A year after DOGE, the cuts keep coming

The Department of Government Efficiency hasn’t come close to achieving the $1 trillion in cuts pledged at its launch last January but it has rooted out billions in wasteful spending, shrunk the bloated federal workforce and spurred a nationwide effort to streamline and economize government agencies.

In Washington, DOGE continues its work, claiming as of October to have slashed an estimated $214 billion in federal spending, which DOGE officials say has saved each taxpayer $1,329.

It’s now a scaled-down, decentralized effort to slash government waste.

There are no more Oval Office appearances with President Trump and Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who headed DOGE for 134 days. In fact, Mr. Trump hardly mentions DOGE.

Mr. Musk left his job in the administration in June and returned to the private sector, never getting close to the initial $2 trillion in federal spending he hoped to eliminate.

“I certainly think Elon Musk leaving Washington took a lot of the wind out of the sails for the DOGE movement,” said Dominik Lett, budget and entitlement policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

In an interview in December, Mr. Musk, who departed DOGE amid intense backlash from the left and myriad court challenges, described his tenure to conservative influencer Katie Miller as “a little bit successful.” Under his leadership, he said, the department had stopped between $100 and $200 billion in “zombie payments” that Mr. Musk said lacked codes or any explanation for their purpose.

It’s almost impossible to quantify all of DOGE’s cuts.

Mr. Musk’s estimates have been challenged by analysts on the right and the left, who say DOGE’s reductions are likely much smaller than $214 billion.

But the department achieved some indisputable and significant successes in shrinking the size of government.

It singlehandedly eliminated the USAID office, which had unfettered authority to distribute up to $50 billion annually in taxpayer money to programs in other countries.

And DOGE drove a reduction in the federal workforce.

Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor said last month that 317,000 employees will have left the federal workforce by the end of 2025, offset by 68,000 new hires. That’s a net reduction of 249,000 workers.

Staff cuts were ordered across many government departments and agencies.

At the Education Department, layoffs targeted nearly half of its staff amid a broader effort by the Trump administration and Education Secretary Linda McMahon to eliminate the department.

The IRS has shed more than 26,000 employees, and still aims to shrink the agency’s workforce to fewer than 60,000 employees, which would be a significant reduction from more than 100,000 IRS workers during the Biden administration.

Government DOGE workers continue to root out and stop spending deemed unnecessary or duplicative across the federal government, but with a lot less fanfare and, Mr. Lett said, diminished impact.

“DOGE has taken a back seat in this government recently and I think that’s disappointing,” Mr. Lett said. “A lot of hard-working people in this administration are still cutting unneeded and wasteful government contracts. That is absolutely worth celebrating. But I think most people can appreciate that DOGE is no longer the tip of the spear.”

DOGE announced on X in December that agencies had cut or reduced nearly 100 “wasteful” contracts that, if fully implemented, would have cost more than $5 billion. The money had been directed to “develop a comprehensive strategic narrative and management approach aimed at the Human Centered Transformation and Enhanced Partnerships,” and a Pentagon consulting contract for “strategic transformation and enterprise project support.”

It slashed another $29 million by ending a Commerce Department consulting contract for “providing the necessary staff to perform Program Management, providing planning, analysis, and support in managing projects.”

In November, a Reuters story quoted Mr. Kupor saying DOGE “doesn’t exist.” But Mr. Kupor said his comments were taken out of context.

“DOGE may not have centralized leadership…but, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.,” he said.

The White House did not respond to an inquiry from The Washington Times.

The DOGE effect has undoubtedly lessened, but is credited with shining a spotlight on government spending that ranged from the inexplicable to the outlandish. It exposed U.S. taxpayer money spent on drag shows in Colombia and Ecuador, transgender clinics in India and Guatemala, electric vehicles in Vietnam, and $122 million for groups aligned with foreign terrorist organizations, among many other eyebrow-raising and costly examples.

The DOGE initiative, under Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, made significant reforms. It overhauled and modernized the federal government’s antiquated retirement system that for decades was managed from 26,000 filing cabinets stashed in a decommissioned Pennsylvania mine.

It’s now a completely digital system that will eliminate the backlog of retirement applications for full benefits that existed under the paper process.

In May, the DOGE team announced it had rid the system of 12.3 million Social Security numbers associated with birth dates from the turn of the 20th century or older.

Mr. Lett said while DOGE fell far short of the optimistic $2 trillion in spending cuts Mr. Musk initially predicted, the effort catalyzed a government-wide movement to slash spending.

In July, Congress passed a $9 billion rescission package, followed by nearly $1.6 trillion in federal spending reductions included in the GOP’s sweeping tax cut bill.

The government continues to implement significant reforms to staffing management.

In October, Mr. Kupor announced plans to “revamp” staff hiring and handling across the federal government by creating one centralized system that replaces outdated and duplicative technology that is currently spread out over 119 systems, “none of which integrate effectively with each other.”

The DOGE movement inspired similar cost-cutting and government efficiency efforts at the state level with legislation and executive action across more than two dozen states.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has arguably been the most aggressive among them, creating a DOGE Taskforce to audit county governments and root out wasteful spending.

So far, the audits have uncovered $75,000 spent by the city of Jacksonville for a “hologram” of Mayor Donna Deagan, $150,000 annually for a company that brings drag shows to the Pensacola city theater and $572,000 for “unconscious bias training” in Hillsborough County.