DOGE.
A chainsaw through government.

On the campaign stage, Musk talked about cutting at least $2 trillion. By January 2025, he was talking about $1 trillion. By April, the figure was $150 billion. The promise kept shrinking.⁵

DOGE’s website eventually claimed $215 billion in savings. Senate Democrats put the waste from its first six months at $21.7 billion. Between the sales pitch and the bill were canceled programs, employees paid to stay home, and contracts that DOGE counted as savings without cutting a dollar.^{6, 7, 1}

GAO’s August 2026 review found that DOGE had not followed its stated method for most contract claims. For 96% of claimed grant savings, the information was insufficient to verify the calculation method. Of 264 leases reviewed, 108 were already being terminated before DOGE. The organization did not respond to GAO’s requests for information and interviews.¹

The Homeland Security review exposed another problem. DHS reported $10.5 billion in potential cost avoidance from 438 full or partial contract terminations. Almost all of that potential came from 30 IT contracts extending as far as 2034. Yet the department had already committed more than $1.7 billion elsewhere in 2025 for the same needs. A canceled purchasing vehicle did not make the work disappear.⁸

Paid departures carried a bill of their own. GAO estimated $6.7 billion in 2025 salary costs associated with deferred resignations. That was part of the $9.5 billion spent on administrative-leave salaries across the government that year.⁹

Senate Democratic investigators separately estimated at least $21.7 billion in waste between January 20 and July 18, 2025. Their report included paid departures, involuntary leave, severance and reinstatement costs. Those figures overlap GAO’s later accounting and cannot be added to it.⁷

Nor did the federal budget undergo the transformation Musk had advertised. Treasury recorded $7.01 trillion in fiscal 2025 spending. CBO’s preliminary fiscal 2026 estimate showed spending rising another 6%. Those totals reflect far more than DOGE—including benefits, interest and defense—but they put the promise of a dramatically cheaper government in perspective.^{10, 11}

The errors were there from the start.

In February 2025, DOGE claimed an $8 billion saving on a contract worth $8 million. It counted a $655 million contract three times. By early March, Reuters found that DOGE had deleted its five largest savings claims; its own accounting showed that 941 of 2,300 canceled contracts saved nothing. These were the receipts offered by an operation demanding that everyone else justify every dollar.¹²

The fraud hunt—and the check that never arrived.

Treasury’s inspector general examined the payment systems that became central to DOGE’s fraud rhetoric. The June 2026 audit found control weaknesses and improper payments. Its conclusion on fraud was blunt: “We did not find evidence of violations of administrative or criminal law that would constitute fraud.”¹³

There was supposed to be something in it for households too. Trump embraced a proposal to return 20% of DOGE’s hoped-for $2 trillion in savings—roughly $5,000 per taxpaying household.¹⁴

By October 2026, that DOGE dividend had never materialized. Trump was promoting another $5,000 payment, this time tied to Republicans keeping Congress. The earlier promise had quietly become the backdrop to the next one.¹⁵

For decades, the USAID sign meant something far beyond Washington. It appeared on sacks of food, at clinics and beside water projects. The agency, founded in 1961, administered assistance to about 130 countries in fiscal 2024, through more than 60 country and regional missions and thousands of partners.²³

Then the people who kept that network running were removed. GAO counted 13,600 USAID staff worldwide in January 2025. By April 2026, there were 241. Of 7,510 awards, 6,780 had been terminated by March 2026. State took over the surviving programs. GAO’s September review found that documented guidance was still missing, leaving decisions vulnerable to inconsistency, reversals and legal disputes.²⁴

Kabita Mukhiya was 28 weeks pregnant when she died in Nepal in December 2025. Her baby died too. Outreach workers had stopped visiting her community after U.S. funding was cut. An Associated Press investigation traced the lost support to canceled maternal-health programs. The death of a woman far from Washington had become part of the record of a policy celebrated there as efficiency.³¹

In Myanmar, Mohammed Taher told AP that his two-year-old son, Mohammed Hashim, died on May 7, 2025, after the family’s food rations stopped. A neighbor corroborated his death and burial. The family was trapped in an internment camp, already vulnerable to conflict and restrictions. Two weeks later, Rubio told Congress: “No one has died.”³²

In South Sudan, Save the Children reported that eight people, including five children, died during a three-hour walk to cholera treatment after U.S. funding cuts forced nearby services to close. Reuters carried the charity’s account. Losing a clinic had turned a treatable emergency into a journey some patients could not survive.³³

The losses reached the clinic door.

