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efficiency is gone. DOGE quietly disbanded in November, eight months ahead of schedule, and the final numbers are now in Elon Musk promised to cut at least $2 trillion in waste, fraud and abuse. That target dropped to about a trillion dollars, then 150 billion. The actual result, government spending went up, not down, up by about $250 billion compared to the same period last year. But there's another number that tells a different story.
Doge cut 271,000 federal jobs in less than 10 months. That's the largest peacetime reduction in federal employment since World War 2. So what actually happened here? We're going to walk through the data of what Musk himself now says about the experiment and what are reveals about the limits of disrupting the government the way you might disrupt the company now. The Keto Institute, a libertarian think tank, published A detailed analysis
this month. They looked at Treasury Department spending data and Bureau of Labor Statistics employment figures. The conclusion is very blunt to the point. DOGE reduced federal employment enormously, but it did not cut spending in. It could not possibly cut spending just by firing people. This cuts to a fundamental math problem that Musk either did not anticipate or chose to completely ignore. Federal salaries account for about 10% of total government
outlays. The overwhelming majority of federal spending goes to transfer payments, things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the national debt. None of that changed because DOGE laid off workers at the Department of Education or the USAID. Let's get into that right after this break. And the employment numbers are crazy. Federal civilian employment fell from about 3.015 million in January to 2.744 million in
November. 9% decline. The pace of reduction has not been seen since the military demobilizations at the end of World War 2 and the Korean War. So Alex Nowrista, senior vice president for policy at the Keto Institute, put it very bluntly, said this is a faster and steeper decline in federal employment at any time since the demobilization of the US military and economy at the end of World War 2, at the and at the end of the Korean War. It's the biggest peacetime ever
decline in federal workers over a 10 month period. DOGE brought federal employment back to levels last seen in 2014, and it did so in less than a year. Nearly 60% of that decline happened in one month, October, driven by a civil service buyout offer the Musk had initiated earlier in the year. The deferred resignation program gave workers the option to leave with pay through September if they agreed to just quit and depart voluntarily, and
thousands took that deal. But here's the spending side. The federal government spent $7.6 trillion in the 1st 11 months of 2025. That's approximately $248 billion more than the same period in 2024. It also exceeds spending in 20/23/2022 and 2021 under President Biden. And according to the Cato analysis, there is no visible structural break in spending that coincides with Doge's start date. An observer who did not know when DOGE began could not
identify it in the data. The trajectory of federal outlays continued almost exactly as the Congressional Budget Office had projected before DOGE existed. Doja's own website claims $206 billion in savings, but multiple outside sources and analysis have found those claims overstated, full of errors and difficult to verify. Actually, NPR reported that some listed contract cancellations were not actually cancelled, were worth far less than claimed, and had already been spent.
One example, DOGE claimed $4.3 million in savings from canceling a $4.4 million FAA consulting contract. The contract was not terminated, was worth about $150,000, and almost all the money had already been spent. So Musk addressed this at a recent podcast interview with Katie Miller, a former DOGE spokeswoman. When asked if DOGE was the success, Musk said We were a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful.
And when pressed on whether he would do it again, he said, I don't think so. Instead of doing Doge, I would have basically worked on my companies, he added, almost wistfully. They wouldn't have been burning the cars. Now that's a reference to test the vehicles being vandalized dealerships during the height of public backlash against Doge's cuts. Now, the timeline of Musk's involvement tells its own story
here. He was sworn in as a special government employee, or SGE, in January, which legally limited his 10 year to 130 days. He left at the end of May, right on schedule, but his departure was not quiet. In an interview the day before he left, Musk called Trump's signature legislation the One Big Beautiful Bill, a massive spending bill that increases the budget deficit and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing. Within days, Musk was on X calling the bill.
