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Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency said it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government – slashing billion-dollar contracts, cancelling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants.

But the group did not do what Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $US1 trillion ($1.5 trillion) before October.

On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

How is that possible?

One big reason, according to a New York Times analysis, is that many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong. And while the group did make thousands of smaller cuts, jolting foreign aid recipients, American small businesses and local service providers, those amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.

In DOGE’s published list of cancelled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect.

At the top were two defence department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations” and said their demises had saved taxpayers $US7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.

Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.

Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, the Times found only 12 that appeared accurate – reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend.

The Times’ analysis helps answer a basic question about DOGE, which was hard to judge in the group’s chaotic heyday, when it had enormous power to cut federal spending and force out government employees who stood in the way. At the time, in the early months of 2025, DOGE listed real cuts alongside fake ones, and made it hard to tell the difference.

That raised the question of whether DOGE, at its heart, was an exercise in budget cutting or in deception.

It had elements of both, the Times found. But among DOGE’s largest claims, the bogus savings were both larger and much more common than the real ones. Similar errors and exaggerations recurred across the group’s work.

The Times analysis shows that, in trying to demonstrate progress toward its budget-cutting goal, Musk’s group turned other promises inside out.

Musk had said that DOGE would be “the most transparent organisation in government ever,” and that it would bring the precision of the tech world to government. Instead, the group became opaque, with its lack of progress obscured by errors, redactions and indecipherable accounting that few private businesses would accept.

Some of DOGE’s employees are still working in the Trump administration, mainly on technology projects. But the group’s budget cutting now seems to be spent, even as the fallout from fired federal workers and former grant recipients persists. The website where DOGE tallied its successes, called the “Wall of Receipts”, has not been updated since October 4.

At the White House, a spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about DOGE’s work, instead sending a broad statement about the president’s goals: “President Trump pledged to cut the waste, fraud and abuse in our bloated government.”

Neither DOGE nor Musk,

© The Age