An amfAR survey published in July 2026 recorded 1,714 HIV service sites closed among 166 PEPFAR partner organizations in 46 countries. Nearly two-thirds of respondents providing services to prevent HIV transmission from mothers to babies reported interruptions. More than a fifth had ended those services entirely. Fewer than 2% of surveyed organizations had found enough replacement funding.²⁵

Malaria prevention was hit too. KFF found that 80% of 157 USAID global-health awards involving malaria had been terminated. Stop-work orders disrupted mosquito-net distribution, insecticide spraying and access to medicines. A limited waiver did not resolve the payment and restart problems.²⁶

In the Philippines, WHO reported that the loss of USAID support reduced tuberculosis outreach and contact tracing, weakened diagnostic capacity and threatened staff retention. This is the work that finds an infectious person before the disease spreads to someone else.³⁶

The Education Department put roughly half its civil-rights staff on leave in March 2025 and closed seven of 12 regional offices. GAO estimated that salary and benefits for the sidelined employees cost $28.5 million to $38 million through December. The department had not completed a comprehensive analysis of the savings or costs. It recalled staff in December, then rescinded layoff notices in January.⁵²

While investigators were absent, the complaints did not stop. AP reported that the backlog rose from about 20,000 to 25,000. Families alleging discrimination still needed the government to investigate.⁵³

Beth Gellman-Beer had spent 18 years at the civil-rights office and earned $190,000 as a regional director. She declined to return. By June 2026, a contractor was advertising an early-career attorney position in Denver at $225,000 to $260,000. The department said the recruitment was exploratory and no formal contract existed; the postings disappeared after questions. Inside Higher Ed reported that 247 of 299 affected employees had been told to come back after 52 had left. It could not establish how many actually returned.⁵⁴

The depositions above are the first parts of the testimony, not edited highlight reels. The historians’ case archive links the full series, transcripts and exhibits.⁵⁵

DOGE was not only deciding which jobs and programs survived. Its personnel were entering systems holding financial and personal information on a scale few private organizations could match.

GAO’s Treasury review found that one DOGE employee received access to three payment systems in early 2025. The employee could view, copy and print data, and was mistakenly given temporary permission to create, modify and delete data in one system. Auditors found no evidence that those permissions were used to change data. They did find that unencrypted payment data was sent to another agency’s DOGE team without approval. Treasury had also issued a laptop without first ensuring the required security agreement and transmission controls were in place.⁶²

The broader review was hampered by missing answers. In September 2026, GAO reported that four of six agencies provided information about DOGE system access and only three supplied information about their controls. The records identified access to more than 23 systems across the CFPB, Education, NOAA and SEC. Auditors could not establish the full extent of access or assess all the safeguards.⁷³

At Social Security, government corrections to the court record disclosed use of an unauthorized third-party server and agreements involving an advocacy group seeking election-fraud evidence. The agency said it had not seen evidence that Social Security data had actually been supplied to that group. In April 2026, the Fourth Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction and sent the case back. That ruling did not make the government’s earlier inaccurate descriptions of its conduct disappear.⁶¹

Reinstatement can mean a court order, a withdrawn dismissal, an offer to return or a person actually back at work. Those are different outcomes. Senate Democratic investigators counted 25,686 reinstatements in the first six months; the count does not establish that every one of those employees returned permanently.⁷

The legal picture changed repeatedly. In July 2025, the Supreme Court stayed a broad injunction against the workforce-reduction initiative. It explicitly did not decide whether every agency’s plan was lawful. Individual disputes continued, producing reversals such as the NEH grant ruling and the later judgment against FEMA’s proposed staffing cut.¹¹⁹

By November 2025, OPM Director Scott Kupor told Reuters that DOGE no longer operated as a centralized entity. Functions had moved into existing institutions. The temporary mission reached its scheduled July 4, 2026, endpoint, but the renamed digital service and the consequences of the cuts did not vanish with it.^{80, 3}

By July 2026, NOTUS found agencies recruiting again. The IRS had special authority to fill 8,000 jobs—not evidence that 8,000 had already been filled—and USDS itself was backfilling departures. An organization created to reduce the workforce had staffing gaps of its own.⁵⁸

DOGE left inflated receipts, a bill for paid leave, depleted services and agencies scrambling to rehire people they had just dismissed. Every reversal exposed the same failure: the work still needed to be done.

For the people whose food, research, livelihood or safety depended on that work, the accounting was never an abstract exercise. Musk could leave the government and return to his companies. They were left living with the cuts.