It’s not yet clear if Elon Musk’s government efficiency commission will actually be efficient. What it definitely has been is relentless.
The so-called DOGE commission has begun to upload a list of everything it says it has excised from the federal budget. Barely a month into its mission, the group says it has already produced “savings” amounting to billions of taxpayer dollars, mostly through canceled or renegotiated contracts. Those range from inexpensive news service subscriptions to multimillion-dollar training programs and other contracted services Musk has axed.
Yahoo Finance analyzed 1,127 records posted on doge.gov as of February 19. We didn’t audit or validate each claimed action, but we grouped them by agency to get a picture of where Musk’s commission has focused first and what sorts of things it has gone after.
Those 1,127 records covered actions at 39 agencies, including several highly publicized targets of the Trump-Musk jackhammer. There are roughly 400 federal agencies, some huge and some tiny, so DOGE is barely getting its pencils sharpened.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has endured the deepest cuts to date, totaling $6.5 billion, according to DOGE records. Next is the Department of Education, source of $502 million in cuts, followed by the Social Security Administration, at $232 million. Other agencies with more than $100 million in cuts include the General Services Administration, plus the departments of Agriculture, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and Commerce.
It’s not clear what “savings” actually means in DOGEspeak. Most of the actions appear to involve money Congress authorized and appropriated and the executive branch then allotted through signed contracts the Trump administration has now rescinded.
The DOGE data links to many contract summaries indicating the spending in question often takes place over several years. Under most contracts, the purchaser pays in installments rather than putting up all the money at once. There’s no time frame for the money DOGE characterizes as “savings,” but it appears that the spending DOGE is referring to would have stretched over months or years.
Sizable mistakes have already materialized in the DOGE record keeping. The New York Times analyzed one canceled contract the DOGE site initially listed with a value of $8 billion. That was off by three zeros; the actual value was only $8 million. The mistake could have been a simple data-entry error, but DOGE still seems to have used the $8 billion figure when tallying what it says are its total savings to date—$55 billion.
Story Continues
