Claim: President Donald Trump has claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his new task force to cut federal spending, has already identified “tens of billions of dollars” in “waste, fraud and abuse” and could end up saving the government “close to a trillion dollars.”
Rating: This claim is FALSE.
Trump’s numbers are far above what DOGE has claimed to find on its website and social media, which separate analyses from NPR and the Washington Post tallied up to only about $2 billion in verifiable savings as of Feb. 19, 2025.
NPR reported that the $2 billion saved came from cancelling around 500 government contracts, roughly half of them within the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
There is no evidence that any of these contracts were terminated due to fraud, corruption, or abuse.
How much has DOGE claimed to save?
DOGE’s website has reported over $115 billion in savings as of Mar. 11, 2025 from a combination of fraud detection, renegotiating or canceling contracts and grants, reducing workforce numbers, and implementing changes to government programs.
But six current and former federal contracting officers told NPR that DOGE’s website is “misleading the public” with the data it includes.
The NPR analysis found that $46.5 billion of DOGE’s reported savings were not linked to any specific items in its database. Another $8.5 billion allegedly came from canceling government contracts, $6.5 billion of which hadn’t been actually terminated as of Feb. 19.
Over a third of the government contracts listed would also not save any money if canceled.
Who’s behind DOGE?
Trump launched DOGE through an executive order on Jan. 20, 2025 with the mission to slash the federal workforce and cut spending on issues that don’t align with his policies, appointing billionaire Elon Musk as leader.
But a new court filing has clarified that Musk does not officially work for DOGE, redefining his role as “senior advisor to the president.” Musk still serves as the public face of the group, and no new leader has been named.
Several lawsuits have flagged potential conflicts of interest with Musk’s private businesses, SpaceX and Tesla, which have received at least $18 billion from federal contracts. Musk is currently the wealthiest person in the world by a large margin.
Another lawsuit raises concerns about Musk and DOGE employees’ access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which stores U.S. taxpayers’ personal and financial information such as bank accounts, addresses, and Social Security numbers. WIRED reported that at least six DOGE engineers employed by Musk are college-aged men linked to Musk’s companies.
“What we’re seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government,” Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told WIRED.
How much can DOGE really save?
Musk has suggested that eradicating “waste” could save “at least $2 trillion,” around 30% of total government spending in the fiscal year ending September 2024.
This figure has drawn skepticism from public finance experts, considering over 60% of this money went toward mandatory spending for Social Security, Health, Medicare, and Income Security programs.
“It would be hard to say that you could cut $2 trillion out of a budget in a single year without compromising some of the fundamental objectives of the government that are widely agreed upon,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told The Hill.
Budget cuts on that scale would require “meaningful and difficult” changes enacted by Congress, Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the center-right Manhattan Institute, told NPR. “Waste, fraud, and abuse” is not enough to get there.