As the head of President Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Tesla CEO Elon Musk has vowed to cut between $1 trillion and $2 trillion from the annual federal budget by 2026.
"I think we can do at least $2 trillion," Musk said at a Trump rally last October. "Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that."
Musk later revised that number down — but not by much.
"We'll aim for $2 trillion, which I believe is the best-case scenario," Musk said in a January interview on X, the social media site he owns. "But you need to allow for some margin. If we target $2 trillion, I think there's a strong chance we can achieve $1 trillion in spending cuts."
"Unless we're stopped, we will get to a trillion dollars of savings," Musk predicted on Monday.
In pursuit of that ambitious goal, Musk and his team have spent their first weeks on the job waging war on the federal bureaucracy: canceling contracts, terminating leases, firing civil servants, blocking payments and dismantling America's top foreign aid agency.
At the same time, both Trump and Musk have expressed their support for sending $5,000 refund checks to taxpayers as a "DOGE dividend."
“There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the [$2 trillion] DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% goes to paying down debt,” Trump said in Miami on Wednesday.
“I love it,” the president said that night, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One.
So how much money have Musk and DOGE actually “saved” so far — and are they on track to hit their targets? Yahoo News is updating this story when DOGE releases new information; here are the latest numbers.
DOGE claims $115 billion in savings — but its own ‘wall of receipts’ shows just $35 billion
On March 2, DOGE posted its fourth self-audit online in the form of a "wall of receipts." At the top of the page, the organization claimed $115 billion in savings (up from $105 billion a week earlier and $65 billion the week before that).
But for the fourth time, the data didn't compute.
To start, a Yahoo News analysis found that only $35 billion in savings were itemized on the page — not $115 billion.
DOGE has attempted to address this discrepancy with a new disclaimer. The $115 billion total, the group now claims, is 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."
But rather than itemize all $115 billion, they add, their wall of receipts will instead be limited to "a subset ... representing ~30%" of that total: "contract, grant and lease cancellations."
Where does the other ~70% come from? DOGE doesn’t say — making their overall figure impossible to verify.
In addition, there are two problems with how DOGE appears to be counting the savings that are itemized on the group's wall of receipts.
Errors keep cutting into DOGE’s claimed savings
The first problem is that over the past month, a series of mistakes have consistently reduced the amount DOGE claimed to be saving — even as the group's top-line number has continued to rise.
On Feb. 18, the New York Times discovered that DOGE's single-biggest line-item — a contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — was erroneously listed at $8 billion.
Its real value? $8 million, with an m.
On Feb. 19, CBS News reported that DOGE was purporting to save $2 billion by canceling a trio of USAID deals worth $655 million each — but in fact, Musk's team was counting the same $655 million contract three times.
On Feb. 20, the Intercept found that while DOGE was claiming to have canceled a huge, $232 million information technology contract at the Social Security Administration, they had really only nixed a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project that let users mark their gender as "X."
In early March, the New York Times revealed that DOGE was taking credit for "canceling" contracts that had ended under previous presidents — including a $144,000 Coast Guard contract that had ended in 2005 but for which DOGE claimed $53.7 million in savings.
And on Thursday, the Times discovered that "at least five of the 20 largest 'savings'" from a recent batch of 3,489 terminated federal grants posted earlier this month "appeared to be exaggerated" — including a USAID grant that DOGE incorrectly valued at $1.75 billion.
“The organization that got the grant … said that information was wrong twice over,” the Times reported. “For one, the grant had not been terminated. Second, the government had already paid out all the money it owed. So even if the grant had been terminated, the savings would have been $0.”
Previously, Musk's team had been quick to fix their work, either erasing or adjusting 10 of their largest receipts — which they initially valued at more than $14 billion — to reflect their true combined value of less than $1 billion.
"Nobody's going to bat a thousand," Musk said during a Feb. 11 appearance with Trump in the Oval Office. "We will make mistakes. But we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes."
But since early March, DOGE has instead started to post claims without the kind of identifying details that would allow the public to fact-check its figures — "for security purposes," according to the White House.
