Elon Musk announced last week he will leave his highly publicized role as a top government advisor to President Donald Trump.
Using the survey below, let us know your thoughts and experiences about the first four months of DOGE’s federal spending cuts. Feel free to let us know who you are and where you’re from.
Musk’s departure comes a little over four months after he began heading efforts to cut spending and reduce federal bureaucracy.
Since Jan. 20, when Trump took office for his second term, Musk has been frequently beside him – as a special government employee – overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The efforts of DOGE and Trump’s administration to cut federal spending are intertwined, with the department created during Trump’s first day in office.
Some Republican leaders, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, have said DOGE is doing “incredible work,” and Trump has described Musk himself as “terrific.”
But others say DOGE’s reported savings haven’t lived up to Musk’s initial promises. Given the trickle-down impact some of these cuts could have on the state of Michigan, we decided to ask readers about their thoughts.
On Jan. 20, a Trump executive order officially established DOGE with the purpose of “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
The agency was first proposed by Trump after the 2024 election in November. Then, Musk and biotech entrepreneur turned Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were tapped to lead it together.
RELATED: Go here for more of MLive’s coverage of Trump
Musk, who later became the sole head of DOGE, said on the campaign trail that DOGE would seek to cut $2 trillion in spending, a sum that was later walked back to $1 trillion.
From mid-January through the end of May, Musk repeatedly made headlines for selling federal assets, cancelling/renegotiating contracts and leases, ending federal grant programs and reducing the federal workforce.
A good number of the agencies that were affected had offices, leases or federal workers located in Michigan.
In early March, the DOGE website was updated to list six Michigan locations to its list of canceled leases, including a Bureau of Indian Affairs facility in Baraga, a departmental management (IG) building in Grand Rapids and an Indian Health Service facility in Traverse City.
DOGE has also announced the closure of a Michigan-based Social Security office, a terminated lease for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s office space in Ann Arbor and for an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) facility in metro Detroit.
The savings touted by DOGE have also extended to federal grant funding, including the cancellation of grants and contracts at agencies like the Department of Agriculture, USAID and the Department of Health and Human Services.
As of May 29, DOGE reported 15,149 grant terminations totaling $40 billion in savings.
That includes a $238 million grant to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services that is listed by DOGE as being canceled in March.
A $20 million grant to the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity (LEO) intended to expand broadband access was also canceled, along with a $1 million grant to pay for the development of climate and resiliency plans in Flint and a nearly $19 million federal grant for Kalamazoo County that would have helped repair homes and improve energy efficiency.
At least 17 grants to Michigan universities had been canceled as of early April 2025.
RELATED: Michigan universities have lost millions in grant funding. They could lose billions more.
Musk has also sought to cut down the federal workforce. DOGE and the Trump administration have authorized a Jan. 20 hiring freeze, federal employee buyouts and mass layoffs.
RELATED: How many federal workers did Michigan have before Trump cuts?
There is no official figure for the total number of firings and layoffs to the 2.4 million U.S. federal workers since Trump took office.
The cuts include probationary employees, or those who have not yet gained civil service protection and typically have worked for less than a year. The move has been challenged in court numerous times, and has made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Other federal departments that have seen layoffs are the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Agriculture, Defense Department, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Veterans Affairs, Internal Revenue Service and National Park Service, according to analysis by the Associated Press.
Several fired federal employees testified in April before a Michigan Senate Labor Committee, including a U.S. Marine veteran who was fired, then rehired at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Ann Arbor. He said he believes federal workforce reductions will negatively impact Michigan’s nearly 441,000 veterans in the long term. They could see delayed appointments or difficulty finding care.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has sued the Trump administration, part of a coalition of attorneys general protesting the layoffs of probationary federal employees.
After four months of these changes, Musk announced the decision to leave DOGE in the evening on Wednesday, May 28.
He maintained on X that the announcement is because he is a special government employee, meaning he is only authorized to perform temporary, limited duties for a period of up to 130 days in a year.
In his post, Musk thanked Trump for “the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” and said the DOGE mission “will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”
Some Republicans, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, have praised the work of DOGE thus far.
“Elon Musk and the entire DOGE team have done incredible work exposing waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government,” Johnson wrote in a Wednesday morning post on X.
The DOGE website claims it has saved an estimated $175 billion as of May 30, through a combination of “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings and workforce reductions.”
That number amounts to a little over $1,086 per taxpayer, according to DOGE, based on an estimate of 161 million individual federal taxpayers.
But some research suggests those savings could be less than calculated when it accounts for the cost of actually making the cuts.
A study by the Partnership for Public Service, reported by The New York Times, found that the cost of making those cuts came in around $135 billion for this fiscal year.
The Partnership, a nonprofit studying the federal workforce, used “budget figures to produce a rough estimate” regarding the costs of firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave.
RELATED: Cost of DOGE cuts appear to wipe out most of agency’s reported ‘savings’
Cuts at the Internal Revenue Service that led to 22,000 employees leaving were also projected to cost the agency an estimated $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University.
Combined with the $135 billion in other costs, it appears the cost of DOGE’s cuts – minus any incurred from lawsuits – comes in at around $143.5 billion.
White House spokesperson Harrison W. Fields told The Times “it’s important to realize that doing nothing has a cost, too, and these so-called experts and groups are conveniently absent when looking at the costs of doing nothing.”
DOGE’s cuts are also expected to be less costly in the coming years as up-front costs may be more than future costs.
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