It is gusting abomination. He urged supporters to kill the bill and threatened to fire every politician who voted for it. Trump responded by saying that Musk had lost his mind and that he was not interested in speaking to him. And the two feuded publicly through June and July, with Trump at one point telling a really crowd maybe it's time he went back to where he came from now. Musk even formed his own political party, the America Party, in response, but by
September changed his mind. The two in reconciled publicly, preparing together at a memorial service for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. And the bill passed anyway. The Congressional Budget Office estimated it would add roughly $3.8 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. Indoge itself no longer exists as a centralized entity. When asked about his status in November, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Cooper told Reuters that doesn't exist
now. OPMOPM has absorbed many of Doge's functions. Some of Musk's former lieutenants transitioned to full time government roles at the agencies they were originally detailed to. Joe Gabia, an Airbnb Co founder who led Doge's overhaul of the federal retirement system, now runs something called the National Design Studio, responsible for government websites, including the new Trump accounts program.
Now what does this all mean? Though the Cato analysis frames it quite plainly, Doge failed to cut spending because most federal spending is for entitlement programs that remain on policy autopilot. Only Congress has the authority to change those programs. Firing bureaucrats does not touch Social Security. Canceling grants does not touch Medicare. The math never worked out. A 10% cut in the federal workforce saves roughly $40
billion annually. That's a lot of money in absolute terms, but but it's a rough rounding error in a $7 trillion budget. DOGE reduce federal employment enormously. It did not cut spending, and it couldn't possibly cut spending just by firing people. The only likelihood to close the deficit is by cutting the biggest programs and the biggest programs, Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and also the military. They're not going to cut military spending.
Some agencies did not see spending cuts USAID saw. The biggest, though, was spent over $30 billion in 2024, was slashed and folded into the State Department before November. The Department of Education is on pace to spend over $40 billion less in 2025, and the FCC is on track to spend about 1/3 of as much this year as last year, with those savings were dwarfed by increases elsewhere. Defense spending is up. Homeland Security is up.
Commerce is up. In the mandatory spending categories, the one that's actually drive the budget kept growing on autopilot. Social Security payments alone are set to be over $100 billion higher in 2025. Interest payments of the national debt will also be about $100 billion higher. The national debt grew by more than $2 trillion during Trump's first year back in office. Musk came to Washington with the same playbook he uses at his companies Move really fast, cut aggressively.
Ignore resistance. And that works at a private enterprise where you own the equity and can fire anyone who disagrees with you, and does not work in a government constrained by laws, courts, civil service protections, congressional appropriations and public opinion.
Musk acknowledged as much in his interview with Miller, said he had underestimated how hard it would be to remake the federal government quickly, and he noted that his businesses had suffered because of the time and controversy that Doge consumed. Now the irony is that Musk's political involvement may have cost him more than he saved anyone. Tesla's brand took a beating. Sales slowed. Cars were vandalized, caught on fire. Dealerships were fire bombed. Investors pressured him to
refocus on the company. Meanwhile, government spending rose. The deficit crew in the national debt crossed $38 trillion. DOGE cut jobs but not costs and made headlines. But it didn't make any savings. And in the end, even the man who ran it said he would not do it again. There's a broader lesson here about the difference between running a company and running a government. In a company, the CEO has authority that can fire people, cancel projects and redirect
resources at will. In government, power is distributed. Courts can block actions. Congress controls appropriations. Civil service rules protect workers. Public opinion shapes what is politically possible. And Musk ran into all of these constraints and seemed genuinely
surprised by them. The same tactics that made him successful at Tesla and SpaceX, moving fast, breaking things, ignoring objections, generated lawsuits, political backlash, and ultimately limited results when applied to the federal bureaucracy. Now the agencies that Doge cut are now rehiring workers. Some employees who took the buyout have been asked to return. Operations stalled out. Patient basic functions broke
down. The Labor Department, the Social Security Administration and other offices struggled to serve the public after losing experienced high value staff. Whether those service disruptions were worth the political statement is a question. Depends on your politics, but from a pure spending perspective, the answer is very clear.
The cuts did not produce savings, the deficit kept growing, and the experiment ended 8 months early, quietly absorbed into the Office of Personnel Management as if it never. Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast passing on right now, I greatly appreciate it.
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