Meanwhile, the group doubled the number of items on its wall of receipts over the last week (from 6,571 to 13,637), claiming another $15.2 billion in itemized cuts.
DOGE might be inflating its real savings as well
The second problem is that DOGE might also be systematically inflating its real savings.
Previously, National Public Radio found that since the aforementioned $8 million ICE contract began in 2022, the agency had already used it three times for work totaling $3.5 million. So canceling the contract now could only save the remaining money (i.e., the $4.5 million that hadn't been spent yet).
In addition, “just over half of the contracts touted by DOGE, accounting for $6.5 billion in alleged savings, haven't actually been terminated or closed out” as of Feb. 19, according to NPR’s analysis of a federal government procurement database.
All in all, NPR found the “estimated savings from the initial DOGE list of just over 500 contracts” that have actually been canceled “runs closer to $2 billion” — a fraction of the $55 billion DOGE was claiming at the time.
One week later, after DOGE increased its top-line number to $65 billion, NPR again matched the organization's receipts to federal contracting data — and found that "the savings were essentially unchanged [at] about $2.3 billion."
Another issue is that DOGE appears to be taking credit for saving money that the government was not required to spend — and that might never have been spent under any administration, according to Jacob Leibenluft, a former executive associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Biden.
How? By subtracting the amount of money an agency had committed to spend under a cancelled contract from the potential amount it could have spent if all of that particular contract's options, renewals, extensions and expansions were eventually triggered.
In reality, the current value of each contract — the amount the federal government had actually awarded at the time of cancellation — is usually smaller than this theoretical ceiling, meaning the amount saved by cancelling the contract is usually smaller as well.
As an example, the journalist Judd Legum recently showed how DOGE did the math on a cancelled EPA contract. The contract's potential value, according to DOGE, was $134 million — but its current value was just $70.1 million. Subtract the amount already spent or obligated ($64.7 million) from the contract's current value, and you get just $5.4 million in savings — a far smaller figure than the $69.3 claimed by DOGE.
If DOGE were to switch to this method instead — calculating savings based on a contract’s real-life value rather than its maximum theoretical value — it would instantly cut the group’s itemized claims roughly in half.
From a few billion to … $2 trillion?
It’s early yet — but it’s clear from DOGE’s initial rounds of accounting that Musk & Co. still have a long way to go.
If DOGE’s claimed cuts continue at the current (itemized) rate of $35 billion every seven weeks, for example, they would total just $260 billion by March 2026.
It's possible that DOGE might get some help from congressional Republicans in the months ahead. Seeking to cram Trump's entire agenda into a single budget bill that can survive the Senate with 51 votes through a process known as reconciliation, the House GOP recently passed a package with $2 trillion in cuts — mostly to Medicaid and antipoverty programs.
It's an approach that Trump has endorsed (even though he has also promised not to alter Medicaid).
The problem is that Musk’s deadline is 2026 — and those savings would be spread out over 10 years, not one. The House bill also includes extensions to Trump's 2017 tax cuts that would reduce government revenue by $4 trillion over the next decade, more than offsetting any savings.
Experts say that if the Trump Administration actually wants to slash trillions from the annual federal budget, they will either have to eviscerate sacrosanct defense spending and social-safety net programs that remain popular with the public — things the president has already declared off-limits — or eliminate everything else.
So far, DOGE has barely touched the biggest sources of contract spending in the federal budget, like defense, choosing instead to focus on much smaller areas of investment such as foreign aid, education and programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
"It is completely impossible for DOGE to save $2 trillion," Jessica Riedl, an economist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, recently told CBS. "Two-thirds of the $7 trillion federal budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans and interest on the debt — all of which has been taken off the table by President Trump. Saving $2 trillion would require eliminating nearly every remaining federal program."
Unfortunately, Riedl continued, “DOGE has no legal or constitutional authority to cut this spending; Congress must pass a law.”
Graphics by Mike Bebernes
