious schemes of evildoers looking to rip off Uncle Sam or clock-watching bureaucrats counting the minutes until their retirements.
Before shutting down, DOGE claimed to have saved the federal government $215 billion — $1,335.40 per taxpayer! — but experts have questioned the claimed savings, with some concluding that DOGE actually cost the federal government money as agencies scrambled to deal with chaos and added expenses that include paying thousands of employees not to work.
The Trump administration has said that it does not plan to do a final accounting. At a meeting of the House Appropriations financial services subcommittee last week, Republican Rep. David Joyce asked Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, “Is there something that you’re going to present or is there somewhere we can find what exactly DOGE accomplished as far as reductions in dollars spent, people at agencies, or whatever? Is there going to be some documentation of what took place?”
“We have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report,” Vought replied.
Whatever the final numbers may be, it’s clear that even some fiscal conservatives interested in reducing government spending were less than impressed by its efforts. “Good riddance,” said Jessica Riedl, a noted fiscal hawk at the Brookings Institution. “DOGE created chaos, spread misinformation & incompetence, violated numerous laws, targeted minorities, killed lifesaving aid funding, likely leaked confidential info, and fed the myth that waste alone drives deficits - all to produce rounding-error savings.”
Did DOGE cuts result in deaths? In perhaps the most notable example of DOGE’s aggressive cost-cutting, the U.S. Agency for International Development was completely dismantled last year after Musk said it was “a criminal organization” that needed to end. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he boasted in February 2025.
Analysts have claimed that the demolition of USAID has led to hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths as healthcare programs in impoverished countries were halted, though Musk has bristled at the accusations. “They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died,” Musk wrote last week on the social media platform he owns. “Not a single name!”
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said the case was clear. “Musk’s assertion that not a single child died is absurd,” Kristof wrote, before providing a number of examples, including: “Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection.”
Kristof noted how inexpensive the foreign health programs were. “Until Trump’s second term, American aid cost just 23 cents for every $100 of gross national income and saved a life approximately once every 10 seconds,” he wrote. “Seems like a bargain to me.”
Federal government is hiring again: Although DOGE succeeded in reducing the federal workforce, the hiring freeze it imposed has ended and some federal agencies are starting to refill positions that were lost.
In the first five months of 2026, the federal government posted more than104,000 jobs, NOTUS reported last week. That’s a big jump from the roughly 68,000 jobs posted in the final five months of 2025.
At the Department of Health and Human Services, new hires could be greater than the number of jobs lost last year. HHS laid off about 10,000 workers in 2025, NOTUS reports, while it aims to hire 12,000 this year. In some departments, officials are looking to refill positions that performed essential tasks. The IRS has received permission to fast-track the hiring of 8,000 workers after it laid off more than a quarter of its employees last year, while the Energy Department is rushing to hire nuclear waste experts after it pushed out mission-critical employees.
The bottom line: DOGE is done, but the impact of its slash-and-burn approach will likely be felt for quite some time, and many of its veterans still work in the federal government. Elizabeth Linos, a Harvard Kennedy School public policy and management professor, told Politico that DOGE has undermined confidence in government. “That has really long-lasting effects on our ability to rebuild trust in government or even convince the next generation of talent to enter government to begin with,” she said.